skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Discrimination is illegal.

Companies can't just do whatever they want. They are bound by laws and ethics. If these policies are found to discriminate against rape survivors (for example) they could very well be ruled illegal.

Don't confuse a legal grey area with something being legal.
This one has 800 lumens instead of 900, and uses 12.5watts instead of 10.
What did you buy first once you hit it?
I think "cultural imperialism" is the term you want.
It would not surprise me, either. I do not know the figures, but I think over half their Mac sales already ship with a trackpad and without a mouse.

I also do not understand why people would see this as a sign of killing of the Mac. If the trackpad is superior to the mouse (a position that I think is defensible for most users; if you have a 20-button mouse, you are the exception) what is wrong replacing one by the other?
It's a useful analogy. Heroku abstracts server configuration away from Rails development to the point where it's (theoretically) completely unnecessary to know /anything/ about it. If this does the same thing in a different context, I think it's a fair comparison.
If everyone in the world clicks that "one click petition" to protest the bill, what happens?
> Congress won't make a big change.

Every dollar Microsoft spends on patents cannot be spent on lobbies. And the other way around applies to Google: every dollar not spent chasing patents can be spent lobbying for patent reform.

And, while that leaves hardware patents untouched, they are not the problem. Microsoft is extorting Google partners using bogus software patents, not hardware ones.
Previous submission, much discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2845946

Currently #16 on the Front Page.
Unfortunately viruses may also be an agent for evolution [1]. This discovery is basically a means to kill cells that match a particular rDNA sequence. Seems like something that could become a very strange tool or a very horrible weapon.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/03/071203fa_fact_...
Just used them. The hard part was figuring out how to get a signature up there. The other thing is it 5 free pages. (as opposed to 5 faxes)

Thanks!
Google has just introduced an optional three pane view to Gmail.
Parse, Kinvey and StackMob are great tools if you want to read/write data such as high scores from your app. But you won't have a nice editing interface for the data in the web.

If Parse is "Heroku for Mobile" then StorageRoom, the startup I am working for, is "iCloud for content".

Editors manage content in our flexible service online and data is synchronized or pulled from mobile apps.

Different use-case, but we seem to have found another problem where many devs complain. Existing CMS tools suck at this.

http://storageroomapp.com
Before we jump to conclusions..

Active Military/Security Types with that high level of security clearance do not direct or indirectly talk to the press no matter what country they serve..it does not happen.

In the US there is several layers of liaisons to the press in the Military forces.

At no time would there be primary sources for this story..so that means that New Yorker did not just fail to run fact checking but ran duck and covered knowing full well there were no primary sources.

Let's stop lying NewYorker as there are times when non primary sources is all you have to a story..
> low-level annoyances

... like abusive former partners, death threats, being involuntarily outed, etc etc etc.

Calling these things "low-level annoyances" betrays a deep self-absorption.
All-Time Worst Movies list - now with Factor Analysis!
Comparing the relatively thoughtful discussion on this topic among the web development community to the reddit mob is not particularly fair or accurate.
Just check the article on Entropy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy), which sounds good, and its discussion page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Entropy), which makes you think twice about the quality of the article.
To be clear, the full text of that portion of the legislation says:

---

(a) In General- Section 2703 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:

`(h) Retention of Certain Records- A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least 18 months the temporarily assigned network addresses the service assigns to each account, unless that address is transmitted by radio communication (as defined in section 3 of the Communications Act of 1934).'.

(b) Sense of Congress- It is the sense of Congress that records retained pursuant to section 2703(h) of title 18, United States Code, should be stored securely to protect customer privacy and prevent against breaches of the records.

---

In other words, it amends the existing language [0] which says (in part):

---

A provider of electronic communication service or remote computing service shall disclose to a governmental entity the—

(A) name;

(B) address;

(C) local and long distance telephone connection records, or records of session times and durations;

(D) length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized;

(E) telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and

(F) means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number),

of a subscriber to or customer of such service when the governmental entity uses an administrative subpoena authorized by a Federal or State statute or a Federal or State grand jury or trial subpoena or any means available under paragraph (1).

[snip]

(f) Requirement To Preserve Evidence.—

(1) In general.— A provider of wire or electronic communication services or a remote computing service, upon the request of a governmental entity, shall take all necessary steps to preserve records and other evidence in its possession pending the issuance of a court order or other process.

(2) Period of retention.— Records referred to in paragraph (1) shall be retained for a period of 90 days, which shall be extended for an additional 90-day period upon a renewed request by the governmental entity.

---

So you're 100% right: the name, address, etc information is ALREADY being preserved. This legislation mandates that records of IP addresses linked to accounts be stored for at least 18 months, whereas before they would have been retained for 90-180 days.

---

[0]: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00002703----...
You assume error happens in RAM. Occurring on the wire seems far more likely. Don't forget that DNS is UDP and DNS servers cache their requests.
Trying to prevent the deletion of cookies used to uniquely identify and track their customers' users is ethical?
For a moment I thought it's the curing of a broad range of computer viruses, which can more likely be done than biological viruses. Reading the article cured my misconception. The technique is still impressive.
Barometa Case Study - Blog - Solid State Group
On the other hand, people in academia treat wikipedia as a good introduction, but shudder at the thought of using it to check facts.
I don't see how they could be sued, even over such a comment, since I'm sure they don't make any guarantees regarding the availability of the market, much less for the ranking/search functionality. You would have to prove malice or gross negligence but I think for the latter you would need good lawyers to have a chance.
> It's 7,000 fewer patents you have to deal with

Those patents can become harmless if Google acquires some other patents Microsoft and Apple infringe and force them into cross-licensing.

Obviously, Apple and Microsoft would be more inclined to litigate because an unencumbered Android would doom their respective mobile platforms (Apple less than Microsoft, in this case)
I've been following the development of Parse for the past couple months. Really solid progress. What struck me as the coolest part of their product is the ActiveRecord/ARel-style querying:

>ParseQuery query = new ParseQuery("GameScore");
query.whereEqualTo("foo", "bar").whereEqualTo("baz", "biz");

The ability to stack query options like that is very Railsy. I have a feeling that as more Rails developers focus on mobile development, they will take some of the nicer API designs with them into the Java/Obj-C world.
i'm doing something like this at https://irccloud.com/
Craigslist: all those shitty no pay jobs in the gigs section. That is for you.

They want an expert kernel programmer willing to work for $10 an hour? Great! You're an expert and you know the kernel inside out.

Those idea guys where you get 50% and no pay? Perfect, talk to those guys, they will give you all the experience you need.

Once you have a few of those under your belt and some sample code, go show the guys looking for pros.

Alternatively, you can go to the LKML or Google Chrome or Firefox dev sites. Download the source, work on documentation, find some simple bugs to fix, etc. Pretty much any open source project would love contributors, go contribute., worst comes to worst they reject your patch, but keep submitting til the quality is up to par.

Basically, just go do it. Whatever you want to learn, just start doing it. It sounds like you're trying to give yourself a list of reasons why you can't do it.

If your looking to transition from a field where you have years of experience to a field where you have little and expecting to bump your salary all in one go I have to say it's pretty unlikely that's going to happen. However, if you're willing to put in time and effort you will have no problem transitioning over a period of time.

The simple facts are that it takes 10 years of programming to have 10 years of experience programming. I spent 5 years doing PHP / C#. Another 5 years writing C# / Perl.

When I wanted to transition to iOS coding I bought a dev license installed XCode and started coding an app for myself and put it in the app store (it took about 1 to 2 months). I've made $30 bux on that app, but the point was not to retire from the app store but to learn iOS. Whatever you want to do, just start doing it, and see it through to the fruition that people are looking for. (eg. on iOS store all anybody cares about is that you've gotten it into the store).

If you're getting paid anything to learn to code you're 10,000 times further ahead of everyone else who are paying lots of money to learn theory, rather than practice. (eg. How many iOS courses actually result in people putting an app in the store?)
I'm not saying it's what it is, I'm saying it's the attitude that seems to drive the mods.

But I give up. When so many people take what I say in a sense other than I intend, I know it's time to give up for the night. Clearly I'm not expressing myself very well, so I'm outta here.
Mimeo Connect Print Marketplace Integrations
Gifsoup.com needs a programmer
Looking for an uber awesome programmer well versed in php & c. I run a handful of semi-decent sized web properties and am looking for another programmer for part time assistance.

The most pressing issue at the moment is with one site, www.gifsoup.com which needs a bit of optimization. Need code optimization touching the mysql/database handling, reorganization of the db so fewer calls are made, change of flow of the flv creation because it's a bit disk intensive...and a number of other issues.

Send me a link to your portfolio, along with an idea of your current rates. You can get in touch with me via PM or at jaykim1atgmaildotcom
Don't comment on Hacker News if you can't compose yourself and respond like an adult.
Microbial mats look like one of the most promising candidates, and NASA has a team seriously exploring this possibility: http://nai.arc.nasa.gov/students/this_month/page6.cfm

These mats tend to build up in layers, and often form structures known as stromatolites. You can find some examples both at the NASA team's site (http://nai.arc.nasa.gov/students/this_month/page2.cfm) and here: http://www.evolutionaryresearch.org/stromatolites.htm

There used to be a page up, claiming to show the remains of actual stromatolites on Mars, but it seems to be completely gone now (Spirit Finds Stromatolites, http://www.xenotechresearch.com/marsstro.htm). The Wayback Machine has it at http://web.archive.org/web/20081120022703/http://www.xenotec... but I'd probably rank its credibility with the Face On Mars.

EDIT: Just to make it clear, all actual stromatolites in these links are definitely of terrestrial origin! (At least, I think they are)
Devoid of content, use clang, typical of why I stopped frequenting Reddit, etc.
FWIW, heroin is the drug, heroine is a lady hero.
Percisely, this is why sometimes articles that do not have very good notability gets included without problems. Wikipedians are biased, like any other people, which means some articles may never get challenged for notability, and some editors may decide to keep the article that would normally fail notability test. Other times, mainly but not exclusively biographies of living people, are often placed with a much higher notability standard, mainly due to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_biography_controversy

In fact Wikipedia has a page called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IAR
which encourages editors to ignore policies and guidelines that hinders them from improving Wikipedia. (How well this policy is applied these days, I honestly do not know)

However, just because notability is a guideline, doesn't mean I should make up a word like "xryzcbslmrwp463vnfd" and define that using Wikipedia.

Now, with regards to wikipedia admins deleting articles overzealously, this is indeed a problem in my opionion, and I have undeleted articles that would of be kept if it was actually discussed in Articles for Deletion. The thing is, most Wikipedia newbies, do not know how to contest the deletion of their article, or even know they should be contesting it because the notability is there and can be asserted.
The screenshot looks remarkably similar to the Google wave layout.
It's a math topic. Expect equations.
Is there any evidence that having a strong online presence under your real name increases danger to your children?
Money! Thanks much Ben!
Well, Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that people that don't use their real name are Bad People(tm). (1000 thanks to whoever can conjure up a link to that quote) Personally, that seems like he's attacking anyone that opposes his idea of trying to force people into using real names.

The same can't be said of other systems (Google+, Quora, etc) to my knowledge.
BBC Mike Sewell 'spots UFO' then tells millions on Radio 5 Live
I am glad that one of the current rovers wasn't in a position to have water wash over them. Especially salty water which is very conductive. That would be like 'instant death' for a robot probe.

Of course all of these things could have been discovered and analyzed much more quickly and definitively with a person present ...
I would have to say you're naive for thinking the two are much different.

Any group, no matter how civil and educated, can dislove pretty quickly into mob mentality.
EBay launches social shopping See the most shared products
I find it quite worrying that people will rely on Wikipedia but stop editing it because it's hard and because not everyone is friendly there. Yes, part of the time that you spend editing Wikipedia is lost because you have to look up obscure conventions and templates and policies, and argue with people every now and then, including some rare cases where it's hard to assume good faith. You should be fair though -- Wikipedia is a huge endeavor, and administrative friction is unavoidable to some extent.

If people stop contributing, though, the bureaucrats will take over, and we cannot afford to let Wikipedia stagnate and die in this way. It's tempting to leave the administrative burden to someone else, but it will get heavier and heavier for those who stay.
I've been working on corrections and I was actually struck by how seemingly trivial differences in the languages can completely break large parts of the book. For example, the python version introduces modules fairly early because they are needed for other lessons. But I don't think there is a single library dependency in the entire Ruby version. It can't introduce require and then never use it, but there is very little entry level stuff in the Ruby standard library. There should probably be a chapter on making your own libraries, but that would have to be new material very late in the book.
A Few Lessons I Learned About Online Writers Down on the Content Farm
I want to share a few of the lessons I learned that have stuck with me. It might help some understand how content farms grew into the monsters they became, who contributed to the problem, and why we shouldn’t let it happen ever again.
Do you have any ideas for other rules that can increase the useful-output-to-political-conflict ratio?

(Welcome either in this thread or in direct communication; I am trying to devise better computer-mediated systems for this. While conflict and politics are intrinsic to human affairs I think proper system design can reduce the number of zero- or negative-sum interactions.)
> Discoverability is either painful (waiting for a read-through of your options) or futile (guessing blindly and not knowing whether it is your word choice or enunciation that is to blame).

That is due to the limitations of such voice menus being an audio only interface. There is no reason that a computer couldn't list helpful commands, modifiers (switches), and arguments on the screen as a person rambled about the kind of thing(s) they wanted to do. Given fast, context-aware speech recognition, obviously.
Or - and this is taking the opposite polemical position to yours - that designing systems without empathy is reprehensible. I lean more to the latter but that doesn't mean what you claim is entirely false either.

It's not as simple as anyone paints it, and what's more, it's an area where short-term economic incentives are often drastically misaligned with both goals of personal autonomy and, more arguably, long-term success of a community and product.

But unrestrained personal autonomy gets you 4chan. The real problem is trying to flatten the richness of human experience to fit through TweetBook+ (or whatever comes next). No easy answers and the problem ain't going away.
Nah, I'll read CTM (Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming)[1] first, as it addresses concurrency, for example, and seems to be easier to digest.
CTM is viewed by some as a/the modern successor of SICP.

I had been looking for opinions regarding CTM vs SICP to choose which to read first and I've found two postings [2][3] from a mailing list to be very helpful in that regard. Also a comment on HN[4].

I do plan to read SICP sometime in the future as I'm already interested in Lisp, i.e. I'm reading Practical Common Lisp, On Lisp, deferred Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming for later and plan to read Lisp In Small Pieces, which covers compilation.

I've also stumbled across PLAI (Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation)[5] by Shriram Krishnamurthi which seems to cover similar topics, and I plan to dive into that sometime in the future as well. If someone can tell where PLAI stands in contrast to SICP or CTM, that would be very helpful. Ah well... I found an opinion [6] on that too.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Techniques-Models-Computer-Pr...

[2] http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2008-February/022...

[3] http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2008-February/022...

[4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1119132

[5] http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/200...

[6] http://schemers.livejournal.com/584.html?thread=1864#t1864
Facebook has the same link.
Definitely not a deliberate lie. The bill amends previous bills on the topic by adding the retention of IP-adresses etc.

If I was unclear in the post I am very sorry and will amend the post.

That said the core of the post stand. The linking of currently stored data with IP-addresses creates a direct link from internet usage to personal data. Something that should scare most people.
This hasn't always gone the other way however. Adium finally added support for IRC recently, though pidgin and libpurple have had it for years.
For me it's worthwhile to actually read the resolution and the law. It just makes it more real for me rather than a random internet posting.

The resolution is here:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.1981:

The resolution modifies the legal code (law) given here:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00002703----...

[Edit] There is a reasonable write-up of the action from an ACLU blog here:
http://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/HR%201981
Thanks - updating my comment.
Troll = Advanced Idiot.

Works for me.
It's not completely different. In a literal sense, if you use Parse, you don't have to parse JSON or XML in your mobile app. And in a general sense, we think of "parsing" as taking a big messy problem and making it simple.
.NET Gadgeteer
Getting ever more usable.
I don't. Ads don't bother me unless they're flashy... flash ads, and well, not having Flash Player installed solves that issue.

If a website has other ads that annoy me, I just won't visit it. Or if the content is something I feel is worth paying for a subscription and that subscription removes the ads, I do that.
Every dollar Microsoft spends on patents cannot be spent on lobbies. And the other way around applies to Google: every dollar not spent chasing patents can be spent lobbying for patent reform

This isn't a matter of lobbyist, rather that congress already has a big piece of legislation they're moving now on patent reform. First-to-file is years in the making. And for 95% of patents its a total no-op. Congress just will not move quickly on this. And I think Google is going to focus its lobby efforts trying to keep people away from serious antitrust investigations against them, more than patent reform.

And, while that leaves hardware patents untouched, they are not the problem. Microsoft is extorting Google partners using bogus software patents, not hardware ones.

Google wants to make this anti-MS, because MS has a worse rep. Their real concern though is Apple. For example, notice who's not shown interest in the InterDigital patents? Microsoft. Who has? Apple, Google, Samsung.

Apple doesn't want to get $10/handset for Android. They want to block Android from shipping, period. And Apple IS using HW patents to block Android. For example, they've used HW design patents such as #D618,677. Or even this patent on volume rockers: #7,863,533.

MS is happy to just collect some revenue, and try to slow Android down so they can get their phones up to speed with Mango/Tango. MS will never make a lot of money directly from the cell phone market. 100M units sold is about $1.5B in direct revenue for them. Not chump change, but not a lot of money (on par with about how much money Visual Studio makes). For Apple this is almost their complete business now. They make $250/unit. $10 royalty from Samsung doesn't offset the fact that someone bought an Android machine rather than iOS.

Plus the Nortel patents give them a bunch of HW patents that Apple will likely assert, especially if Android begins to make another push.
This Altix machine I work on does this:

@tg-login1:~> crap
If 'crap' is not a typo you can run the following command to lookup the package that contains the binary:
command-not-found crap
-bash: crap: command not found`
IP Address: 184.53.246.0 through 184.53.246.255 - -, -
How to seem good at everything: Stop doing stupid shit
But the part everybody's getting worked up over is the tracking of Internet activity, which is not part of current law, and is not part of the bill in question. I have no idea where that part came from, so I'd be glad if you could make that clear.
Why nerds are unpopular?