skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems like a bad decision on the Court of Appeal's part. No, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm taking reality, not the-law-has-already-crawled-up-inside-itself legalistic fantasy.

The point of a "public domain" is to have a huge stockpile of stuff, images, stories, characters, mechanisms, processes, that everyone can use to do things with. "Evoking" a copyrighted thing, that's just the sort of use that public domain works are supposed to do.

Clearly, whatever Court of Appeals here has totally bought in to the concept that a state can grant ownership of an idea to someone, that an idea is property, only usable by a single entity.

Decisions like this and the "People United" mis-judgement from the US Supreme Court really tarnish the courts by moving away from reality, and towards a fantasy where legalistic reasoning governs.
Your conversion assumptions are ambitious.
He was in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, and is an extremely prolific, opinionated blogger. He and Peter Woit over at Not Even Wrong used to feud constantly.

Interestingly, Motl is actually really polite and charming in a shy, goofy way in person.
Don't forget the equally important question: how many Android phones will be sold? It's hard to buy an Android phone and not get sucked into the Google ecosystem - and I assume Plus will become a big part of that.
Who pays by the text? Don't most plans include a large number of free SMS messages?

Besides, this guy's analysis is very flawed. For one thing, SMS messages don't take the same path as data. They can't, since so many people (still) don't have smart phones. Also, the idea that because one kilobyte costs x that one byte ought to cost x/1024 completely ignores setup and fixed costs.
SO that's about $20 per iPhone that people spend on apps.
All of that requires server-side coding in order to present the content provided by JS otherwise. It wouldn't do anything in this case.

Although altering jQuery to add a link at the bottom of every textarea field...
I was interested up until I read this little number in the newsletter I got from them:

>In addition to 96GB of RAM, each of these servers contain 32 cores (at 2.0GHZ each, 64.0GHZ total), writes at over 3 Gbit/s and reads at over 4 Gbits/s.

You would think a company like Storm would know you don't just add up the cores to get 64Ghz.

Also, for what it's worth, we just ordered 3 physical servers from Dell, 96GB of RAM each, dual xeons for a total of 32 cores, and dual 10Gbps fiber channels to hook up to our SAN. So yeah, the price seems pretty high...
It's not his fault that the system is set up in a such a way that some random bureaucrat that's not close to the project can make a department unemployed with a wave of his hand. Aiming for the next grant is how you survive - it's not trivial for academics (or anyone) to move cities every year or so to follow where grants might land.

Until there is that job security, knowing that as long as you keep working you're not going to be randomly turfed out, this phenomenon will be a fundamental part of the academic career.
Wow, that is a lot closer than I thought, considering how many cheap iPod touches Apple sells.
3 Reasons Why Using WordPress Will Make You a Better Writer
The world is slowly (painfully slow in some market sectors) becoming more and more aware of the power of WordPress as a publishing platform for both the large and small businesses. It’s never been more felt in the publishing industry for both the large editorial news publications and the individual publisher and blogger.
MS Access is ACID compliant.
I disagree with this portion of the article:

You have hundreds of friends, but your news feed is always filled up with nonsense from the same 5 friends that seem to send an update every other minute.

I believe Facebook has an algorithm that only displays status updates from the people I interact with most on the service. For example, using Seesmic or Flipboard shows each status update, as opposed to Facebook on the web I seem to see only a small number of updates and I have noticed they tend to be from the profiles I visit the most. I am actually not bothered by my Facebook feed, although I do love the notion of circles. My Mom got a circle all to herself.
Why tech innovation comes slow to the legal profession
The most important thing to me in SF is having options when I don't feel like working. I can walk to the park where beautiful girls do non-programming things like laughing while blowing bubbles! I can go get a beer and watch a movie. I can walk and grab a quick bite at taqueria cancun. I can go to a club. I just love the energy and excitement here. I've met some of the most cultured and interesting people in SF, and I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything. :)
I don't understand what you mean when you say the public domain is meant to "evoke a copyrighted thing." I'm not aware of any rationale for the public domain in which its purpose it to produce knock-offs of works owned by somebody else.
If you read the text at my link, you'd realize all the dollar figures are adjusted for PPP.

I like the idea of infrastructure help for welfare, but what do we do with the 3 year old left alone at night so that mom can do janitorial work?

4 moms do janitorial work, 1 does day care work.
Is it really harder or a just a pain in the ass?
AT&T plans don't include any free messages
Thanks for the URL! I will look around!
What do you do to improve productivity, performance, & quality of life?
For example, I start off my day with 3 sets of max-rep pushups immediately after waking up. This gets my blood circulating and removes any lingering drowsiness.

I also take a daily fish oil supplement for the myriad benefits (Google it, if you have to).

What do you do?
The BART (The SF subway system) is phenomenal. You can get around very easily and most places are within a convenient walk/bike ride and maybe a short taxi ride. I don't live in SF but I have visited it. Also it is a gorgeous city with lots of nice people.
From my experience, even in a field so close to computer science as robotics your analyzes is correct.

In my opinion, publishing all code that was used for the paper should be mandatory. Everything else is an obvious violation of the confirmation requirement in the scientific method.

But just like with Open Access I have little hope, that this will be adapted soon on a wide scale. If you are a student, I believe, all you can do is get permission to publish your code and do so. Maybe this will hurt tenure but it increases your karma!
http://tdr.uspto.gov/search.action?sn=85353491 Take a look at the Specimen. It's sent to someone named Michael at this address http://maps.google.com/maps?q=22+Avenue+Pierre+Koenig,+Sarce... on June, 22 2011.

Trademark application states the first use was on this date. Also note that the Specimen was also used to create the article about bitcoin http://www.pascazilaw.com/Articles.html

Another nice thing to note is that the letter is from Magellan Capital Advisors, LLC. Notice the signature at the bottom of that letter is signed by Celline M. Pascazi. I can only assume she is related to someone at the law firm, Pascazi Law Offices.

I really don't think this will get approved since it's very obvious that this is a trademark troll. be very interesting to see how this plays out.
I would agree they probably aren't 'paying' them anything. Discounting is fairly different, and is not that surprising. Microsoft probably doesn't want a loss against google and is willing to pay for it, as well as is looking for accounts that are reference-able. Also considering their margins are very high, they still aren't going to lose money on this even if they don't buy anything else. More likely, they'll get it all back on the next true-up on their licensing.

Microsoft has managed to turn plain-text and basic html text exchange and who-what-where-when into an absolute technical quagmire. You can take two very simple concepts, give them to large businesses for 15 years, and you get email clients and servers with thousands of features, and a proprietary calendar protocol that doesn't work with anyone else.
> graduating a semester late (at the cost of several thousand dollars to myself)

Really? Your funding isn't guaranteed?

When I did my Master's I was funded as an R.A. without my advisor/lab having to tap her particular grants. Grants and fellowships were usually seen as something "extra" for master's and Ph.D pre-quals students, not their main source of funding. I find it surprising that your school or department seems to (or is forced to) think differently.
It sounds a bit like simulated annealing.
It's like addiction actually. need adjustment! Good advice!
Not necessarily. My company is often hiring and I have friends who potentially need jobs, however unless I don't think they would be a good (or great) fit, I probably wouldn't mention it to them.
I find your comment on "tightening up" before page compression interesting as I'd never heard that logic before, not discounting it though. Does doing minification before compression schemes such as mod_gzip or mod_deflate really not make much of a difference? I'd be interested in seeing a side by side comparison when put in this context.
I pre-ordered this from AppSumo's Lean Startup Bundle way back in October... I've been looking forward to this book for a long time!
There are different levels of scrutiny that you can Perform in code review; rubber stamping is useless, but you can do it quickly where the code is referenced during the kind of explanation i think you are talking about. Using git, you can commit locally and then push to origin after review (so you don't block on the other Programmer.)
get published in Nature = food on the table

useful to the wider community = warm fuzzy feeling

Ideally you'd get both, but if it's one or the other, for most people a full belly wins.
How is it a greedy algorithm? He didn't say anything about the "intuitive" decisions maximizing immediate gain at every decision point.
I wonder why they are not offering ogg vorbis support. Is it just not as popular? Are the files typically larger? Either way, it's a glaring omission imo.
Huh. Cool. Are you familiar with Metropolis light-transport? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_light_transport

I've read about it in the context of speeding up global-illumination path-tracing for computer graphics.

I think it's based on work that was originally done for neutron scattering.
We've got some servers similar to this in one of our compute clusters. Four 12-core AMD Magny-Cours processors, 128 GB RAM... they are a thing of beauty, let me tell you. Actually very good for certain bioinformatics codes, especially wired up to each other with Infiniband. :-D
Knowing 'How'
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I think Ikiwiki will do Markdown. Have not used Ikiwiki myself, but was quite impressed with their page on security, which is a good sign of overall competence.
You can read more about Dayta here: http://daytaapp.com/ and email me privately if you have any questions — sahil@slavingia.com.

Sorry if the blog post wasn't clear enough.
I'm sure the users he describes can be trusted to make locally optimal choices.
You are right. I deleted my comment so as to not spread misinformation.
Saying that you're a victim of "SEO" is about as accurate as saying you are a victim of "Web Development."
We pull the branch and have the reviewer run the relevant tests. Doing this was simpler than figuring out how to do fancy stuff with the ci server (which checks the integration branch after merge.).

Having this step requires the reviewer to know which tests are relevant, which ensures that they were written or updated.
Agreed. I'd love to see this in Chicago.
Alzheimers cured in mouse model using immunotherapy
I'll grant you that most will eventually end up with smartphones, if for no other reason than the phone manufacturers will simply stop making "dumb" ones. I personally prefer a "dumb" phone but I can see the writing on the wall.
Show HN:Non-Anonymous Chat
The simplest and biggest space saver that minification does is remove excess whitespace and newlines. Compression schemes do the exact same thing, as well as compress all the other characters used in the source.

Yes, the browser will have to decompress and the whitespaces will be included in the parsing step for the javascript engine, but at this point we're deep in the weeds. The biggest driver of speed for web pages is the network.
The people at Willow Garage think there is a market for this [1].

http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2010/04/27/reinventing-whee...
Wow. I wonder how they justify that as a non-evil action?
Matt Might has something on this topic. The CRAPL is what he calls it : http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/
I hacked this together to see whether there is a group of people that prefer not to chat in anonymity. I tried out a few anonymous chat sites and most conversations involved male genitalia or some perverse comment. I hope people can start a better conversation when they reveal their name and picture.

Please check it out and give me your opinion.
Yup, we're using Socket.IO.
We'll be adding support internationally soon.
"These circles represent a powerful innovation. They allow us to send more personal updates just to our closest friends instead of forcing us to share with all of our hundreds of acquaintances"

Powerful innovation!? Give me a break. This should be called an "obvious innovation" or "trivial implementation". How is it any different from having mailing lists?
A prime example of a fundamental feature of facebook is the concept of a single wall that all of my friends can post to. Even if I could figure out how to prevent my work/church/family friends and my college/bar-hopping/trouble-making friends from seeing each others posts to my wall, I'm still faced with an uncomfortable UI that displays posts from both groups at once. That aspect of the UI alone doesn't help me feel secure about privacy on FB.
In a similar topic, I've always found Google Will Eat Itself[1] an interesting concept.

[1]: http://gwei.org/index.php
I'm not an expert, but I've been doing a little research on audio file compression to cut down on Amazon S3 charges for a personal site I have up that suddenly got a fair amount of traffic. The way I understand it, ogg vorbis files actually compress better than mp3s, so they're better on a quality/size ratio. A 3MB ogg file will generally sound better than a 3MB mp3 file.

I think the reason Amazon might not be supporting them is that not all browsers can play them natively — specifically, Safari needs a plug-in to play them. So, for my site, which is using jPlayer, I have to compress all the files as .oga and .mp3, then set up the mp3s as a fallback so Safari will stream them.
I don't know ASP.net all that well since I'm the open source skunkworks guy in my organisation. But sometime I look at applications produced by our ICT department and I notice that they carry a whole load of crap in this ViewState thing. I'm only vaguely aware of what it does, which is apparently more than ICT do because lots of weird behaviour happens when you use the back button in the browser.

Coming back to the actual point: I don't care what your source code looks like when it's sent to my browser. Presumably the developer features of modern browsers should be able to show/export a cleaned up version of the source? I've never checked since I only look at my own pages, which are of course beautifully indented...
Source? Easily could be a scam.
How 17 Famous Website Looked In The Past: In The ’90s.
Another take on the million dollar homepage : MillionDollarCu.be
A few months ago I posted a writeup about displaying a Gameboy video signal on an oscilloscope (http://www.flashingleds.wordpress.com). It did the rounds for a few days (kotaku, HN, hackaday, slashdot etc.), and I was slightly surprised at which sites generated the biggest numbers. Reddit was at the top by far, something like 25k in 24 hours without having even made their front page, followed by slashdot (7k) then HN (3k).
For a site that usually ambles along at ~80 hits a day it was pretty crazy.
One factor in YC's boom is the added incentive that every startup accepted by YC automatically now receives a $150,000 investment when they graduate, courtesy of Yuri Milner and YC founder Ron Conway's SV Angel fund.

YC founder Ron Conway?
+1: bought it just before the free update, but haven't Been able to use it, crashes when you breathe on it wrong.
> Many of us work on SaaS solutions, which have little to no marginal cost, yet we charge for the service.

The cost of programmers to create the product, the cost of servers, system admins, etc. Those aren't small costs.
I agree. Part of the value is that it is a default application in every phone. My previous startup provides an SMS gateway that sending 500K messages each year to mostly SE Asia receivers (small amount compared to what other providers do) Even now although data plans are getting cheaper and more common, there are still a lot people NOT carrying IPhones, Androids, BB etc. If you want a ubiquitous push notification mechanism, SMS is still the only app. And maybe part of the reasons why the author is ranting about this is because when I compare SMS rates across different countries, US users are paying quite a premium for SMS as compared to Asia or SE Asia where I am located.
High-Performance Networking Programming in C
It is relevant and not spam; please share the answer here.
Then don't use it! Seriously, you said the problem was that you didn't want anyone contacting you. But the fact is that FB does this quite well, and it's not that much work. And, it's damn convenient. I, awhile ago, basically switched over to it completely, as it integrates into my Jabber client quite nicely. Now people know if they want to contact me, they should use FB IM.
Simulated annealing is a probabilistic algorithm.

The state space for this game is not stochastic. It's deterministic.

Standard single-agent search techniques apply here (i.e. A* and its variants) and essentially encapsulate this "iterate and repair" idea (especially IDA*).
Knime http://www.knime.org/.

To a lesser (but free) extent, Orange http://orange.biolab.si/
This.

However, there is a difference between bulk, wholesale costs and individual retail costs, and prices. SMS is hardly the one and only example of high markup goods in history. Indeed, there are a plethora of entire industries in the same boat. Consider toys, many toys cost a few percent of their in-store retail prices, but again those costs are in bulk at wholesale. The same applies to batteries. And everyone knows about the huge markups in furniture and mattresses. The best advice is to find alternatives or shop around. If you just give in and accept the price that means you've declared you value the good you receive higher than the price you're paying for it (and in many cases SMS's are worth as much as people are paying).
A tablet doesn't fit in your pocket. I carry my phone everywhere I go. Though I would love to have a tablet, I can't imagine doing the same with one.
Except if Bitcoin becomes popular, other similar digital currencies will arise. Bitcoin will be no more speicial than nickels are in the non-digital currency realm. It will be just another kind of digital coin in your digital pocket.
FB chat has a jabber interface. It can be used by those of us who don't sit on FB all day too. Pretty convenient. Now, I hope they'll get the group chat working via jabber too.
Clay Nude
SF actually has an abundance of reasonably priced office space. I don't know the medians, but a quick glance at http://www.rofo.com/CA/Mountain-View and http://www.rofo.com/CA/San-Francisco shows similar price to square foot ratios.
The poverty line sets a minimum level of consumption.

Poverty is defined by income, not consumption. Please go read the link I provided explaining how the census calculates poverty.

You're forgetting change in asset prices.

Unless you are proposing that most poor people are homeowners, and that the value of their houses increased in 2009, that explanation doesn't carry much weight.

Fun fact: only cash transfers are counted as income. A housing voucher, for example, pays for consumption, but does not count as income.
I wouldn't be surprise if someday this company sees 1M/day going through its service.
Basically they're letting people create "slashtags" that restrict a search to a customized list of sites.

Eg) I have one for /objc that searches a half-dozen high-quality, good signal-to-noise, non-spammy objective-c related sites, so that if I search for "timers /objc" I get only quality content and no farmed spam.

There's a lot more to it but they've essentially farmed out the job of whitelisting the non-spammy parts of the internet to their users.

Edit: and more to the point of what you were desribing, you can easily use other people's public slashtags, and it will detect and suggest relevant ones as you use it. It's totally worth playing around with.
E-mail I just received from Amazon. I can't believe how exactly right this this, and how unexpected that is.

(full disclosure, I am an Amazon employee, not affiliated with the MP3 or cloud drive team. I was just independently motivated to share this, because not one hour earlier I had been looking at my downgrade options on my phone).

"Information About Your Cloud Drive Account

Hello,

Thanks for your prior purchase of the 100 GB Amazon Cloud Drive storage plan. Beginning today, all paid Cloud Drive storage plans include unlimited space for MP3 and AAC (.m4a) music files at no extra charge for a limited time. Learn more here:

http://www.amazon.com/mp3gettingstarted

Because your current plan now includes unlimited space for music, we're refunding the difference between the cost of your original Cloud Drive plan of 100 GB and the cost of a current 20 GB plan ($20), which is the least-expensive Cloud Drive plan that includes unlimited space for music. A refund of $80 will be issued to the card originally used for your Amazon Cloud Drive storage plan. Refunds are typically completed within 10 business days and will appear as a credit on your credit card statement.

We hope to see you again soon!

Sincerely,

The Amazon MP3 Team
http://www.amazon.com/mp3
Every programmer could benefit from taking creative writing courses in college.

You are forced to purge your mind of every disorganized thought onto paper, and then go back through as often as necessary until it's right.

This may not be a great "programming" strategy, but it certainly makes the design process more fun and productive.
The "end result" approach with a diminished focus on clean markup doesn't make sense. The "end result" is not going to be the same for every user - for starters, people use different clients, and not everyone is sighted.

Of course, this is also based on the premise that code is bad because it's not human readable when it reaches the browser. Maybe I'm getting hung up on the details when it seems like the article was written only to defend the use of WebForms.
I believe I came across it at some point or another, but I haven't looked closely at it. For better or worse, it doesn't seem to be employed by others doing light field simulations underwater ... not sure why. I'd have to poke into it further. I was, however, seriously thinking about writing a plugin for Blender that would utilize my specific scattering phase functions in their volumetric ray tracing renderer ... no time though.
Absolutely. I can't imagine they intend to do anything more than trademark troll everyone using bitcoins.
DNA is now DIY: OpenPCR ships worldwide
Never actually connected me. Also says "Users Online: 0"