skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Only the GPL/LGPL parts are available, but the Honeycomb code isn't viewed as ready for public consumption yet. My guess is that we'll finally see the code when Ice Cream Sandwich rolls out.
Show of hands would be quicker.
I don't think it's anything technical, just the same old tactics they use against any other criminal organization.

Catch a weak link, offer them a deal in exchange for information that leads to the conviction of someone higher up in the organization, repeat until you make it to the top.
People often recommend Douglas Crockford's "Javascript, the Good Parts" and "Eloquent Javascript," by Marijn Haverbeke. The source code of interesting libraries like jQuery can be very illuminating as well.
This guy is a professor I would have loved to have for one of my English classes. His positive attitude and willingness to adapt and work hard for his students is just remarkable and rarely seen in a college classroom.

By the way, this is a great solution to the much-discussed (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2774254) problem of effectively dealing with plagiarism: imagine if it were expected, as part of your class, that you engaged your professor via email while writing assignments. There would be no way to plagiarize, because the professor would have direct insight into each part of your writing process as he saw bits of your essay fall into place. Imagine all the students that could be guided to correctly cite and re-use sources if their professor had just headed it off at the pass instead of running it through TurnItIn and groaning at the fallout. I couldn't agree more with the benefits of this dynamic, more interactive teaching method for writing.

It also makes me wonder if he would be interested in having students share their works-in-progress via Google Docs--he would be able to essentially peer over their shoulder as they type and comment. Or would that be going too far?
Fox challenges cord-cutters by sticking TV shows behind paywall
Yeah, I agree. Karma shouldn't be an indicator of how often one visits HN, it's merely an indicator of how much one participates in the HN community.

For me, getting karma is not desirable at all. What's the point of it? I only comment, when I think I have something useful to say, which is not often the case. I never felt the urge to post just so that my karma increases. I think, this really reflects the good design of this whole system by pg.
Just added to the Wish List. Thanks!
You were right to post it -- it's a new blog post announcing the non-beta release and benchmarks.
Gig.U Universities bringing high speed networks to their communities
Hacking Together My First Video Advert
Interesting. So, only 522 with over 2000 karma?
Just be glad you didn't pick a Motorola Milestone.
http://www.trademarkia.com/automagically-77390897.html
http://www.mytrademarkia.com/automagically-77870578.html
http://socialmedia.trademarkia.com/automagically-77646827.ht...
http://electronics.zibb.com/trademark/automagically/30404525
Software Craftsmanship is often disastrous in Computer Science departments, never mind other fields.

I remember getting a C program from one of the biggest names in both undergrad CS education and machine learning and finding it wouldn't run on 32 bit machines because it had a static array that consumed 4 GB.

Even in computer science, the product is papers, not working software, and the situation is worse in other fields.

As someone who had an academic background, I think going from "pictures of cats" to "math and science" is like going from the frying pan to the fire. Entry level positions in the math and science Juggernaut pay from 2-5x less what a junior or senior person in the social media Juggernaut gets. You can sink anywhere from 5-10 years into getting a PhD, and then you'll find that there are just enough new jobs for the children of yesterday's professors who weren't totally destroyed by their upbringing and that they've got an insurmountable advantage in the game of musical chairs.

Science and Math is a system that uses up young people, especially men, the same way that the racing industry uses thoroughbred horses. There's no realistic career path for 95% of the people who get involved... other than working on "pictures of cats" or whatever it is that pays.
all trademarks for Automagically. dating back to 2007.
There is no war on tech talent.

Or better to say, in Bay Area, there is a war to find an engineer with 15+ year experience for 80K/year. But if you pay a market price (meaning match what other companies pay), there will be no problem finding an engineer. Especially for startups. But if startup offers 80K/year and corporation X offers 120K/year + bonuses, ... you know

Maybe I'm outcast but I was told (and I believe it) that for a startup to get a good team it needs to pay market rate + stock options.
I've always been impressed with how honest their data seems to be on diseases. They made it very clear up front that it's all trial-and-error and they're doing the best they can with the data they have, and that advances are made all the time.

I doubt I would ever have paid full price for the service, but I got in during a sale and have been quite pleased for the money.
Colleges Join Project for Faster Computer Networks
Press releases always quote the total sector bandwidth, and at long range there tend to be a lot of customers per sector. Due to the narrow channels and good propagation, 700 MHz white spaces may end up being worse than 2.4 GHz.
Is Cloud Print Going to be Held Off on Chrome OS?
Is he trying to position himself as a pundit? Is he telling people to follow his G+ account? Or is he simply posting stuff he finds interesting? If he's actively trying to position himself as a voice for the industry, that's different. If he's just posting stuff and people happen to read it, then I think he's done thing inappropriate.

I also still find it bizarre that some people seem to believe that "sexy" implies "sexism" when it relates to women. Why is it that every time an attractive woman is shown, a small but loud group calls it sexism? Why are women not allowed to be sexy without it somehow oppressing them? No one screams "sexism" when men are portrayed as sexy. It's not sexism if a woman takes a photo with an attractive man. Why can't women be sexy?
Brings back memories of programming QBasic in the MS-DOS shell on Windows 98. Ah, those were the days.
Certainly it's not easy, but aren't most of these companies all about "putting in the hard work" and whatever other cliches you can come up with? "We're gonna change the world!" (as long as I don't have to change my ZIP code, or get a different cell phone provider, and as long as you uproot your entire family, move across the country and come work for my fifth startup).

I totally understand it's not an easy thing to do, but many things in life that are worth doing aren't easy.
It always grates on my nerves when someone that young, seventeen, is referred to as a "man".

I suppose teenagers enjoy more freedom in Europe, maybe it's more appropriate there.
PSA: There's still a ton of excellent, obscure music on CD that hasn't reached the cloud. Get ripping your local libraries and dollar bins while you still can.

(Incidentally, the optical drive in my last machine, a Macbook, was as good as useless. It failed multiple times because of the flex in the plastic case. So much for impeccable Apple design standards.)
I know that they have taken some heat for security issues of late, but, frankly, I love this company and their product and I am happy to see them doing well.

The magic of Dropbox is that it strikes just the right balance between simplicity and power.

When my mother deleted a book that she had been writing for almost a year (and its backup), I was able to show her how to retrieve deleted documents from Dropbox. It was incredible.

Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well Dropbox is magic to most of the people that I have introduced it to.

I know that there are other solutions out there that do similar things to what they do, but I have never really been able to find one that just clicks with so many people regardless of technical ability.
http://www.dotkam.com/2011/07/06/noram-db-if-it-does-not-fit...

I agree PR and lots of BUZZ makes it really difficult to choose the right DB.

My latest obsession is Riak => Basho is VERY honest, and quick in helping you out and telling where and how Riak can help you, and most importantly what would NOT be a good fit for Riak. ( I am not working for them :)

/Anatoly
The Android OS Comparison Chart [Infographic] | Tech18
So the Blu-Ray market will pretty much be just slightly larger than the Laserdisc market was. I say it will be slightly larger because in the case of LDs, only highly affluent home theater geeks could afford to buy the players and the discs, whereas BD is priced much more competitively.

EDIT:
We can also include everyone that doesn't have access to high speed broadband as candidates for BD, so the potential market isn't quite as grim as I originally surmised. Given the woeful state of broadband expansion in the U.S., there's probably a pretty good market for optical discs for the next 15 years at least.
if I were tasked with catching these guys, I would:

* setup numerous honeypot open proxies and tor gateways

* work with journalists to have all emails and communications forwarded

* isolate ddos clients and reverse-engineer command and control. surprisingly many of these trojans are poorly written and have security holes themselves

* setup numerous fake twitter profiles and provoking them into responses - things like posting images, replying, etc.

* setup fake hacker groups. stage defacements etc. in order to get in touch with them

* I would write a system that tracks and stores every bit of communication they make and plot out their social communication graphs and when they are talking, who to, etc.

* ask ISP's or proxy providers to grep for traffic patterns.

* get user-agent info from twitter, or provoke them into visiting a link, and possibly load malware. no browser is really safe in a targetted attack

* word/speech tracing. this is why 1337 5p34k was invented, so you can not be traced via your vocab/grammar/spelling/phrases etc. it doesn't take a large sample to start narrowing it down

probably more - haven't really thought about it, but when i did see that they started using twitter I gave them 3-4 months, tops.
“Positronic Net is an attempt to reduce the amount of boilerplate coding required for Android programming to just connect framework components together.”

Sounds like exactly what I've been waiting for. Definitely time to learn Scala.
I generally put his articles firmly into the "derp" category. And before we say "hey, we all have to be polite here on HN," his articles consistently take shots at anyone and everyone he disagrees with in a disrespectful manner. Terms like "knuckle-dragger", "pseudo-scientific slime", "Mr. Smarter-than-thou", "flowering of this idiocy", all reek with contempt of his straw-man opponents.

To address this particular article: the writing is all over the place. First paragraph: he doesn't like science when it's a "club to beat up people you simply disagree with." Well, good, reproducible scientific results can indeed be used as a "club" to beat up ideas that are wrong. It's one of the best uses of science. Now my assumption (from reading further) is he hates bad science. Which I actually agree with, but that is not stated up front.

From the fourth paragraph. "...science is the beautiful application of reason and logic that slowly and inexorably moves from ignorance to truth." The next paragraph says "Bullshit." What's bullshit about it? That is indeed how good science should work.

Then he goes on to talk about scientists who speculate outside either their area of expertise, or outside scientifically produced results.

Later he says "It needs to be clear when reporting medical studies what types of methods were used...". Here's the deal: it is clear. It's clear in reputable scientific journals. Read by scientists that can actually make sense of that kind of information. And even then, as a reader, you have to use critical thought to mentally junk studies that don't follow appropriate methods. Reading the most reputable peer-reviewed journals is a start, but you can't shut your brain off while reading even those.

If he's talking about newspaper reporting about science, yes, it's frequently wrong, because it's written by non-scientists. As an exercise, read a regular newspaper article about anything you have deep knowledge in. I'll bet you find many problems with it based on the lack of understanding of the reporter.

In his last paragraph, his conclusion seems to be that scientists should do good science, and not bad science. Again, this is what peer-reviewed journals contribute greatly to. It's not a "totally new way of doing things". Not even close.
After we solve all of the hard problems in the world, can we go back to looking at cat pictures?
As somebody who works in the industry, I'm hardly surprised by this, although ~99% is pretty crazy. There seems to be a much higher percentage of snake oil/pretend vs. real deal in security than other industries. There are some really, really smart people, and then there's this vast horde of people who've remembered a list of buzzwords and not much else. I guess that's partly because it's so easy to get away with not producing any actual results since they are so hard to quantify--at least when kids with Metasploit and Sqlmap aren't out to get you :)
OMG, finally someone that see's the bigger picture!!!
Or perhaps you're a lemming who follows the pack? Not saying everyone who moves out there is, but judging someone's character by their ability to change geography in the same country isn't a great idea.
How do you check for domain availability?
We live in a capitalistic society. I'd like to think that means IF !STOLEN THEN PAID and its contrapositive IF !PAID THEN STOLEN. Patents say IF USED THEN STOLEN. Companies tend to license these patents into their capitalistic form for many reasons, but the fact that they have a decision in the matter allows for monopolistic behavior.

I believe all patents should come with a required provision that lists a fair market value for licensing it which anyone can use, thus IF !STOLEN THEN PAID. In turn, this forces the USPTO to actually quantify (to some degree of error) the "useful" requirement of a patent and, by small extension, if it is "statutory" (product or productizable) and "nonobvious" (existing competition?). I think it also forces the requestor to give some detail on the intention of the patent rather than making an arbitrary claim to an underlying concept.

It's all about the money; they need to stop pretending and judge it that way. As it reads now, the current patent system was a premature optimization which planned for a society out of Star Trek instead of, well, lets not go there today.
Alleged Anonymous Members Arrested: This Week in Hacking
>The solution is that intellectual property and government granted monopolies are bad and should not be the law. They exist on shaky ground in that we assume that they produce more good than harm -- not a well grounded assumption imho.

Except those laws are what allows the entire software industry(both closed source and FOSS). Without the protections of IP, none of the copyleft licenses(either Apache or GPL) have any power. Neither does any closed source license.

So no, intellectual property by itself isn't bad. It's absolutely required.

EDIT: Not sure why this is downvoted. The GPL itself relies on copyright powers to have any force. Remove copyright, the GPL loses all it's power. Any software license becomes useless, too.
He isn't saying that, but it would be the result of his suggestion. It would be hugely lopsided in favor entities with lots of money, since the value of your invention to you (but not to potential infringers) is bounded by your cash on hand. The cost of getting a patent is already a hardship on non-corporate inventors. They won't be able to afford a lot on top of that — the ROI would just not be there. If Joe Inventor patents his technique for creating geese that lay golden eggs but can only afford to pay $5000 on top of the filing fees, then I can rip it off and end up having to pay him fractional pennies out of every dollar I make off my infringement.
How Google Times Product Launches for Maximum Damage
I'm a single founder and disagree with the other posts here that this is unsalvageable. But first things first, remember that it isn't odd for employees to own around 10% of the business IN AGGREGATE after dilution with senior non-founders taking up to 2%. Double that number if there are no outside investors, and do the math based on whatever your company is worth. Then divide by four to factor in vesting....

If those numbers don't make you happy, the problem is that your company isn't valued at the speculative 5-10 million that would make what you are asking for reasonable. Assuming the business makes 100k a year, we can guesstimate you want at least 10% of the value of the company for a single year's work. That might be fair or it might not be, but it's clearly disproportionate given the time and risk the others have already put in.

Where does this leave you? In my opinion as a business owner, the best way to get around this is NOT to haggle over the valuation of the company because you have no control over it and neither do your partners. By all means throw the ball in their court and see what they offer, but whatever they come back with remember that you can probably do better by linking your ownership to growth and the amount of new revenue you drive. This will be easier for them to agree to since they'll only give up more ownership if the company performs better thanks to your work. And assuming your work makes the company money - you will be able to push your stake in the business much higher than you would get otherwise as an employee, possibly even up to founder levels.
I own a couple of Plextor IDE drives still for this purpose. When it comes to ripping music, older is often better!

For any other uses though, I haven't needed a CD drive in the last year. It would have been useful when I installed Windows, merely because it's harder to lose than a USB memory stick!
Welcome to the world.
(yes, believe it or not, there actually is something outside middle America)
I'd like to quote one of my favorite songs:

"You could not feel sadness if you've never tasted joy; that's the curse of humans - born in passion you destroy"

While I find the concept of cryonics fascinating, and feel the science should be researched more, I also feel death is important. Not only is it a natural part of life, but it's also the catalyst that enables enjoyment. I'd be extremely apathetic towards everything if I knew I'd live forever. And then, there comes the sociological problems associated with resurrecting the dead.

Edit: Some people seem to have misunderstood: My comments about living forever is in direct reference to what's stated in the article, not what's realistic.
So, you need an internal drive for ripping? External drives are where it’s at and Apple will gladly allow you to use them. (You can get one for the low, low price of $20 if you really want to.)
You should be using words that more accurately describe the functionality your code provides, anyway.
All Is Not Lost
This is my theory as to why we Australians are stereotypically addicted to travel.
Snitching. It really isn't that hard to remain anonymous, as you said. But if you're spending hundreds of hours working on Ops with a small team, you learn to trust them and you slip up and share personal information. When somebody slips up, the cops threaten to drop the hammer unless they give up the rest. A 17 year old kid isn't going to risk his whole life for somebody he's never even met, so he snitches.

LulzSec isn't anything new, this kind of hacking has been going on since the 80s - they've just taken a different approach with the media. And snitching is always how hacker groups fall.

This is essentially how all law enforcement investigations work, actually. Drugs, hacking, graffiti, white collar crime, whatever. Get a good snitch and you'll get the whole organization eventually.
Great to hear. I'm glad to know Dropbox is here to stay.

Just remember to keep the service simple. Don't fall into the feature pit!
This paper should be published in the Journal In Support Of The Null Hypothesis. It's just a valid a conclusion and good job by 23andme. I am a customer and I will continue to be a customer of theirs for the foreseeable future.
> In the early stages of a company, a single superstar hire can mean the difference between success and failure

Shel Kaphan, the brilliant engineer who built Amazon.com

"The nature of the technical challenge was much more straightforward than many other things that I had done in the past. It wasn’t something where we had to work for years and then find out if the thing we were building would actually work or if anybody would care.

It had a lot of pieces, some of which were not easy. Like constructing a catalog out of a lot of non-authoritative sources, none of which was designed to be easily built into a database. At that point, there wasn’t anything like Ruby on Rails or anything where you could slap together a Web site with some dynamic behavior in 10 minutes."

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl...
Seems like it's not. In the same thread, a googler mentions it's done completely client side.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4912092/using-html5-canva...
Last year, my optical drive had gone bad, but I never realized until I had to rip a CD. Apple gave me a new Macbook Pro cause of the bad drive, but that is one of only three times in the last 2 years that I have tried using an optical drive (the other two were to load sample libraries)

I doubt I am going to miss one if they get rid of it, but I know others who would.
Scheme Android example project
Looking at the supported browsers on http://www.google.com/tools/feedback/intl/en/index.html and some of the clearer bugs in their screenshots (enlarge the picture, check out for example text-underlining and compare with FF/Chrome), combined with what ElliottZ mentioned in this Twitter message https://twitter.com/#!/ElliottZ/status/89520809147772929, I could with quite high certainty say that they have a very similar approach to doing this. Having worked with this for some time already, I can see why they for example have not supported Opera, although the problem (presumably the reason they don't) can easily be fixed with wrapping text in temporary nodes for example. One major advantage they have, which works for their favor is that they use the script on pages they control, where as my approach is trying to get this working on any page, regardless of who created it with as bad CSS/HTML as they did. If you aren't gonna be using z-index positioning, no letter-spacing, no CSS3 properties, no HTML5 form elements etc. it can be very easy to make matching screenshot to the page.

For IE<9 the Flash option won't have to be the only option either, a server could be rendering the elements gathered from the users browser (in other words a canvas proxy for the canvas renderer).

In terms of my script, the aim is to try and get the compatibility down to FF3, IE6 (with non-canvas support through flashcanvas or server canvas), Opera (haven't looked much yet how old version would be able to support it), and Chrome.
One point frequently missed by people mocking blu-ray is that a lot of people are using it now pretty much by accident. I have a PS3 for playing games, and at a later date I got a LoveFilm subscription (it's like Netflix but British and rubbish). Now, if I want to watch a movie, it doesn't cost me a penny extra to watch the blu-ray. Do I want high def /for free/? Hell yes, I do! So I think Blu Ray will be sticking around.

However, on the "will the PC crowd miss it?" front - do I need a Bluray player? Yup! Do I need a Bluray player in my netbook, laptop, or desktop computer? Nope!