skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't disagree entirely, women-only stuff usually pisses me off as well - I didn't mean to defend only one gender, I meant to imply that discrimination sucks either way. Just yesterday, Cory Doctorow deleted my comment on BoingBoing because I implied that this comic (http://boingboing.net/2011/07/24/sexism-flamewars-explained-...) is stupid and inflammatory.

That said, there are milder scenarios for discrimination and there are severe ones. This one is severe in its stupidity.
Shoes For A Winter Wedding
Definitely agree it's impossible to say. :)

Why do you think the tablet would become a dumb display? It's hard for me to imagine there being much cost savings there - you could remove some smarts but you'd have to replace them with almost-equivalent-costing smarts because you still have to handle networking, presentation of remotely-generated video and audio, receiving and transmitting user inputs, etc. Guess you could save a bit on flash storage, too. But compared to the extra latency, added dependence, etc, it doesn't seem a win to me at all.
Except the "webtop" mode is garbage.
Then perhaps we agree at the margins. It all depends on what you consider to be a 'slight change' in the model. We also probably disagree slightly on what businesses you are willing to claim as startups. Is a new restaurant a startup? How about a consignment store? A dev consulting shop?

Even in the most commoditized industries with extreme competition, there is often a built in profit margin that is essentially accepted by the businesses in that industry, because it would be mutually destructive for it disappear entirely.

I'd wager that most of the small business economic activity in the US comes from sole proprietors repeating business models verbatim and collecting that additional margin above and beyond their built in salary expense.
It is, at the very least, more expensive.
Really? Eloquent JavaScript is the only (concise) JS fundamentals book I can think of- there seems to be a surplus of web programming cookbooks and AJAX guides.
Thanks, it makes perfect sense and is pretty much why I virtually never use mocks. In fact, my personal philosophy is at odds with most advice I have seen around unit testing, in that I try to avoid the use of even stubs wherever possible. In other words, I try to make my unit tests as much like integration tests as possible. Obvious exceptions are things like third-party APIs, which must be stubbed, but everything else I try to get close to production code.
JavaScript for Rubyists
Are you seriously telling me that you've never seen a white man call another white man "a cunt" in a sporting situation? I've observed trash talking in white on white games. I've observed it on Indian on Indian games, in German vs Dutch games, in Senegalese vs Cote d'Ivoirian games.

Why say you've never played at the Harvard Club? I'm assuming that's some bastion of white male privilege. Is that the only place where white males play?

People who trash talk during gaming situations are often regarded as immature, juvenile dicks. If you're on a basketball court and you call me a cunt, I'm going to think you're a juvenile, immature, dick. If a black man calls me a cunt, I'm going to think he's a juvenile immature dick.

Why is this so hard to understand for you?
Veteran developer Steve Lacey (Google, Microsoft) Killed in Auto Accident
The Speed of Social Media
Create a 3D block with CSS3
I do this on FB by removing the vowels in my last name. It is clearly obvious to anyone who I am once they see my profile/listing, but searching my name will not bring it up.
Lymbix Reads Between The Lines To Sense Emotion
Aw, this was physically painful to skim.

What you really want for time-series data is a column db such as cassandra (or vertica etc.), perhaps HBase, perhaps a RDBMS, or perhaps a plain old log-file.

What you most definitely don't want is Microsoft Access or MongoDB.
Thinking about it, MS Access might still work to a degree.
Infographic Visualizes The Greenhouse Gas Emissions of 20 Popular Proteins
The huge area of glass enclosed space that needs to spread out from around the tower.
While this is kind of review for somebody whom does work with all the hardware more than actual dev work:

"When you automate something once, it not only greatly increases execution speed the second and third time around, it reduces the chance of failure, of missing that one important step."
...let's not forget that to any whom take over your job after you, you can say: 'And we have this script I hacked up to automate that process..' and you'll look like a rockstar.
The article says he was renting them. It doesn't specify the means of possession, like a hundred thousand little pockets on the inside of his jacket, a burly aluminum case handcuffed to his wrist, or a peddler's cart.
I've been (mostly) happy without my optical drive on my netbook for a while now. It's limited my operating system options, but I haven't really needed it aside from that. Most software I use (even games), does not require a CD anymore. It's just not as necessary. And when it is, you can buy an external cd drive for around $100
I created a plugin for this type of thing a while back too:

http://plugins.jquery.com/project/available
This just looks so cool. I'm sure this would be very useful on giant legacy codebases where the author is long gone but the bugs remain, and I just like the idea of using ai techniques to refactor code. Seems all futuristic and stuff ;)
My example is my own company, slicehost. I don't believe that we needed to find and/or prove the business model. It was a simple hosting model, we just thought we could do it more efficiently. Granted along the way new models arose from the automation inherent to the efficiency, but we already had profitability and traction at that point, it wasn't a requisite to 'making it'.

Now is efficiency gain (or conversely quality improvement) alone enough to make it qualify as a brand new business model? I'd argue that it is not.

My anecdotal support for my theory here is that we felt initially that we were taking very little risk in starting the business. It was clear and obvious to us that we could survive on the implied margins of other providers and acquiring customers in hosting at that point in time was relatively non-competitive.
Even with Launchpad, I still find myself defaulting to Spotlight to find/execute my apps.
Very good point, thanks
Ask HN: Why does Excel suck on a Mac (and can it be improved)?
Can somebody please tell me why Excel for the Mac is so inferior to the PC version? I get the spinning wheel for operations that take seconds on a PC. And does anybody have any suggestions to speed things up and/or improve performance?
Their research is certainly cool and novel. On the surface, this is a straight-forward application of genetic programming (evolving abstract syntax trees):

1. Take function which fails some test case(s)

2. Parse AST

3. Find a bunch of other lines of code in the program and use those as possible mutations

4. Evolve until test performance is improved

The trick is #3. They are going on the hypothesis that the solution to bugs are often found in other parts of a program. For instance, you pass in a variable and forget to check for it being null. It's likely that you have a check for that somewhere else in the program, and if so, then you can add that (templated) line of code into your buggy function and it will now pass that test case.

It's certainly not a panacea, but it does work remarkably well for many bug cases.
I hadnt thought about that one but it sounds like a really good idea. I might combine it with something like exclusive offers for top submitters, I'm sure some of the venues would go for it in turn for the advertising.
I dunno--I have a keyboard dock at home. I don't bring a keyboard around with me, but I can put the iPad into it to sit down and do a bit of typing. (I like it for working on my book, precisely for the reasons that the author dislikes it: I can't get distracted!)
Hopefully this question will still find an answer even though this article has fallen off the front page:

Is there a company structure, or is it possible to design one, that would allow a startup to operate free from the threat of patent trolls? What comes to mind is a network of shell holding companies that is used to hide ownership of copyright IP - Charles Stross describes this in the first part of Accelerando. Simply, it may have reached a point where it is safer for startups to operate as a subsidiary of a foreign company not subject to U.S. patent law.
I'm having lots of thoughts about climates within the rings.

I'd expect the temperature ranges to change at different distances frmo the centre. It may be that you could do agriculture at some points underneath.

On the other hand, it's likely that for best efficiency they'll need to create as much momentum as possible from the device.

But - the venturi effect will be significant underneath and they might need to shape the land in sections under the rings. Is it possible you could hide crops within glass casings that improve that effect?

Will water vapour collect at any point in particular?

I'm considering a science fiction plot based around people who live in housing built around energy towers like this.

When this is built, I'd be interested to do a roadtrip to see it.
Airbnb Raises $112 Million to Take Its Marketplace For Places Global
But then it wouldn't be just "like having Brad whispering in your ear when you pitch VCs," as one Amz customer revr said.
Why choose something as inefficient at reading the web as a notebook? The iPad is far better suited for that.

There are tradeoffs involved in everything. Laptops, Desktops, Tablets, Smartphones, everything has its strengths and weaknesses. I think it is nice to see how many things are possible with each technological genre.
We have documentation about the names policy for Google Profiles: http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?answer=...

Your #2 and #3 points seem to assume that if your profile name violates the policy, your Gmail access is suspended, but that's not true. If your profile is suspended for not having a real/common name, that only affects services that use your profile (Google+/Buzz/+1). It doesn't affect other services like Gmail, Blogger, Docs, or Calendar that don't use your profile. So you can continue to use Gmail even if you can't use Google+.

Finally, even though Gmail will work even if you can't use Google+, there is recourse to appeal a name suspension. Here's the url to use for an appeal: http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/request.py?hl=en&...
Are we racing from the physical too quickly?
With the web and technology moving so quickly, I wonder if we are moving away from the physical to the digital too quickly.
Can somebody explain the problem with allowing people to choose their own names? They claim it is to foster "an environment." What kind of environment? Surely not an honest one, since using real names doesn't cause people to act honestly.

Forcing real names fosters an environment of rigidity and conformity. But I guess people like that about FB and Google+. At least MySpace allowed you to pick your colors.

The Internet could be it's own place, it's own unique environment, but instead people like FB or Google+ want some poor attempt at a one-to-one mapping of the real world.
fastmail.fm?
For general/anonymous discussion, it might not be a big deal, but if you want to talk about one of your characters, then you're still associating the character with your own name.
Steve Lacey passes away
Super Soldier
Facinating. If only a few of these programs yield results the implications are staggering.
I guess. What do you expect? They're people just like everyone else. This isn't one of those "1,001 crimes you can commit in the morning while making orange juice" things from Reason magazine. Aaron went way out of his way to expose himself to this situation. It's possible that where you see an Internet folk hero, the DoJ sees someone bent on forcibly publishing every closed database pertaining to the public interest, laws be damned.†

Let me add something else that I think some other HN people may be familiar with:

My Confirmation sponsor is/was a criminal court judge (friend of the family). Very nice guy. Spectacularly nice guy. I babysat his kids once. I've seen him maybe twice in the past ten years, but I'd be surprised if he didn't remember the names of my kids. When I was younger, we saw him all the time. Every weekend. My dad played in the church folk group with him.

I can't remember the particulars, it may have been 4th of July firecrackers (illegal in Chicago) or it may have been shaving cream on Halloween, but either way he caught me and some friends doing something technically illegal. It was NOT. OK. I remember the legality of the incident being taken VERY. SERIOUSLY. Entirely different demeanor. I've seen the same thing with friends' cop dads.

I think people on HN don't fully appreciate the extent to which prosecutors and judges take the law seriously. They've dedicated their life to it. Our country is ruled by laws.

There are definitely times when the law is wrong, or when its diligent enforcement doesn't ultimately serve the social good. This may very well be one of them. But I think it's a very bad idea to build a worldview around the notion that the criminal justice system is going to casually look past the law. The law is a big deal.

† I don't know Aaron Swartz personally and am not asserting any of this to be true.

†† To your later edit: there's no statute against "public example making". If you don't want to be an example, avoid felonies. That's going to get me downvoted, so can we assume good faith and accept this new emoticon I just made up: :#> as shorthand for "I don't really think the person we're talking about is culpable for a felony based on the information we currently have"? :#>! :#>! :#>!
Burger King was started even though there was already McDonald's...think of it as a validation of your idea and find a way to make yours better
On the contrary, I remember a quote from some physicist before LHC went live saying something like "if the LHC finds nothing that we've been predicting that will be a more incredible find (than proving the Higgs or Graviton), because that means we're completely wrong".

The LHC not finding particles in the areas we're predicting is simply telling us that our predictions were wrong. Time will tell, the LHC is still relatively new and is producing a metric ton of data. What we find in the next few years will radically change our understanding of the cosmos, I'm sure.
New signs point to Diablo 3 release date
The Absurdity Of Comparing Copying To Stealing
Could you expound upon that? Except for my understanding that it uses tethering bytes instead of phone bytes, I thought that they webtop mode would be sufficiently cool to be useful for emailing, more verbose texting, some web-browsing and ssh sessions.

Is it really that bad?
I suppose that's a temporal difference...you had it, then you ate it. It appears that both things are possible, given sufficient duration and stomach.
Am I more likely to succeed by reading this book and participating more directly in my negotiations, or by spending more time on my work and hiring a lawyer with a reputation for understanding these negotiations?
I think there is very little stopping us. For consumption of information, there is nothing quite like a tablet. However it is a little different for productivity. I can't imagine coding or doing sys admin on a tablet. I'm on a tablet now :)
Followup: I received the following error on 7/25.

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.

Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:

devnull@example.com

Message will be retried for 2 more day(s)

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[example.com (1): Connection timed out]
On being a woman and a non-physicist at CERN
Boot to Gecko: building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web
I expect Matrox would be up for building it since they already have an established base for video switching.

However, I've always suspected that the iMac is the real successor to the Cinema Display line: Thunderbolt pass-through, internal video card. It'd take some engineering, but if anyone could do it, Apple could.

Plus, Apple's always interested in consolidating product lines with value-adds.
You dont have to down vote sombody if he had asked a silly question. You could juzz explain it the way you did.

Assumption made here is people will report and provide review comments. if they (who want to do illigal stuff) select places to get one room and behave normally and decently in public, nobody will ever report anything. I am not saying it will be a widespread practice, but all it takes is one dead fish to dirt the pond.

And nobody answered the first part of my question. ie the factors that promted or inspired PG to make that remark when he visited them.
"Grandparent absolutely intends his insult, in proximity to his argument, to undermine his disputant's credibility."

I don't think that that is clear at all. In fact, his derision reads more like a thesis statement to me: "X is a curmudgeon. Why? Well, because of statements like Y."
"these guys are sons of wealth, I can't imagine they've ever known serious privation in their lives, and they're trying to squeeze still more money from someone who, much as I dislike him, earned it by working his ass off."

True, but with a few asterisks.

First: Zuckerberg himself didn't exactly go hungry as a kid. AFAIK, he came from a fairly well to do -- probably upper middle class, though certainly not Winklevoss-class -- background.

The class angle certainly makes unsympathetic villains of the Winklevosses, but their actions -- not our best guesses at their upbringing -- are the real reasons to revile them.
My claim is pedantic, but it's not silly. I'm not a fan of either ad hominem or garden-variety insults, as I hope my comment history will demonstrate, but I do think it's worth drawing the distinction on principle.
In Britain your real name is the name you choose to use for every-day purposes. The state just follows your choice of name.
depends on your usage. The rest of the toolchain is all python, numpy, scipy, matplotlib especially.

This might be poorly titled: it's not just about the storage as it is about the aggregation of disparate sensor data into coherent, continuous data streams.
It's a question of incentives. The costs of sending 100 people up instead of the normal crew of 7 and a lot of cargo on a shuttle mission would have been minimal. However, there was no real point to sending that many people into space at the same time and the risk from failure would have been insane.

So if there was some need for thousands of people to be sent into space per year then NASA could design and operate a fairly low cost per launch system. However, once they started operating highly capable but delicate system added to the fact there was little value in sending more than a token number of people into space in a given year then costs are going to spiral out of control even if the desgin was reasonable.

PS: I have even heard the argument that NASA benefited from the amount of spectacle involved in the shuttle program. If they had built something that looked and operated like a 747 nobody would have cared but build something that takes thousands of controlled explosions and then sit’s on a huge ball of fire into space and wow you must be doing something important.
Since you like name-dropping credentials in relevant areas, I do minimal research in PL and I can say that PL/I is objectively far, far worse than C/C++. Why? Well, C and C++ both have huge flaws. Huge flaws -- no one who has ever programmed anything nontrivial in these languages would argue otherwise. So why are they better than PL/I?

PL/I has just as many flaws, if not more. Let's look at some of them.

1. PL/I compilers are awful. The number of people working on PL/I is a fraction of the people working on C/C++. C/C++ are getting faster, more correct, and more succinct every day. One of the most promising techniques for PL/I is compiling it into C and then calling gcc because PL/I is so bad. (And if you don't think build times are a factor in compiler construction you are sorely mistaken).

2. No one knows PL/I. This one's pretty easy. PL/I is write once, read once. C++ is write once, read many.

3. PL/I provides no compensation for its flaws by providing higher-level transformations and PL features (e.g. true higher-order functions, strong type safety, garbage collection). The cost of switching to PL/I is actually made worse by the fact that PL/I is at best slightly better to program in than C++.

4. PL/I build tools and deployment tools suck. Who cares if you can run it in a hundred processors on a mainframe? How is that useful in scaling to millions of people every second?

5. Where's the support for interoperability with other languages? C++ can be used with other languages through well-known and well-maintained paths. PL/I has no support.

Basically, you may have a solid theoretical background but your practical experience in modern PL engineering is sorely limited.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/franchise
Festo is well known in the industry for making very elegant and graceful demos like that:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_citFkSNtk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhfFnEQM1aU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zih1lB5-GZg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG82USg5mtE
Jenkins Build Pipeline Example
The ones whose parents didn't give them enough attention so they have to spend their days testing the boundaries of internet communities and then throwing a fit because their wingding character isn't supported.
> the client would declare all locks upfront

But if the client crashes after acquiring the locks, wouldn't your system be deadlocked?
Can we change the title? This is opinion presented as fact.
I think people on HN don't fully appreciate the extent to which prosecutors and judges take the law seriously.

On the other hand, a relative is a DA. She has explained how around the holidays, she collaborates with the prosecutor to ram cases through the system or slap people on the wrist and send them home. This way all the noble guardians of the law can take an extra few weeks off between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Hrm, good question.

I guess I just don't see us using 10 discrete computers to interact with the cloud. I don't see us having a TV computer, a tablet computer, a smartphone, a desktop, an office machine -- I see us having one computer (with a secure link to the cloud) that then interfaces with our surroundings.

I agree, the cost difference wouldn't be that significant between a normal tablet and a dumb tablet, but I don't think it will come down to costs. It will come down to security, flexibility, customizability...
Google+ Venn Diagrams
Help me understand this. In your example, how would this malicious string be any more worrisome with the console installed than without it? I realize you could trigger the console to be displayed by crafting a URL, but it would be displayed in my browser (and thus, localhost) as the consumer of your URL, correct? It'd be one thing if this gem caused any arbitrary query string to be executed as ruby code, but I don't believe it does. So help me understand the way you could exploit this?

I'm not doubting you...I'd simply like to understand. Thanks.
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Ask HN: QRganize - Your QR code library.
Sign up page: http://qrganize.com

QRganize is an app for the iPhone that allows you to scan QR codes and organize them into categories of interest.

Tackling a problematic QR code user experience by enhancing productivity and convenience.

Any feedback is much appreciated!