skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Software Predicted Risk in California West Nile Virus Epidemic
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2875797

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2875883

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876232

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2876722
Awesome app. Can I get in contact with you - i'd really like to talk about what you are doing with QR codes in more detail. If you get a moment - please drop me an email: wphipps78@gmail.com
Thomas Hawk has a long history of enthusiasm and rage; if his normal pattern holds expect to see him lambasting Google for not adding his pet (absolutely essential) feature in six months or so.

This latest enthusiasm has me puzzled though. I mean Google+ looks like it's great for sharing photos of limited interest that aren't necessarily public. But it doesn't strike me as a good place to present your art to the world.

I'm surprised that no one is selling turnkey photosharing sites that work off an Amazon backend and that operators can skin with their own branding and mix and match galleries and slideshow Javascript, and other features.
yes, clearly installing plugins is only barely easier than writing them yourself.

plugins let vim users pick and choose what they want from their editor. I'm not bashing kate; it's just a different way of doing it. (vim user myself, though I used to be a big fan of kate)
Flickr may or may not be dead, but Google+ isn't going to replace it. The great thing about Flickr is the discovery. Flickr has a ton of tools that help you find other photographers (explore, tags, groups) and Google+ has none of these.

Whereas Flickr enables and encourages users to seek out new contacts, it seems to me that the purpose of Google+ is to better facilitate communication between existing contacts. He doesn't mention this in the post, but does anyone know how was the photo walk organized?
> deny there's a problem, fix it, then promote how great your fix is

I can't think of a way this can be construed as an indictment against vocal users, or really, anyone except the developers (or marketing or management from the same organization).
Ever thought about the way they get Fb Likes?
Marketing on the internet -- the social media invest particular -- turns into really complicated in the event you do not have had one of the best programs at your own convenience.
Evidence That ADHD Is a Genetic Disorder
In short, Mr. Hawk is pointing out that Flickr is no longer dedicating resources to untangle a PHP codebase that has taken on a life of its own after seven or eight years whereas Google+ is embracing photo-sharing as an integral part of its new offering. Proof to that is that I have Brian Rose in my circles right from the beginning and I had no clue who he was. A photo-walk with the Facebook team? Can anyone even tell me who's on the Facebook photo team? Flickr?

Flickr will not be rebuilt nor will it be offering incremental feature upgrades of any importance going forward. I'd be surprised if they actually had a dedicated development team versus a group of maintenance developers. The managers are there to make sure I pay for my Pro account once a year and report back to the board that the money is still rolling in.

Google+ pictures to help you share, discover and reinforce social relationships, Flickr to store and organize your crap.

OMG does 500px suck. It's Flickr with a new theme and Stumbleupon integration.
it looks like they ultimately will charge for cloud backup (just like dropbox). As you note, the incremental cost of user is zero, so they don't incur a cost by distributing lots of client applications (unlike dropbox, who incurs costs for free customers that use the <2GB plan).
it will be interesting to see if dropbox responds. I like the model aerofs proposes. I'm a dropbox user but I use it entirely for the file syncing across three machines - I've only once used the web access to my files (i.e. only once used the cloud storage that aerofs would not provide).
If AeroFS has the same usability as dropbox, I would switch to get more storage for free.
Not sure I agree with this. I believe that some people have the ability and desire to objectively analyze an idea without considering the source. In fact, considering the source before the object (in this case, the idea) is an ad hominem logical fallacy.

Also "Only about 1% of proposed ideas are ever accepted.": I would love to see the empirical testing that led to this conclusion.
Tracking Crime in Real Time
Dragonica receiving its biggest content update yet.
who exactly are those Java developers that dismiss current Java options and are waiting for prototype languages? I was honestly unaware that someone important in the community had that opinion, can anyone provide references of those opinions?
Music is distracting when you need to be creative, because your creative brain is effectively distracted by the music. I read about a study[1] recently that presented a programming problem to two groups; one group listened to music while they solved it and the other group had silence. While each group performed acceptably with regards to creating a solution that conformed to the spec, the music-listening group neglected to notice that a series of transformations in the problem spec turned out to result in no changes whatsoever. The group working in silence was able to make the connection and came up with a more efficient program.

[1] Sorry, can't find the source. Will update if I find it.
Just to update this since there was so much interest, I looked into the literature a bit more closely.

First off, at the end of the article it says "Supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health (K24 CA11787901, 1PN2-EY016586, and R01CA120409), the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy, and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (7000-02)." So the funding system was working as expected.

It also looks like people have been trying this for a long time and for various reasons it has actually not worked very well. This paper is noteworthy not because they used the HIV modified T-cells. It's noteworthy because people have been banging their heads against this specific brick wall for a long time and coming up empty-handed. The key innovation appears to be the addition of extra machinery that made the T-cells more potent and also the ability for the T-cells to hang around and expand in the patient.

Also, to give people a sense of how much time something like this takes. This specific viral mechanism was tested by the same group in mice first and published in August of 2009 (open access: http://www.nature.com/mt/journal/v17/n8/full/mt200983a.html)
If you select the learn more link, you can see that they have basically built a P2P distributed files storage system.
Spain orders Google to delete citizens' data from search engine results
Theory is great, BUT if it isn't storing anything, then at least one device/computer with an up-to-date version of the folder must be online at all times. Is that correct? If not how does it sync without storing the data remotely?
What worries me as much as the double standard, i.e. scorning Iran, China etc for their crackdown social networking sites is that the conservatives have the unequivocal support of Labour on this issue.

Not only is there no criticism coming from the political left in the UK, but their obsession with deploying intrusive computer systems during their previous period in office suggests a power like this would have been enacted far more quickly were they still in charge.
MMOGames tries to prove Facebook Groups are the new Forums
I've used earplugs but haven't so much since I got a pair of Bose QC 15 noise-cancelling headphones. They work wonders for blocking out background conversation.

For moderate levels and when I am in a relaxed state to begin with, I can leave the destructive interference feature off. The insulation all by itself is very effective. If the noise is really annoying (or if I'm anxious or tired or something) I can turn on the noise-cancellation. It can feel a little awkward at first and I have a vague sense that it might not be good for my ears, but essentially all external distractions just fade into the background. To interrupt me you basically have to walk up and tap on my desk.
Note that the boxes with the source of the css are editable. Makes much easier to edit out parts and see how they are done.
Chirping birds 'swapping insults like rappers'
I think this depends on who your customers are. For most people that have some knowledge the most annoying rep is someone that tries to answer what they don't know. If I come across these people I wont tell them I know they are full of shit so they probably think I bought their blustering but they aren't having my sale. But if it got you better sales in your experience it seems this is the minority of people.
Xfce 4 vs. GNOME 3
Same here. Nobody believes me when I tell them I can feel others' presence in a visceral way.

I have lesser but still significant problems in cube environments. Would love to get out of the cube farm...and I believe I'd produce a lot more value if I weren't stuck in an uncomfortable place.
The desktop is not dead dammit
I think you will have to wait. It will take some time to get the store back running again, even with the money.
Isn't there a chicken and egg problem for new entrants? There's not a lot of photos to discover if you're building something brand new.
But with what do you disagree? That WebSQL and IndexedDB are competing standards? From the point of view of a web developer, they must be, or we wouldn't have gotten into this situation in the first place.
This is simply incorrect. If you assume you really do have 100 000 "characters" in your alphabet this is correct. However, your alphabet follows a certain pattern: It's English text.

At that point its easier to brute force the individual characters. English text has about 1 to 2 bits of entropy per character. Lets assume 1.5 bits per character on average. That means that to really get 52 bits of entropy for a 3 word phrase you need to have at least 35 characters in your 3 word phrase, or about 12 per word.

Your password is only as strong as the weakest link. In this case English is easier to brute force than your 100 000 character alphabet.

It's simply false to assume that "yes no one three" has 44 bits of entropy because it got randomly selected out of a 2048 word dictionary.
Can someone explain the triangles?

I see what their doing, but why does it make the triangle shape? Shouldn't it just render as a square with different sized rectangular borders?
Scenario, Role Identification & Access  - ISM4Startups
Amazon CEO patents idea to protect dropped phones using mini-airbags
Also, under question 2), one has to double-click the textbox following the "Other" choice, in order to give the textbox focus and gain a working insertion point.

You should give the form a good going over. It starts to, erm, not be confidence inspiring.

Nonetheless, looking forward to having a look. I decided to request a dead-tree version as sometimes having one at hand allows me to pay attention at times I otherwise wouldn't.
Of course, it makes sense to know your tool chain as well. This is a problem that could have been solved in 5 minutes with log rotate. Know your tools!
I think that article invoked Godwin's law.
It's worth mentioning that you can also read the book for free online: http://www.ericsink.com/vcbe/index.html

Take a look and decide if it's something you like to have in paper form.
Short Film of a Dying Dragonfly
According to the linked Haaretz post:

Biber, 89, discovered on Sunday that in the first wave of violence this week in England, his barbershop just off the high street in Tottenham, north London, was also broken into and looted. But it didn't change a thing: On Monday morning, as has been the case every Monday for the last 41 years, he was back in the tiny shop, giving haircuts and shaving his regular clients, despite the rioters having stolen chairs and a valuable hairdryer.
Supersonic Concorde set for a comeback?
Patent Holders Trying to Drag 3rd Parties into Patent Disputes
PageTrawler - Automated Content Auditing and Site-Mapping
Wow I didn't know about 500px. Thanks for mentioning it, hope they release an API…
Using View Source gets a redirect to the page, but using the Developer Tools will get you the page source (current, without a new request for the source) -- it should do the same for the cookie case, etc.
It's because width and height are set to zero. And since the browser tapers the edge of the borders, you get a triangle shape.
Visible Light Communications: A Greener, Broader Spectrum for Data
I've been using the beta for several months now and it has worked great across a variety of Windows and Mac machines.

For things like music and photos where I have 40+GB of accumulated bits it feels a better option than a straight cloud based system like DropBox or JungleDisk (which I also use, but for a smaller amount of stuff).

I have a number of machines with many GB of spare disk space, so rather than paying monthly storage fees for back up, I can just use this to replicate rarely changing content. Since machines on the local network sync at LAN speeds it is also very fast in the usual case.
Spotify employees hit million dollar jackpot
You can do this with datamatrix codes as well. Semacode has been doing this for years:
http://semacode.com/
Pretty sure that study was mentioned in Peopleware, but didn't include a citation reference.
There's quite a lot of impressively quick efforts to raise funds for people who are affected (I noticed http://cravify.com who were in the TC article about mapping riot locations have updated their map to allow donations by location), the difficult bit seems to be working out where to send the money, there aren't many charities which formally deal with helping local areas recover from something like this.
So, it's Dropbox, but the Cloud part is optional?
You'd be surprised. JTR does l33tspeak substitutions, one-row-up substitutions, keyboard walks, pretty much all of the common things everyone does because "no hacker would ever think of that."
Wow, offtopic, but you have a beautiful site.

I'm in the midst of reading Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style and it's really motivating me to design my blog in a lot neater, cleaner, typographically-aware style. I think you've really nailed that. If you haven't read that book yet, I highly recommend it; I think you'd appreciate it.
You sync only when both sides are up.
worse, you're really only getting sales from people who have already committed. If I'm unsure and I suspect bs, I'm likely just to bail.
I'm using this for about 6 months now. It works exactly like Dropbox, but it doesn't store any data on a central server, so I can use it even for my more sensitive files like my ssh private key.

I have a server at home on which AeroFS is running, so my data generally is available. And if my internet at home is down, usually there's another machine where it's running.

As it's syncing and keeping the local copy, the most current data will be on the machine I'm working on anyways.

The installation feels a bit "heavier" than dropbox which does a better job at staying out of my way, but the advantages of next to unlimited storage and no third-party server are huge for me.
But who would seriously interpret it that way, other than as a pedantic legal defense? ;-) When the newspaper says "Toy Story DVD Free Today!" it'd be odd to interpret that as assuming you could sell your own copies of Toy Story. I don't think authors necessarily have to stoop to defining everything in legally precise terms if the general term fits the case and, particularly, since copyright law is on their side already even if they say nothing.
CSS is designed for typography and layout. It was never designed to render arbitrary geometric shapes - something like SVG should be used for that. This is just clever hacks pushing the box model to its limit.
It's not a web server log.
Our Amsterdam startup partnered with Virgin Mobile
Somebody on bbc question hour was suggesting that police inaction was on purpose.They wanted this to escalate and use this violence as an excuse to make draconian laws.Cameron's action actually agrees with the prediction.

I do not want to believe in conspiracy theories but seriously does it take 3 days to decide using baton round/rubber bullets.
Motorola XOOM Flash Performance
On the last paragraph, it isn't that people may feel they deserve certain things, but that they are willing to grossly violate the law and society's standards in order to fulfill them.
a bit heavy on the google influence in the article....

I don't feel like G+ is at all geared to photographers. Flickr has tons of features/tools that seem natural to many but are key to managing photos, making sets, organizing etc. The meta data alone you can associate with flickr photos is incredible. G+ can make a photo set in the same way Facebook can, not really same target/point.
I also don't understand from the website if this is a real filesystem (mounts in the namespace of the OS, works with any program etc) or o userspace utility, something like an explorer/finder plugin.

Can anyone shed some light on that? Thanks.
He's trying to say that by stating that a brand new service that is, by most measures, doing fairly well is "failing miserably", you've lost your sense of perspective.
It definitely looks cool. I assume when the cloud backup option is avaiailable you can choose what to back up? Can you choose which folders are synched on a folder-by-folder basis (since I don't need my 500GB photo library on my mac laptop, but I do want it on y desktops)?
Hopefully there is a version that works on Windows Server 2008/2011?
This would kick butt on the mac app store.
Invite requested...
See that seems like a bit of a downside to me, I like being able to pull down things from my Sparkleshare server onto my laptop when I'm out, but I don't have my computer on all the time (Infact, most of the time, when my laptop is on my computer is off and vice-versa). I still think it's a great idea but having some cloud storage is a definate plus.
Oh, now I get it, you're claiming that the current deficits are due to spending by the Obama administration?

Can you point out which spending? I'm under the impression that they're structural deficits created by Bush programs and exacerbated by the recession. But if you could point out some large Obama spending plan that passed, I'd change my mind.
I was using this for awhile but the sync algorithm is retarded. It spent all of its time syncing gigs of meta data and saturating my upload rate. Also be prepared to make room for the 100mb+ process as it does not seem to care about memory efficiency.

I guess I'm still stuck with rsync and cronjobs until they work out the issues.
Looks nice but invite only so can't test it, help?! :)
OS X Lion: Using Mail’s New Search Features | TMO Quick Tip | The Mac Observer
Awesome! Just ordered a copy.
Storage is Cheap, Don't Mutate - Copy on Write
The "unlimited storage" thing threw me. If I understand it correctly, it's limited by the free storage I have to use.

"Your computer quite possibly has hundreds of gigabytes of space..." actually, no. Yes, I have a desktop with hundreds of GB free, but my laptop fights with me every day to keep 10-20 GB free. In that case, I think a network file share makes more sense.

Aside from the confusion marketing, I like it. Definitely looks like a potentially nice, secure Dropbox replacement.
The Problem with Average Ratings in App Store Reviews
Great promotion opportunity. Run with it.
This is welcome news. I recently got diagnosed and after taking the medication, I've found a great increase in the quality of life.

There are a few who are very anti-drug when it comes to this condition and their children. Let me tell you from personal experience, these people are doing more harm to their children than good. Education is important.

Depending on the severity, each year a parent doesn't take action is a year lost for their child.
I'm running this on a Windows Server 2008 (among other things) and it works fine. (update: invites are gone)
Wow, thanks!

If anyone tries this and ends up with a "Setup.ini signature <@ URL> failed to verify"

add the -X option to the cygstart call; e.g.:
C:/<path/to/cygwin/bin/>cygstart.exe <path to cygwin/setup.exe> -X -K http://cygwinports.org/ports.gpg

Credit to:
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.os.cygwin.ports.general/342
Comparing the Tweet, +1 and Facebook buttons next to each other, I can easily see how people just don't understand what +1 means. The button graphic has a colored ribbon at the top with the label '+1'. Next to it, I see the number of the total clicks. However, there is no explanation what it means. Compare that to the Facebook button. It says "Recommend", and "60 people recommended this".

'Recommend' is a clear call to action. '+1' requires a lot of interpretation and prior knowledge. It's the same issue G+ faces with huddles, sparks, hangouts and circles. By not adopting everyday language, features become mysterious.
love it, love it, love it. Please don't go out of business :) Related to going out of business - I'd like to start paying something monthly to support, please add that option
Use SEO with Your Trade Show Marketing
I agree and it also makes sense. frankly, just judging a (business) idea based on the messenger might give you a better accurracy on the likeliness of success than listening to the idea itself ( unless your insight is >= than that of the messenger). it's one of the principles behind pg's funding strategy.
anyway, it's easy to get misleading feedback depending on whether you're good at presenting your ideas or not. always keep in mind that most people won't be able to make accurate predictions on your business idea (heck, not even you can!). the only way to find out if something actually works is by building it.
>Since machines on the local network sync at LAN speeds it is also very fast in the usual case.

On a LAN, I don't really see the advantages over something like FreeFileSync, which is GPL'd.

Over the 'net, locating the machine and performing NAT traversal can be useful, though, especially for people behind ISP NAT.
3 Common Link Building Mistakes
"I'm a bit of a photography buff, a Flickr Pro user for years, and I'm not sure I want my photographs to be in the same place where I update friends and acquaintances about my status. It's an entirely different thing to me."

Absolutely agree. I'm a hobbyist travel photographer, so I end up with essentially two kinds of photos: photos of a place, where I try and form a nice composition, post process (crop, colors, balance, etc.) and then carefully catalog on flickr (for the former, I might take 20,000 photos during a week, and end up with a couple dozen really choice ones I want to keep in this way), and cheesy photos of me and my family at these places, mostly goofing off with statues or whatever.

The semantics of the two kinds of photos couldn't be different. So I use FB and G+ for the latter, and flickr most definitely for my carefully curated former.
Seems like you could use a decent router with USB storage support ;)
Infographic - web traffic during the London Riots
I found this:

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=6862...
http://www.unifyingtheories.org/
▲ or just use characters. Most of the shapes created by the CSS examples are already available as characters. ♡ ∞ ◆
What benefit do I get from +1'ing something? It doesn't go in my stream, it doesn't affect anything that I know of... Why would I do it?

It's like they implemented it without have any idea why the customer would use it... They were just copying other people... Badly.

And while we're on the topic of sharing, why doesn't Google Reader send shared items to G+ yet? It has sent it to Buzz for quite a long time, and Buzz isn't even popular.
In general, no it doesn't really matter at all, especially not if you have a degree in maths or the sciences instead. If you're going for a programming position though it really helps if you can demonstrate other programs you have written.

But please give us more information about what you want to do.