skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm, is there a way to also do async tests?

Still seems to be a bit much code to write for a single test compared to other testing frameworks (e.g. nodeunit on the server side or QUnit for client scripts).

The code coverage check is a nice feature - are there any other testing frameworks around supporting this?
If you think the law's so shitty, why do you keep electing people like Obama and Bush who push for these things?
Most cancers are due to diet. Most rich countries have the worst diets that include processed foods. Most poor countries lack processed foods and industrialized agriculture. But whatever, with all this money you need doctors to create anti-biotics to keep industrialized agriculture "functional" and anti-cancer drugs to cure diseases that only exist due to money in the first place. Honestly, I think its a crock, instead of staring at computer screens and microscopes all day, these scientists could be planting gardens and cooking healthier meals and would probably save more people. But hey...we're rich, and rich people need expensive hobbies and degrees!

This map for leukemia correlates clearly rich vs. poor: http://64.19.142.13/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/t...
Probably did not file the appeal properly either
Well someone who's been working for a foreign company, if they've been working in for a managerial position for a year+ can come in on a L1-A visa to establish the new office/branch. (And it has to be an actual multi-person company, not someone who's self employed).
You're right, missed that part. Was wondering how they got around the FDA. Now it makes complete sense.
A survey of over 100 developers

Whilst I'm no fan of Facebook development, this survey doesn't seem to be that fair: one of the graphics it says it received 135 answers in total, 19 of which named Facebook's API. That's not many answers...
I got on the cheapest flight I could find and went to the very first Startup School. And while I did not walk out and change the world, I walked out and changed my life. Streaming or not, my advice is to find your way there by hook or by crook and attend in person.
If you get accepted, it's definitely worth flying in for. It's something I believe everyone should experience, especially if you're thinking about creating or joining a startup. More for the social aspects than the content.
Yay! It was fun to speak at the first one of these.
British PM Misses Point of Social Media, Threatens Ban
Compuserve was generating automatic account passwords in the early 1980's from two dictionary words and a non-alpha character in between them. Mine was "sleeve;coast". No doubt they didn't invent the trick either.
I don't think entropy is the whole story. I would argue that although security-through-obscurity is a terrible, awful practice for systems, it's not that bad for personal password schemes. Using a nonce "system" for passwords, even if it's mathematically low-entropy, is still secure, at least enough for personal use.

For example, if I use single dictionary words fed through a trivial ceasar cipher, then that is mathematically very low entropy. Realistically speaking, however, it's relatively safe if the cracker doesn't know that's what I'm doing, because it's impractical for crackers to compute all possible low entropy "alternative dictionaries."
I peeked at a few but didn't buy. Many books are just a long novel with no graphics. For such books, the Kindle store is fine as there are no issues with graphics or missing TOC or waypoints. But when I peeked at books that should have table of contents, quite a few of them didn't - even recent popular books.

I didn't do an exhaustive survey by any means, but the few full-priced (at least somewhat) popular contemporary books I checked out on both Kindle and Nook were better done (on average) on the Nook, as table of contents were more often included with Nook books.

To me - the fact that I should have to examine quality when paying $10 for a book is inexcusable. In a physical book store I don't have to worry about these things.

EDIT: replaced "chapters" with "table of contents"
Twitter's API has historically been very good. I think at least part of the issue with Twitter and developer satisfaction is that they have spent the last year doing just about everything they could to push developers off of making full featured Twitter apps using that API short of outright banning them from doing it.

Seems to me that the problem is more an issue of the process and politics of using the API (and widespread uncertainty as to how long the full API will be available given Twitter's signaled future plans) rather than technical/documentation problems with the API itself.
The article doesn't touch on one aspect of the research likely to have been particularly unpalatable to pharmaceutical companies: Potential cures are bad business.

Of course, there is no conspiracy here. It's just the human tendency to rationalize when money is involved. Imagine you run a pharmaceutical company: Your products save lives, right? You want to be able to continue saving lives, so you have to stay profitable. And to stay profitable, you have to make good investments. Products that are used in long-term treatments are good investments. One-time cures aren't.
I'm surprised that this patent was granted.
Facebook chat now showing all online friends
Here’s What Happens When You Try to Edit Photos of Money in Photoshop
This is what I wanted to do and the exact reason why I left the biotech industry. They don't like crazy ideas.
Also refer this if you are new to JS - https://developer.mozilla.org/en/A_re-introduction_to_JavaSc...
There are a few details (and a theoretical example) in this article: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1964843
It's unenforceable. Check page 19 of "Programming the Logic Theory Machine", by Newell and Shaw, published in 1957, for prior art.
Can Anonymous really 'kill' Facebook?
"Sleeping well helps keep you alive longer. Among humans, death from all causes is lowest among adults who get seven to eight hours of sleep nightly, and significantly higher among those who sleep less than seven or more than nine hours."

http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/07/deep-into-sleep.html

Sleep itself probably doesn't make us live longer, but it could be a good measure of how we are living our lives - amount of stress, anxiety, etc.
Tip: Don't spellcheck until the end - it destroys your train of thought.

I know, the red line underneath misspelled words is really annoying, but over time it's easy to ignore
The curse of knowledge during a sales pitch
LinkedIn forbids members with 250 followers to self-quit (screen shots)
Well, one thing is that Chrome extensions are much more limited; also, they only even run when you let them.
I can't help but think that this is a solution to the wrong problem. The big problem with password security in the modern world really isn't that they're easy to break, but that they're pervasively reused between sites. So breaking them (for example, by reading them in plain text out of a dumb database!) in one place opens up attacks on higher value accounts.

The fix, of course, is to get users to stop re-using passwords between sites.

How does making passwords more memorable fix this? If anything, forcing users to use random base64 strings strikes me as more secure as they will be forced into some sort of password locker implementation by their inability to remember them.
The only legal option is to creat a world government, possibly extend the authority of UN. Governments need to match the size of multinational corporations.
What sort of work visas do these guys get?
But the user still needs to copy the data between servers, no?And what happens if the personal clears all the cookies in FF and deletes the Local Storage?

Wouldn't it be better to use a personal cert?
Why Google Still Desperately Needs Firefox
GelSight at MIT makes 3D scanning fast and cheap
> all Chinese people be able to browse the web uncensored.

No none. They want all Chinese people to be able to browse the web as censored by them rather than as censored by China.
Exactly. LinkedIn doesn't really have much of an API in terms of the data you can get out of it. Facebook does, and I assume far more people use it because of that.
We're on "Chrome 13" if that means anything. It shouldn't make a difference as long as major release numbers correspond to major improvements.
3) Article claims that GPS telemetry was sent continuously. What did they use? Wifi doesn't work. There are no cell towers in the ocean. The only option that could remotely work is satellite data. That costs a fortune and has heavy equipment.

They probably used amateur packet radio to transmit telemetry. I suppose it may be hard to believe if you're not a ham, but this is a rather common usage scenario, even over long distances.
Spoilers Don’t Spoil Anything
Wrong mind set, they could easily charge 100k+ for the treatment and insurance companies would still jump for joy since it's cheaper over the long run.
In general, a virus consists of some genetic material and some method of getting that genetic material into a cell. You can swap out the virus's own genetic material for the genetic material of your choosing, and the delivery mechanism will still work. If you use HIV's "delivery system" to deliver genetic material that encodes a cancer-fighting protein, then you get cancer-fighting T-cells (a type of immune cell), since HIV targets T-cells.

This is a massive oversimplification, of course. But anyway, the harmlessness of the viral vector depends on how efficiently you can separate the virus's delivery mechanism from its own infections genetic material.
Clearly, they are pulling the old "major version change marketing stunt" to catch up with a perceived lag in version numbers compared to other browsers. You see, apparently people think IE 9 must be vastly superior to FF 4...

Personally, I think the time for version numbers should probably be over altogether. At this point I feel it's more productive to just tack a date string onto the thing and be done with it. For example, Firefox 2011-July is way more informative than an actual version number.
I hope so; that's annoying and counterproductive.
What exactly does a patent office do to determine if something is actually original or not? Like did some clerk look at this and say "Yeah, I'm no computer scientist, but this sounds original to me"?
Yeah, I moved to SF from DC about a month after that one. Still here. At a third startup :)
At first I thought that too. But within 1 or 2s, I remembered that linked lists have never been limited to single linked lists (except maybe in poor quality courses), multiple linked lists have been around since Unix and very very probably before, have nothing inherently special, so it's absolutely all right to both simply call them "linked list" (like the patent properly does in its title) and to consider them as CS 101.

The patent is both obviously invalid and properly named "Linked List". That it is does not cover the single linked list special case does not changes this fact. The title is neutral, and you are inferring an anti-patent tendency from a neutral reporting (from which crowd btw?). I would be hugely curious to hear on which base you inferred that.
watched the old videos over and over gain, cant wait to attend in person ie if I get selected :)
Several years ago I read an article in Fortune about cancer research. Government funding is extremely conservative. They're happy to pay you to nail down another tiny detail about some kind of cancer, but try an innovative cure and they balk. They also take three years to get the money to you, by which time your research might be obsolete.

When Michael Milken got out of prison, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and started a foundation to fight it. He asked researchers for the crazy ideas they really wanted to work on, and got the money to them in three months. In return, he insisted researchers immediately share what they learned. No patents, no waiting for prestigious publication.

According to Fortune, people in the field generally credit Milken's foundation with cutting prostate cancer death rates in half.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/...
Did they make Firefox re-entrant so that a f'd up page in one tab doesn't affect all the other ones and the browser chrome?
"up to 50% less"? That is a major weasel statement. It could use 1% less and still meet the "goal".
One of the best events I have been to. I highly recommend attending in person.
The atmosphere that day in the auditorium was amazing and you get to meet people from around the world.

Have I mentioned it's free?
On the other hand, as research tools are becoming more affordable to smaller institutions and universities, we may witness a shift from big pharma to smaller and more focused independent research.
U.K. Riots: Plans To Control Social Media Won't Work
Famously (well, famous if you were into MMOs & high-end raiding 10 years ago), EQ did something similar to what you describe. An end-zone boss wasn't supposed to be reachable before obtaining certain keys that weren't even in the game yet. Folks that had used in-game mechanics to bypass the doors one day logged on to find items like http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=17057 replacing their original loot.
Yes, PPIP did begin. What I didn't realize is that a lot of this profit came from derivatives, not sales of the assets themselves. The actual program size was $40 billion, which is still a good amount of money but less than the original $1 trillion planned. So money was made without as many assets changing hands as the Treasury anticipated... I guess that's an even worse outcome?

I recommend reading the following article which talks about the failures of PPIP: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/01/richard-alford-why-ha...
It definitely takes all of your contacts.

http://mashable.com/2011/08/11/facebook-phone-numbers/

"When you download Facebook’s mobile app, this feature syncs your phone’s address book with your profile. From then on you can access all of the numbers in your phone from your Facebook profile."
That's why I think medical research should be funded by the insurance companies.

The main impediment: free-loading companies could take advantage of the companies funding the research. One solution would be to start a patent pool, making their inventions freely available to all the companies participating in funding the research.

A senator (Bernie Frank maybe, not sure) recently introduced a bill to tax insurance companies and apply the funds for medical research. That'd be another way to fix the freeloader problem, but then you're stuck with the government choosing the research, and it tends to be overly conservative.
Can get get negative confirmations? Will Quora guy be speaking? That presentation was painful to sit through last year. His advice boiled down to "have rich friends and tag along for the ride."

Reid is another tricky one. He has so much useful information, but his presentation last year was almost incoherent. It looked like he was running late for class and tried to prepare his presentation on-the-fly with no organization.
This ignores too many issues to be relevant.

If something has a surprise, I can enjoy showing it to friends and watching them get caught by the surprise. That adds pleasure.

If something has a surprise, it can make a bigger impact and stick in my memory longer. That adds pleasure.

Sometimes I can guess a surprise. That adds pleasure.
The Cyrillic o isn't being interpreted as U+006F, it just looks like it. A UTF-8 decoder doesn't know how it's output is going to be used.
"is broken" equates to "allows or encourages something that wasn't originally intended". That's an apt description of the patent system and the current situation.
I'm having a hard time believing that this concept made it past the pitch stage. I can't even.
That's a pretty good approach. I guess the main drawback is that the git commit hash will change far more often than the contents of most of the static files, though, right?
Eh, I can think of far far worse uses of that power.

But maybe we should start informing soda drinkers and car drivers of how much power is burnt making those aluminum cans and cars...
Key internet traffic choke points on US soil are monitored by the National Security Agency and people are surprised by this?

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

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T
Just like enterprises, they get you to install their CA cert as a new trusted root and then they sign their own certs for each domain as they flow through. Corporate IT will just push it through AD or pre-configure it, I'd assume campus IT gets you to run an executable to install it. Since all the traffic will be signed by them you won't get very far without accepting their root.
Every language has idiosyncrasies. IMO it's tough to use a language effectively without knowing them, even if you don't use them. I mean, imagine trying to use Ruby and not knowing about implicit return values. Or the obscure array slice operations in Python. Every language has its own funky things.
If these types of passwords become popular, brute force crackers will build dictionaries of well known phrases.
Thanks for the great feedback; we've fixed the styling on the privacy policy and TOS to make it much more legible. We're a little nervous about pre-populating information from Facebook as we want to err on the side of caution regarding personal info but will seriously consider this. We're adding new services by the day so check back soon and we'll have more to opt-out from!
Android : Running Standalone Python
I wonder if it would suffice to highlight characters not found in the primary font. I don't know how, exactly, fonts fallthrough, but I doubt most fonts venture outside locales.
I flew in last fall and really enjoyed the experience. The the chance to meet a lot of like-minded people from all over the world (including one guy from Scotland) was worth it alone. The speakers were first-rate, including Mark Zuckerberg and the after-party was great.

If you're interested in startups, this is a great event to attend.
Is Detroit the new Brooklyn?
What you're saying is true, but even after digesting it it is still easy for me to blame the patent office (if not individual patent examiners) for the problem.

The current brokenness of the patent system is due to a snowball effect. If the patent office hadn't let the system slide out of control to the current state of brokenness, their examiners would have more authority to push back on anyone trying to push sketchy "inventions" through the system.
All other things being equal, does how early (or late) you fill up the application form have any bearing on whether or not you make the grade? (I hope not)
I think I understand what you're trying to say. Each page should have predefined javascript collections in the HTML, varying based on the need of the page.

That's fine for a traditional layout, but most client-heavy applications do not load HTML every time a user clicks something. In my case, the application only loads the HTML once, on the initial visit, and from that point, it's all javascript. Re-working things to load HTML on every click would actually make things slower, since it has to fetch the HTML each time. This type of architecture makes a loader necessary.
I really liked that quote, too, but what do you mean turned out rather well?
So this means it will be $10k a shot in the USA and $500 everywhere else until India clones it?
I've done a bit more testing and found that while it can be used in URLs it's problematic. When pasted in the navigation bar it causes errors in both Chrome and Firefox. There's probably a way to exploit this and make it work but I don't have time to dig into it right now.
It is though, did you read any of the above comments?
That's assuming that you value all years equally, which most people don't.
70 creative advertisements that make you look twice
Zynga's new S-1
Watch out for sites that only use the first 8 characters of your password (no matter how long it is).
The lawyers for the patent trolls are smarter than that, they aren't going to start with dozens of defendants, they are going to start with one or two, bully them into settling, and then use those settlements as precedent when they go after 4 other people... and hey, their patent must be valid, because look at these two guys who are licensing it already.... then they go after the next group (expanding the net each time like they did in those old 'she'll tell two people' shampoo ads).

Precedent counts for a LOT when it comes to resolving any legal issues, even if the precedent is settling, and the trolls know that and use it.
Except, joshu created Delicious, so the fact that he agrees is relevant information.
Not really a great deal if 20 years of therapeutic treatments would bring in more than that 100k for the "one time" cure.

Also not advocating there is some conspiracy going on here.
Agreed. The eBay API is an abomination, but so few people are brave enough to use it that it would never show up in a Worst API survey.
When Startups Fail, Investors Recoup by Selling Patents
That was such a nasty comment that initially I couldn't even understand what you were asking.
This is neat! I can think of many potential use cases for this from the perspective of both the customer and the service professional. The service industry has so many sub-par performers, so it'll be great to have a service that identifies and rewards (through identification) the good ones.

Can you disclose any other features you have planned beyond profiles and following?
Just for clarity with standard terminology, "4 year with 1 year cliff" usually means 4 year vesting, with 25% vesting at the end of the first year. Thus, it's 0% for the first year, then 25% immediately at the beginning of the second year, and then 1/48th of the total grant for each of the next 36 months.

4/1 is basically the silicon valley standard.

Usually you get the next increment on leaving (i.e. if you leave mid-month, you get the vest for that month), and often if you leave before a year (but after doing stuff, and amicably), you get some portion of the first 25% -- letting someone go after 11mo just to avoid the cliff is usually not done. If someone turns out to have been a bad hire after a month, it's more likely to just let him go and stick with the minimum terms of the contract (i.e. nothing).

IMO if you can't trust the management of the company, you shouldn't work there anyway. You should have contractual terms which are mutually acceptable, but it's almost always possible for an employer to exceed or fail to meet those terms, with limited recourse for most employees.
I was here last year and I have to say it was one of the best things I've ever attended.

The after party at YC was also pretty damn epic. So many awesome people, just a shame I felt too shy to go say Hi to pg.
Thanks sramana!

I can't wait for the Indian and western programming cultures to become more intertwined. I feel like we have a lot to gain from each other.
Surely a cure to an otherwise generally terminal illness is worth 100k though. I know I would be grateful to pay such a price, the alternative seems to be no cure, and eventual death.
You can learn about the SaaSy API here: http://saasy.com/features.php#nine

Unlike the others, SaaSy is all-inclusive.
The US has a growing population to begin with.

And some people are so ingenious, they'll get richer no matter what you do. To make the typical voter's income at least stay even, the average has to go up then.
Firefox 9 UI revealed