skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This argument is simply wrong. You could use the same type of "progression" to get, at the root, basic theoretical physics or pure math. Yet, ideas and concept from these two fields are not patentable.
The Benefits of Benevolent Language Dictators (vs. committees)
That's a huge strawman! I've seen utter rubbish written in C++ but I don't go around claiming that C++ is broken on that basis. What you are claiming is utterly invalid.

You say that you refactored it to 1500 lines from 20,000. Clearly it was written badly in the first place. Are you seriously suggesting that there is some other language where a bad programmer can't write bad code?

Java does NOT 'encourage 20,000 line behemoths filled with dross compared to a concise 1,500 line program'. That's an outrageous strawman argument.
Maybe is still useful outside of compiled language because it is also a way of composing and combining operations that might fail. The catch is that a great deal of its usefulness (in Haskell &al) comes from static typing, because any function which could return nil would return Maybe<SomeType> instead of SomeType, so you are forced to check against Nothing in order to have a valid program, thereby eliminating any possible NullPointerExceptions from your program. (The monadic syntax Haskell/Scala/&c provide makes this less tedious than it sounds.)

However, you could still make use of the composition operations in dynamic, untyped languages, and simply use them as a toolkit for chaining together operations which could possibly return nil. You don't actually have any static guarantees like you have in a typed case, but it's possible to imagine use-cases where the combining operations are useful enough to reimplement in a dynamically typed language. I suspect that a dynamically typed language that somehow lets you use some kind of monadic notation would benefit from this (e.g. perhaps through the use of Lisp macros), but without extra language support, it probably would just be tedious and verbose (e.g. in Ruby.) I'd be happy to be proved wrong, though.
and if you search for www yahoo is first.

http://i.imgur.com/mhDzY.jpg
Please note, I am not taking a position on who is right or wrong, just reporting what I read. Thanks.
ICML 2011 Keynote - Hartmut Neven on Google Goggles and Quantum Computing
Strata Week: How Facebook moved 30 petabytes of Hadoop data
Also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2748869
I really don't understand the experiment, or how they made a model universe with 2 dimensions of time and 1 dimension of space.
Interestingly, a Dogpile.com search now returns Google as #1 (it's a sponsored result, though), and 4 more sponsored results I haven't heard of before giving Yahoo as the top composite result from Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Slightly less content-free post here:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/07/alibaba-mobile-os/

The only technical facts from either seem to be "runs Android apps" and "based on Linux", which makes it seem like this is just another vendor-skinned Android build. It certainly looks Android-y to me.

My prediction is that, like most of the bargain basement Android devices, it will be crummy. Although probably crummier than usual if they've thrown away the default Google UI and replaced it with a budget-developed vendorware skin.
This argument just seems like a step along the path to static typing. If you're using Ruby, haven't you already decided that you prefer the simplicity of a dynamic language to the safety of static types? So why start to add half-baked typing to your code? It seems like it just puts you in an uncomfortable middle ground.
Yahoo and the recursion!
Gmail now has a (temporary) notice upon sign-in that you're forwarding some mail
Unless you don't know what search is, and you don't know you're using search.
The author refers to pg's article on Cities and Ambition, and suggests that what is said about NY in the article is changing.

I don't think so. The banks will come back stronger than ever, it's just a matter of time, they always do. Other than that the mentality of people in the city has not changed. This so called engineering school which is expected to become top notch overnight, won't change things. If that were simply the case, Boston should never have seen it's decline as a tech mecca in the first place.
Microsoft creates "The GMail Man"
JRuby 1.7 has the major Invokedynamic changes. You can play with trunk for now.
Here.
http://knol.google.com/k/einstein-was-wrong-falsifying-obser...

You ask for details, I hand them to thee.
IIRC the PulseAudio debacle was with an LTS release.
Wow. Canada's Green Party is even more scientifically illiterate than most others.
The study mentioned that they collect operating system data as well; the subsequent writeup on that might prove quite interesting.
Mathematica may be overkill -- I suspect they'd just need something for basic symbolic manipulation, to reduce answers. In any case, a web-based mathematics system already exists; Sage can be run in a browser, and it integrates a number of useful mathematical features with Python:

http://sagemath.org/
I imagine that they would have, but for the following:

I'm sure that clojure compiles clojure, at this point, at least for the majority.

So, once you've written something that compiles clojure to js, then you just need to compile that compiler to js.

Why haven't they done this? My guess is that "something" in the clojure compiler relies on the jvm, or links to some java code to do its work.

Another possible reason that clojurescript doesn't yet compile all valid clojure.

In any case, I'm sure that this is an eventual goal. Hickey has stated that he always wanted clojure to target multiple platforms, but decided to start on java first.
Really enjoyed the techniques used here, but my initial instinct when the video loaded was: "Oh no! Popups!"

Due to this, I doubt anyone but OKGO could really get away with using these techniques...

Your thoughts?
One should not really trust any cloud based app with any mission critical files that are not backup-ed somewhere else.

I am not sure how the Ubuntu LTS release being stable has anything to do with their Ubuntu One service...
I don't think that nil accepting any method and returning nil fixes this problem at all. It certainly shifts it. Sometimes enough to stop it from biting you, but only by accident. Other times, the shifting just makes it that much harder to figure out what is going on.

Fundamentally, if you're not explicitly aware that something might be nil you won't always be making the right choices. The Objective-C behaviour just allows you to get lucky some of the time. Frankly I'd prefer if it just blew up in my face immediately.
git commit -a -m "blaaaa"

or (my favorite!)

hg commit -m "blaaaa"

At least, that's how I do it!
Ha, altavista.com is just a Yahoo! search box.
IOS Oscilloscope Review
Given that mail forwarding is buried in the settings where users will almost never see it, this is a very significant security measure.
It took me too long to figure this out. There are some people to truly, and passionately, believe something they say to you, and realistically they personally can't make it happen so you can't really bank on that 'promise.'

I used to think those people were lying to take advantage, but as I've gotten older I have come to recognize that these 'yes' people get promoted a lot. And for some of them, they really do believe what they are saying.

As an engineer I've found that once I can 'calibrate' someone's 'yes-ness' I can then work with them, understanding that they only make 'wishful' commitments rather than 'reasoned' commitments.

So when someone, like Steve Jobs, says "we're going to make it an open standard!", my first question then is "Great, I've got your support in making this an open standard so I can count on you to wield your position influence to aid me when folks line up against that effort, right?" If the answer that that question is no, then they were lying.

The difference is subtle of course but important. Steve clearly doesn't go to standards meetings and vote etc, but if Manager Bob gets push back from accounting that he's going to exceed his travel budget by sending 5 guys to the Open Video Chat Working Group which is championing the Facetime protocol as an open standard, then Manager Bob goes to Steve and says "I need your help here, these 5 guys are needed to argue this standard and keep it from being turned into a turd by the 5 guys from Google who are going to attend." and then Steve whips off a one liner to accounting that says "Get off this guy's back we need this." Then its all good. If on the other hand he says "We gotta save money, send one guy." well in that case I'm more sympathetic to the accusation of prevarication.
same here, 1st result: newyork.citysearch.com - New York, NY City Guide - Reviews and Recommendations by Citysearch
You are right, the error i get on my console isn't related to that, i misunderstood the error i get, i tried replicating today and the xhr request goes trough ok, http://yfrog.com/gysa24p makes me wonder what was my original problem, ill try to stop commenting by impulse.
I'm not an expert in this but I think the issue is one of tradeoffs. I think I remember reading (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that broadly generalized, microkernels have better security at the expense of performance, vice versa for macrokernels. See the "Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate" on Wikipedia.

Either way I'm interested to see if HURD will ever take off in any real sense. For example, could we see an Ubuntu/HURD mix in 5 or 10 years? Will it even matter with that kind of timeframe? Would there ever be any practical advantage to use HURD vs Linux besides more "freedoms"?
there is none, my mistake
Why Techmeme should support the new
My understanding is that you can't chainload non-Linux OSes from Grub2. And though I'd rather be loading Linux OSes, most of what I'm doing is installing Windows. So that doesn't really solve my primary use case.

Also, yes, the howtos I've read sound very fiddly, and it would be a lot more attractive if it were automated and user friendly. If this is done in hardware to look like a CDROM drive, that is the most automated and user-friendly solution. Even a fully-functional Grub2 that can chainload Windows isos will still be a little less elegant.
Hm? I read the GP as saying

"If you boot the iso from a harddrive (or the equivalent, a 'normal' usb stick) the installer fails because it explicitly looks for a CD/optical medium containing the repository"

With the gadget in this article that wouldn't be an issue anymore: The thumbdrive _is_ an optical drive for all the OS knows.
It didn't feel like I was talking to an alien who had no understanding of the problem with education today when I interviewed him. He started having attention problems in 4th grade (which is the age he's targeting), and all of the problems he described to me lined up with my own beliefs.

I know it reads as blatantly bragging, but from my interactions with Andrew (having met him at his office personally and then having done the interview over Skype), he didn't come across that way. It sounded to me like he had explained it many times before and was trying his best to succinctly give a straight answer. He seemed pretty normal by social standards, and I have some engineering friends who are sincere assholes with an ego much larger than Andrew's, if that's how you perceive him. I think most hackers and especially programmers have some amount of that cockiness though, that's not something we're all immune to. Even the CS professors admit that CS students walk around feeling more entitled than liberal arts students (and it's scribbled on the bathroom stalls: "Liberal arts degree dispenser below" right above the toilet paper roll in an engineering building on the campus I went to). Anyway, that wasn't the vibe I got from him, although I can see how you could read it that way.

It's an interesting point brought up: has he had enough painful experience with education to build a solution to it all? I don't know. I don't think it takes much to fix education; it's so broken that any young person today with an appreciation for gaming could probably figure out something better than what exists now. But I'm really interested in seeing what his team comes up with, and if someone wants to work on education, I'm more than supportive of those efforts because that whole process sucks right now.
You're partially right with Windows. Windows NT, since the beginning IIRC, uses a hybrid kernel in which things like drivers and IPC are and such are still in the kernel, but the application subsystems and fileservers run in user space. Plan 9 has a very similar design.
I saw a tweet from Jonathan Hoefler sarcastically saying he loves when the Gmail team uses pirated versions of his font online, or something to that affect, but it appears he has deleted it: http://twitter.com/#!/H_FJ
UK MP views on the true use of the Internet (she is also a romantic novelist)
That is the big claimed upside of this approach, the cell phone transmitter receiver is very simple, with only 1 antenna. The base station number crunching becomes much more sophisticated, but that is fine.
I agree that instilling confidence that they have a right to be where they are and the ability to learn and be what they want is key.

I don't think women are generally a minority - I only ever feel like one when I start working with new teams at work or classrooms in the university. But being a minority everywhere you go -ugh- that sense of isolation sounds really tough :(
And it's implicitly everywhere.
House panel approves broadened ISP snooping bill
That looks like a personalised result, especially with the google.ca underneath.

My UK Chrome incognito result has BBC, Wikipedia (World Wide Web), Wikipedia, Facebook and... uhh... Radisson Blu hotels.
Aw crud, and now the headline has gone and changed, so my comment no longer makes sense.
Google Search doesn't appear at all if I do the search on Google.no. Yahoo comes first, followed by Bing and search.com. Twitter, AOL and 4shared (a file sharing site) are all on the list, and so is "Google Insights for Search".

I wonder if this reflects the relative popularity of the alternative search engines in different countries. Google's search ranking algorithms hold many mysteries.
In which case, Bing is probably where you belong, with all the people making typos in the URL bar of IE.
Hypervisors like Xen can be viewed as microkernels.
Every hospital I've ever been in has foot pedal operated sinks on the way into the OR's. Most of the gizmos either have a patent number or a pending etched somewhere on them.
> Let's get INDEPENDENT scientists not funded by the oil industry or government to write an article and I'll trust it.

Err... who the hell do you think would fund such a study? I doubt there is any bias from taking government money.
Goldman's new money machine - warehouses
New Twitter ads are similar to adwords
Does OS X (and iOS, I suppose) being built on Mach not count?
> Low arithmetic intensity problems are going to be bottlenecked on memory transfer time, especially for GPGPU

True in absolute terms, but it might still be worthwhile doing that anyway. You're still offloading computation to the GPU, and the data transfer isn't going to tie up all of your CPU's cores. While you're sending data across, the rest of your CPU could be doing other tasks it's better suited for (branchy code, virtual function calls, recursion...).
I have a hard time believing that Apple doesn't have an internal protocol spec for FaceTime and created the protocol willy nilly.

You can design something very intentionally without ever having compiled a spec for it. There are certainly design notes, e-mail conversations, and, of course, the code itself to document the protocol for internal purposes.

Which makes me question how hard it could possibly be to submit an open draft to a standards body.

Assuming FaceTime has an internal spec, that does not mean it is in any shape ready for public consumption. For example, the spec could leave unspecified various things that Apple's particular implementation did not have to address. It could be written very informally. It could have fallen out-of-date as the protocol evolved.

None of this would mean that FaceTime was designed "willy nilly." There are processes less than ideal but still perfectly acceptable.
Congress already passed a law. The Supreme Court interpreted it as not allowing software patents. Congress has remained silent since then.

It's the pro-software-patent people who need to petition Congress. Anti-software-patent people should merely petition the executive branch to enforce the law as it stands.
> A patent wouldn't be just the algorithm, but also a writing device and paper.

Well, yes, and if the patent says "a writing device and paper" it might be valid, because paper is a specific construct, and the patent obviously does not cover such things as e.g. a piece of cloth.

Why do you use bzip2 and not bzip? Well, because arithmetic coding is covered by a supposedly valid patent. However, bzip can be executed by hand, or on any multitude of devices satisfying the requirements for Turing-completeness. The idea that a patent should preclude the writing of bzip, a purely mathematical construct, is absurd. bzip runs on an abstract device.

You could, for instance, specify a specific processor in the patent, but this is not done. You could not, however, specify a processor architecture, because this is also a mathematical construct, which can be carried out on paper.

Let me give you an example: My uncle knows that a cell phone is a computer. How? Well, I told him, and I'm a researcher. How do I know? Well, originally, some professor told me, and he's a professor. How does he know? Well, he or his colleague studied the literature indicating that an ARM processor is Turing-complete... which, at the end of the day, is a totally mathematical consideration, independent of the physical world except perhaps the brains which analyze it.

>But you can patent a device that uses it and renders the output to a computer screen.

No, because each independent part of this is some prior art. The representation of data on silicon is long since public domain, the display of silicon data on a screen is long since public domain, the x86 architecture and the GPU architecture are mathematical, and the algorithm itself is mathematical, and the combination of these is not itself novel or interesting: it is not even performed except by the end user, who must merely double-click a game icon and shuffle some bits around with a mouse.
Google+ circle names for online daters
Please change link to
http://blog.twitter.com/2011/07/timely-tweets-now-easier-to-...
Hashtag for patent schema #patentrollcall
The author of this blog post is a known loud-mouth, a know-it-all, yet wrong 99% of the time.

There's got to be a way to block these ignorant kids and their bullshit, ignorant blog posts. They are stuck in a 12-year-old mindset, and don't know why the tech world operates like it does.

Seriously... look at all of his bullshit blog postings. I'm glad he's focused on that, instead of using his stupidity to harm others. Usually it can be ignored (unless it pops up on 'Hacker-Wannabe-Script-Kiddie-Failed-Businessman' News)
Nearly EVERYONE in South Korea has been hacked in one go
So: why not a Batch API like FB's?
Ugh, no. I've run into several situations in ObjC where I forget to alloc a NSArray or NSDictionary into an ivar, and then I go and put objects in it, and get really confused later when I query the array/dict and find nothing in it... That's one behavior of ObjC I absolutely hate. I'd rather a quick segfault that'll tell me the problem in 2 seconds vs. staring at the code for an hour trying to figure it out.
> I guess all the brainpower in the world can't magically cure arrogance or grant humility.

I didn't think he sounded arrogant at all actually. He stressed that he thinks genetics play a small role. He then explains much more thoroughly the systematic approach he used to maximize his studying proficiency. I, in fact, think he was quite humble about his merits.

But if that's not the case, I wouldn't blame him either. He's human after all. So he is conditioned by his environment as much as we are. If I would be labeled as genius at 6, have 3 B.S. degrees by the age of 16, and pretty much everyone agreed I was "special", I think it's pretty expectable that I might end up believing that.
A Lua MQTT client library
PHP 5.4 Traits and the Diamond Problem
Republicans demand net-neutrality documents
It's available to anyone and everyone, even you! Right now!
According to the Flook precedent, the novelty in your invention can't merely be in the algorithm. Too bad the patent system ignores that precedent.
In related news, one thousand soccer moms using internet explorer six have been raided!
15 Tools to Help Speed Up Your Website
Google+ with specific circles
Hi, thanks for your comment.

To be able to simulate circuits, I guess we need to add those Verilog/VHDL descriptions for digital circuits and I guess to implement that feature alone is a very overwhelming task.

I think implementing a tagging system is a very good start. And probably build a community of users that can give feedback on circuits will be very cool features for users.

I am glad to see you guys working on this. Wish you guys the best.
Thanks for the response. B) sounds great -- I'll be very curious to see how it's implemented!

A critique of the common school system is that it encourages simply giving the answers the system seeks, rather than a healthier and more realistic method of encouraging exploration of problems and spaces and perhaps guiding the student along their journey of discovery (and as a result encouraging innovation, creativity, curiosity, etc.). So I definitely would love to see the problems go beyond this!

As an afterthought: I imagine teaching requires these sort of innovative abilities as well. KhanAcademy seems to work fairly well as it is, however there are always more, different and better answers to how learning outcomes can be improved -- they just need to be explored. (Isn't it funny how KhanAcademy is constantly in the spotlight to be the best -- I could imagine the pressure :)!
I agree that "lying" is incorrect. However your analogy in turn massively underplays what happened. Context matters.

A casual reply to your wife is not the same as walking out on stage in a high profile event as a CEO for a company and stating "I will take the trash out". External third parties don't depend on you taking the trash out either. Investors aren't making decisions based on you taking the trash out. Consumers aren't buying phones based on you taking the trash out. All these things matter and that's why CEOs become legally liable for things they say and commitments they publicly make.

I think on this count there would be room for a class action from consumers who feel they bought iPhones on the basis that they would be able to video chat with other phones and now find that they can't because Apple has failed to make good on a public commitment.
The danger of remote widgets – Feedcat.net sold and now distributing malware
Ask HN: How do I make the transition from being a Python beginner?
I've learnt all the basics of Python, the data types, functions, classes and iteration.

I've started a project to create Breakout using pygame.

I'm done with Learn Python the Hard Way and the other basic tutorials and need to know why you make certain things classes, when to create functions, how should the program be designed, how should it flow and so on. Ideally according to best practices.

I feel like I have all the pieces of Python but don't know how to start putting them together to make something that works.

Any advice?
if you type "search engine" google doen't even show up on the 1st page atleast.
U.S. balance now less than Apple cash