skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cool, but Emacs org-mode has really simple ASCII table creation that will auto re-size columns for you.

http://orgmode.org/manual/Built_002din-table-editor.html#Bui...
On similarly dark photos the dynamic range adjustments was able to bring in much more details than it is seems to have at first look. I suppose the same can be made for video.
How My Eventual Technical Co-Founder Told Me: “Fuck You, Pay Me”
94% of iPhone users will buy another
Haha, that's awesome!
Hacker meetup tonight at HP Sunnyvale - Introducing Dnode and Hook.io
True, but I'd rather send a fleet of robots over there and bottle 1000 different soil samples for later study, and then get on with terraforming the place, perhaps by crashing a comet into it. 'But what if we contaminate this otherwise pristine natural environment' seems to get trotted out in every discussion of Martian exploration and is (IMHO) slowing us down.
Google fires back at Microsoft in public Android patent spat
My favorite prop is the pipe. So sophisticated!
Dow finishes down 500+ points
Perhaps World of Warcraft is appropriate for your level of interests.
Why is this in Hacker News? Why? Please explain, so I don't have to wade through the dreck of the damned article to try to guess why you thought this was important.
These will never be available over the counter because they would lead to a rash of suicides by people who test positive and are infected as well as the false positives. HIV testing is generally done in conjunction with professional support and not something that should be done at home.
I don't know about you, but I see a tendency of .Net guys to prove they can do in C# the things others can do in Python, Ruby, JS, or C. It's pathetic and pointless.
I upvoted you, because I had to look up the origin of that quote, making me want to read the book. Thanks.
Trivial indeed:

Are U2 an "Irish band" or simply a band that happen to be
from Ireland, since two of their members were born in the
UK
around 97 (give or take a year) i paid $500ish for a 6.5gb drive
Why do people feel the need to quote this whenever Europa is mentioned? congratulations, you have good taste in science-fiction, and now it would be nice to move on to the science part and dispense with the fiction bit. Enough with the space hippy act already.
Also a ruby newb, so I'm not sure, but I think it's an error in the book. I got that error on all versions of ruby I tried. Either var.to_s, or "blah #{var} blah" works for me.

This seems to explain it:
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/...
“If they gave everyone a Mac, I’d be out of a job.”
Perception of Science: Public vs. Reality
The problem with Wikipedia is the reaction to people trying to add crap that doesn't belong. It has been to put up barriers to adding content, making anyone who starts a new article go though more and more bureaucracy, paperwork and proving your innocence. It is the same with uploading pictures or just adding text to an article. This has led to much fewer people joining the community, and without enough editors to look after the articles, the arguments to lock down and protect only becomes stronger.

Basically Wikipedia has suffered the same fate as many mature online communities. In the beginning everyone is helping each other out and you are creating something great together. After a few years the older members of the community start getting really tired of the clueless newcomers and start complaining and setting up rules. New users no longer feel welcome and never stay long. Soon 90% are experienced members, and the newcomer perspective is lost completely. It is often not intentional, making it easier for moderators is just higher priority than letting more people participate.

I wonder if Stack Overflow will survive growing up.
Deletions inspired by that attitude is exactly what keeps me from contributing.
Fair enough. :)

I dont use KISSMetrics so I haven't read up on their ToS or PP. Makes sense though.
Probably naively optimistic. ;-)

The public generally doesn't care. The courts won't change course without congress. Congress won't make a big change. Minor reform at best (I doubt we'll see much more than what is already in the oven).

The problem is that Android isn't viewed as innovative by most consumers. I think in a PR battle between Apple saying Google copies, and Google saying that Apple is blocking them from innovating -- Apple wins.

And the other issue is that a lot of the patents at stake are HW patents. Undermining HW patents is a much harder sell.
+1 for "staying away from HP", seems like everyone around me with a HP runs into hardware problems (maybe that's the reason why they are slightly cheaper?)

My favourite would be Dell, they just released 15z a while ago, seems pretty nice.

I would also recommand Lenovo, Asus and Toshiba. I'm using a Toshiba Satellite A660 at work, pretty quiet and stays cool.
You are wrong, this is 2011, there is server space.

Your excuses are borderline offensive.
Strangely enough, WolframAlpha seems to understand your first query but gives the wrong answer nonetheless.

"is 10 percent of the population of united states > 25 million?" => WolframAlpha says "false".

But the population it uses is 309 million, so 10% of it is 30.9 million, which is actually greater than 25 million.

Apparently it's a syntax problem:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+population+of+united...

False. But surely 309 million is greater than 25 million, right? Wait, 25 million, but it doesn't have any unit. So let's add "people".

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+population+of+united...

True. Ah-ah!
So let's get back to those 10 percent...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+10+percent+of+the+po...

i.e. your example plus "people". Still says false.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+10+percent+populatio...

Finally, it works. But it highlights the fact that your syntax has to be very specific to be understood by Wolfram. Which makes the whole thing very error-prone and not discoverable.

(Which is a shame because I love CLIs too!)
First, most the comments say this is a white american (where american means United States, sigh) policy, but as a tiny brown low-middle-class Mexican I have no problem going with my real name.

Second, Is Facebook's 'No custom HTML/CSS on profiles' policy is an abuse of power? How is that having a rule on a social network is an abuse of power? You don't like FB's boring profiles? use MySpace. You don't like using your real name? Go hangout on Twitter or 4Chan for that matter.

I can see why some people don;t like using their real names, but calling it an abuse of power is such a ridiculous overstatement.
Tweaking articles is the very best way to get involved with editing Wikipedia. There are lots of minor typos and grammar mistakes in Wikipedia, and fixing every little bit refines an article.
Because Zed Shaw's original book makes learning Python so easy for anyone without assuming any prior knowledge, plus he's hilarious.
the distribution is skewed towards the top 0.1%. According to "This American Life", the percentage of psychopaths* is higher amongst the wealthy and successful than the rest of society.

Not sure what the definition of wealthy and successful is though.

*I wrote sociopaths by accident, although there's some debate as to wether there's a difference between the two.

Also, what's with the down votes? What did I say..?
Water drop falling in front of an MC Escher sketch
The International Space Station is the most expensive object humanity has ever built. You think that the reason we are slow at terraforming Mars is because we're debating about life there?! No. The reason we're slow is because it would take millennia and incomprehensible amounts of money.

I say we land there with humans, spend a few decades checking the place out, then begin with the terraforming.
I submitted that yesterday:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2841778

It got no discussion and the wonderous total of 2 upvotes. I wonder if this submission will fare better ...
RIM Won't Live to See 2013, Analyst Says
Here's the discussion from when this was submitted a week ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2818723
It's never too late to move!
Mibbit is actually pretty good if you want to chat on IRC via a web browser.
That's a very good point, and Cash Cab is sweet. Also, I was under the impression that the people guessing in that gameshow were celebrities. Are there any game-shows today that play for sub-thousand-dollar prizes with celebrities?
How  To Boost Your Virtual Office Productivity
She posted this on G+ itself, too, and there's an actual conversation there:

https://plus.google.com/115565811010545226083/posts/bPqUZYGj...
I am on Dreamwidth, which is very pseudonym-friendly. It's a pretty cool place.

No, I don't use my analog name there. :-)

Email me if you want invites.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-03/samsung-is-said-to-...

InterDigital’s engineers invented some of the technology for high-speed mobile phone networks now used by the world’s biggest handset makers.

This is a link on some of their "breakthroughs" covered in their patent portfolio:

http://www.interdigital.com/patents/category/patent_portfoli...

"North" is the key word here. This could get crazy. I bet Nathan Myrvhold is laughing to the bank right now.
The Success of Failure
Simon Jones, the Original Arthur Dent, Discusses the Hitchhiker’s iOS App
I can't tell you how heartening it is to read your post, because it means that people can realize the error of something like this and change their beliefs.

People who keep claiming that "we live in public" and that everything is out there anyway are extremely naive.
Thanks for the feedback! We love ScraperWiki, too.

Our initial target audience is not developers, which means that our MVP focuses on UX and making data not-scary for non-technical individuals.

Could you expand on what you mean by lacking open source? ScraperWiki isn't open source either, right? Neither is GitHub. We're interested in knowing what you'd do with it if it was open source. Big ideas?
Simple carpet cleaning Methods
For sure. Watching Whit make movies and then watching the movies Whit makes is one of life's greatest pleasures. He sets out to delight you and he succeeds every time.
The issue is that, rather than making judgements like you have done, reporters have been finding it easy to base suggestions on the numbers, suggesting the reason they would be worth more is that there are more of them.
(tinfoil hat warning)

Google wants data. That's the main benefit that they get out of having a social network, is getting access to a new data source with a different type of data than what they currently have. They want your real name so they can aggregate this data with other data sources, including external ones (think CRM).

When they say they want to handle pseudonyms, they don't mean letting you put a pseudonym into your name field. They still want your real name. What they mean is, the system will require your real name but let you display one (or more!) pseudonyms. In fact, advanced pseudonym management is probably on their roadmap. By letting you display different aliases to different users or circles, Google will be able to associate your various online identities.
Startup Crawl, August 11th
What about WebOS?
As such, Congress currently has no idea how many warrantless requests are made to ISPs each year. How can it hope to make sane policy in this area, when it has no useful data?

The Intelligence select committee knows pretty well what's going on. That's why Mark Udall and Ron Wyden were screaming bloody murder last month before the patriot act extension vote [1]. Because they know, and it's bad.

It seems much of the uproar is about the business records portion and how it is being applied to broad requests to telcos for call detail records without suspicion of terrorism. Often that will be all of the target's call detail records, and then the call detail records of everyone he calls, and very possibly even the CDR's of everyone those people called. You don't have to make that many of those requests before you essentially have the entire country's phone records in one great big database.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/us/27patriot.html
Unless they start requiring ID be presented every time the Internet is used, while big brother is watching over your shoulder, the whole argument is moot.

There is no way to enforce people using their real name online and such policies will only hurt the reputations of companies that try to enforce them.

If I really wanted to bully someone online, I could sign up for an account using a fake name and a proxy/VPN. Nobody would be able to stop me. Requiring people to use their real name, as if by magic, is not going to stop anything.
Ah, I should fix that example. It's totally wrong. Nice catch!

In hindsight, I probably should have used "Hello #{name}" style string interpolation in all of the examples since thats the idiomatic way of doing things.

I was trying to expose the newcomer to multiple ways of manipulating and concatenating strings, but since the aforementioned way is almost always best, I should stick to that.
Hiten is a standup guy, a friend to startups everywhere, and a class act all around. I look forward to him kicking their asses in court.
I quite like the staging area, and when using mercurial, I often employ the record plugin for having something similar there.
Their userbase is not who's suing them.
makes me want to be at the hack-a-thon even more! non-business hours plz!
Awesome success! Do you need to frequently publish app updates to keep your revenue up? Or can you launch your apps "fire and forget", generating money without needing to touch the code again? That seems like the only strategy that would scale well without being burdened by maintenance.
IE6 User Intelligence Study was Bogus
I just started using Kissmetrics, and it's odd that this was the most reassuring thing I've read from this.
The government has way over stepped it's bounds in response to the terrorist threat. I realized it first when I read a New Yorker article on the NSA[0].

In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

...

Even in an age in which computerized feats are commonplace, the N.S.A.’s capabilities are breathtaking. The agency reportedly has the capacity to intercept and download, every six hours, electronic communications equivalent to the contents of the Library of Congress. Three times the size of the C.I.A., and with a third of the U.S.’s entire intelligence budget, the N.S.A. has a five-thousand-acre campus at Fort Meade protected by iris scanners and facial-recognition devices. The electric bill there is said to surpass seventy million dollars a year.

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...
Did I ever say that they do?

In this context I intend “support” as “endorse”. I don’t think they endorse it, or they would be shipping it with the browser. That doesn’t mean they oppose to it. They implemented an API that allows 3rd party codecs, that’s it.
Wait wait wait wait.

A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners.

Having the license to the patent means you get to use the patented technology--no one can come after you. That's the protection, you get to use it. This is bullshit, Google didn't decline the offer because it didn't give them protection, they declined the offer because it didn't give them an ability use those patents against Microsoft.
The only reason for the high price of Nortel patents was because all those big name companies got involved. If it's only Google and Apple the price for these patents might be much lower, maybe half. It all depends how Apple and Google want to play witch each other though.
Yes, because the policy works for you, it should therefore work for everyone.

Also, according to you, a policy which prevents compromising a system is exactly the same as forcing people to divulge information that could cause them harm.
This argument is nonsensical unless there is an actual, consequential penalty for violating the "real names" policy.

It need not be administered by Google. If Ivan Identity is being publicly belligerent, then social opprobrium is the likely result. Use of his real identity gives him an incentive to uphold his own reputation. This does not guarantee that he will respond to such an incentive, but does make it easier for people to respond to his misbehavior when he acts badly.

I'm entirely familiar with the value of a pseudonym, having used this one for well over a decade now. But if you want to leverage it as a brand, then do so on commercial terms, is my feeling.
"This is where the cool kids go. But you don't fit in, so please go somewhere where you do. Like with the other abnormals."
A Curse of One Thousand Intellectual Ventures Software and Technology
The Trivial's War on Reality - Why You Shouldn't "Like" so Much
The factual inaccuracies in the Strings chapter, covering encodings and Unicode, are horrific enough. Confusing UCS-4 and UTF-32, getting historical orderings wrong, completely forgetting to mention Latin-1, and worst, failing to directly outline the connection between encoded streams of bytes, and Unicode strings, in clear and direct language.

Also, the horrific RE abuse at the beginning of Chapter 6 is a remarkable standalone example of Doin' It Wrong:

import re

def plural(noun):
if re.search('[sxz]$', noun):
return re.sub('$', 'es', noun)
elif re.search('[^aeioudgkprt]h$', noun):
return re.sub('$', 'es', noun)
elif re.search('[^aeiou]y$', noun):
return re.sub('y$', 'ies', noun)
else:
return noun + 's'
We're going to be hacking into the night, so you're welcome to show up anytime this evening! Second dinner is at 10pm, and we're at 88 Kearny.
You should check out Hack and Tell meetup. I think you'll enjoy it.
Randi Zuckerberg leaving FB Tribute - how to get a guy in the valley :)
We can haz beerz s00n! You and Laura will be the first people to know when I am back!
I'm kind of surprised that I haven't seen people stating the obvious: on a practical level Google+ has (and will always have) anonymous accounts.

You can create G+ account under any random, but plausible looking name. You can be 15 year French old girl and call yourself "George Bush" (there are already 3 of those on G+). It's not like Google requires valid proof of identity to sign up.

Do people, including Danah Boyd, do not realize that? Given that in practice G+ has anonymous accounts, what is the fuss about?

I understand that Google officially won't acknowledge that but the "no anonymity" is just posturing. They have no practical way and probably no intention of making sure that people provide the real names.

So the issue here seems to be not about anonymity but about being obvious about being anonymous and the many justifications given in favor of anonymity do not carry over.
File Folders Are Long Lasting Folders
File folders are impeccably durable and economical folders. They can aid you to boost up your business identity. We offer cheap file folder printing services to our trustworthy customers internationally.
You have to read to the end to find out that it has only been confirmed in mice. We have cured practically every major medical condition in mice. The human part is the hard part. I'm skeptical that this mechanism wouldn't have some pretty severe side effects.
If we're going down that route:

You're making an assumption without any proof: Pseudonyms lead to bad behavior.

In my world that's not connected to the names used and is merely a function of the 'quality' of the people in your community. Also - you don't solve issues between people with rules about their 'alias', you have to invent/support/hand out some decent tools to block idiots from your online life.
Most importantly, if life was found on Mars and it was convincingly shown to have had a separate origin to life on Earth (i.e. no panspermia) then this would severely impact upon our understanding of how common life in the universe is.

When we've only got one example and it's us, our estimate of the probability of life evolving on a given planet (given suitable conditions) could literally be anything from 100% to any arbitrarily low number you might like to think of.

If we check two life-plausible planets and find separate life on both, the probability is suddenly way biased towards the high end of the scale. (A statistician can figure that one out for me.)
I often try to get math topics by reading about them on Wikipedia. I've found that almost universally, they're completely incomprehensible, unless you already know everything about the topic that's being discussed, and are thoroughly versed in adjacent topics. [1][2]

We can compare that with articles on physics, which is pretty close to math, after all: they are almost always excellent and mostly understandable even to complete laymen (ie, me). [3][4]

If Wikipedia's goal is indeed making all human knowledge freely accessible, then that does not just consist of putting up the words. It means making the content accessible, not just available. While Wikipedia succeeds magnificently in many areas, math is not one of them.

___

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_product

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductivity

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
You need to learn how defensive patents work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_patent_aggregation

It's not just to stop from being sued over that particular patent, but to be able to use that patent to counter-sue when litigated for other patents.

Google has yet to use any of its patents offensively.
If you want something like this without leaving VIM, I recommend DrawIt. I use it all the time:
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=40

It comes in handy when you need to diagram something in your code comments.
Fear of Change Impedes Cloud Adoption for Many Companies
Ehh.... I don't believe so.

I'm reasonably sure Euclidean geometry and symbolic logic do not require arithmetic.
The point is to have weapons for "mutually-assured destruction". Even if they never plan on using them, if Microsoft can use other patents against them and they can't use these patents against Microsoft, then they are useless to them, and Microsoft can go ahead and sue/threaten them with their other patents.

That's the whole point of getting these patents - so you're more "dangerous". If Microsoft had them too, they wouldn't be a threat to them.
Google Are Pussies
Whose internet law is it that says that any sufficiently advanced idiot is indistinguishable from a troll? Or is it that any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from an idiot?
It seems like he would not have been old enough to even be able to answer those first few questions.

On that note, I wonder how many of these questions actually have been asked and documented of survivors of the time, between all the books and news articles that have been written on the subject.

In fact, I found a book on this very subject, which according to the index, actually references Samuel Seymour's article in the American Weekly they mentioned in the video.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Gc6BmV3D1bMC&lpg=PA196&...
This may be the biggest steaming pile of astroturf to ever hit Hacker News.
> why wouldn't they just educate their userbase? <

If you were competing against better funded companies - one of which may be behind these lawsuits (hey, this is business) - how much time would you spend educating? Wouldn't you rather just be selling and making money?
That is most definitely what everyone should start calling it.
just had to stop and say that forbes.com's layout is hilariously awful. the content starts after 500px.