skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find that expecting a twist lowers the enjoyment. The twist, when it arrives, tends to usually be anticlimatic. If it turns out there's no twist, it ruins the whole experience.

I think that's why Shyamalan's later movies are considered so badly.

The "prediction error" point is interesting; I feel cheated when the twist is not so much a twist but hidden information; when one could never have suspected of the truth because not all facts where given. For example, I found the ending of the movie Number 23 to ruin the movie for me, so frustrating it was.

On the other hand, when it makes perfect sense, and facts were there all along, the twist is satisfying. That's why Sixth Sense is so popular.

Also, spoilers aren't always about twists. Telling me the whole plot of a movie robs me the experience of discovering it as it goes. Some of movies I enjoyed watching the most were ones I went in knowing absolutely nothing of what it was about (also some of the ones I disliked the most, but that's another story).
> But building from source might be a pain for some people, especially newbies like me.

It's really not hard, and it's using a tool you should start using as soon as you start "serious" Python projects: Sphinx.

Building the doc from source is pretty much trivial on Unix-type systems (OSX, Linux, BSD, whatever)

* Get the django source, either tarball or source control

* Install sphinx

* Go to the root of your Django install

* `make -C docs [format...]` where format is any set of valid sphinx output formats: html, dirhtml, singlehtml, htmlhelp, qthelp, devhelp, epub, latex, latexpdf, text or man

You compiled documentation will be in the `_build/$format` directory, for each format you're building (you can build all of them). The latexpdf target requires that `pdflatex` be installed and available.
Link bait, dude has what amounts to a quibbling disagreement and is off-base about that too.
The Most Gratifying Job on Earth
I remember your talk and enjoyed it.
What's the criteria on who gets accepted to attend?
That last bit is important; don't confuse the correlation and causation. Sleeping more than nine hours a day won't kill you, it just correlates with other conditions related to death, like obesity or terminal illness or old age.
Unfortunatly you should not be. My understanding is that patents on obvious methods are quite common.
Not just someone, www.lsi.com or @lsicorporation on twitter did
This scheme could be easily guessed by a dictionary attack that simply ran through combinations of dictionary words instead of individual characters.

If this became a popular scheme, the whole entropy argument goes out the door. It only has more entropy if we compare the two schemes on a character-by-character basis (~10 vs. ~25). Of course the longer string will appear to have more entropy.

But if a password guesser expects the pattern of the "four common words" scheme, as they might if it became popular, it's not nearly as entropic. A better comparison would be to consider each word as a single "character" from a 180,000 sized alphabet (for an English dictionary).

Calculate the entropy of that and you'll find it's in the same ballpark.
This is my process for writing anything:

1. Write a first draft.
2. Remove as much filler and redundancy as possible.
3. Fix syntax to match reduced content.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until content is 100% informative.

As a writer and programmer, my goal is to produce content that is both elaborate and efficient. Speed writing can help me with the first step, but without the editing I feel like I'm reading rambling.
offtopic -- just curious, are you http://cr.yp.to/djb.html or somebody else?
The main issue is that for this to work, you need to know specifically what antigen you're targeting on the tumor cells. Think of the antigen as a unique tag that the immune system can use to differentiate cells (a "natural key" if you will). In the majority of cancers we haven't got a clue as to what we should use as for an antigen (though it's not an insurmountable probelem). However, with leukemia they can use CD-19 which is found exclusively on the surface of normal and cancerous B-cells. The last thing you want is an antigen that "looks" like something common, so CD-19 apparently fits the bill there as well. If you choose something non-specific, then the immune system can go after all kinds of other tissue that you don't want it to which could very likely kill the patient.

All that being said, targeted therapy like this is probably the future of cancer treatment, but it's going to take tremendous effort to work out all the kinks. The immune system is ferociously complex, and is still poorly understood. However, it does have the advantage of being battle tested throughout evolution.
and then they respond with 1001 reasons why they can't update (security restrictions, corporate policies, etc).

There has to be a line drawn - where do you draw it? If 5.0.1 came out yesterday, do you not support someone who is running 4.8 which came out 3 weeks ago?
Or those that ignore case... I've come across a few popular ones that do that!
It's obvious that Bill is happier doing philanthropy than he was running Microsoft. It's not too surprising when you think about it, but it's a good reminder for those of us who are still working to make our millions that happiness often comes from living for others. Giving away your money can be more gratifying than making it.
"Because getting a patent means accepting a time-limited monopoly on your invention, anyone will be able to use this specification to build their own search engine when the patent expires in 2018."

This paragraph from the article points out one of the larger issues I have with patents in high-tech, which is the length of the grant. Even ignoring the fact that simply reading patent claims is a VERY long way away from working code and related infrastructure, the lapse of the patent plus the knowledge from the patent would only be good for helping you to implement Google's algorithm as it existed in 1998(!). Forget about 2018, Google's algorithms (while still built on similar concepts) are known to be very different today or even 4 years ago than they were in 1998.

By granting such a long term to patents you are not just blocking competitors from the core claim, but also any innovations you make while the patent is active, assuming enough of the original invention remains that anything else that uses your non-filed tweaks would still be in violation of the original process.

Result? You could (assuming reading a patent magically allowed you to actually recreate the system) recreate 1998 Google in 2018. Approximate value of that 'knowledge gift to society' IN 2018? $0! You're 2 decades behind where you need to be if you're starting at the original core invention.

BTW, I don't mean for any of this to be a knock on Google, PageRank is simply the example the original article decided to use. Google remains one of the only big software-related corporations whose patent usage/enforcement hasn't yet been destructive to the industry as a whole.
Hacker CS: Computer Science Challenges
Users might have some issues finding help on their problems though.
Where I get coffee
One example of which would be a doubly linked list, which (according to Wikipedia) goes back at least to IBM's TSS/360 operating system (1967), and was discussed in The Art of Computer Programming volume 1, published in 1968.
Just filled out the application. It would be very cool to go but I have no clue what criteria they will use to weed people out. I guess we will see!
I don't think I'm typically bothered by spoilers, but The Usual Suspects stands out as an example of where it definitely hurt my enjoyment of that movie. I mean, I still liked the movie, but man, I can only imagine how much more I would've enjoyed it without the spoilers.

Also, by this point The Sixth Sense is ruined for me, so I'm not sure I'll ever get around to seeing it.
Sorry for my unfortunate tone.

I was lamenting the lack of preparedness of a minority of speakers. Most people gave world class presentations, but a minority had a perceived lack of preparation.

With people traveling half way around the world, it seems disrespectful to have speakers fumbling on stage.
Linus repeats this line WRT distributed systems during his famous talk about git:

"I have a theory about backups; I don't do them. I put stuff up on one site and everybody else mirrors it."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8#t=17m4s
Roller coaster riders
IVF success rates | Chances of Pregnancy
I agree with Mark Cuban that it will be a few years before we see a realistic alternative to our traditional distribution of content. (cable, satellite)

Large scale, streaming video on the web is so much more pricey when you look at the numbers (cost of generating 1 mill views online VS 1 mill views on a cable or satellite network)
Hmm, it seems to be more about objecting to the specific expert witness they're using:

"In April, Microsoft sent Google a subpoena asking for a variety of information, including confidential source code.... In its motion for sanctions, Google says it should have had a chance to review the credentials of the expert in question, Dr. Robert Stevenson, and it should have had a chance to object. The motion notes that Stevenson has done consulting work for Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), “both direct competitors of Google.” Now Google wants the ITC judge overseeing the Microsoft v. Motorola case to stop Stevenson from testifying."
Google Maps on Android uses the system TTS. The one that ships with Android (Pico TTS) is indeed pretty bad, but you can buy better ones in the Market (e.g., SVOX Classic).
That's exactly why we don't use git commit hashes - we only want our users to download new versions when the files have definitely changed.
I am not sure the solution is so easy. Invisible players might still make noises, attack, or interact with the environment in some way. So completely dropping them from the update stream might not be possible.
Maybe highlight a better example than a bartender? I can image looking on an Opez page for a tutor, lawyer, or accountant, but I'm just not sure what I'd need my bartender to tell me via Opez...
cough http://phpjs.org/ cough
This patent appears to have gone almost 4 years between being filed and being issued. One wonders what they spent that time doing. Looking through their car's user manual for prior art, perhaps? (Or perhaps they took that phrase literally, and conducted a search of the Louvre...)

Even if USPTO was actually doing a good job of vetting patents, that would still have been four years during which anybody seeking to use a multiply linked list would have to do so under the shadow of a possible lawsuit (which would be expensive, even if trivially winnable) if and when the patent was accepted.
Which is why I like Ubuntu's YY.MM versioning - it's completely natural and expected.

I also like build numbers like Microsoft and Apple give, you know if OSX 10.7 GM seed is different from the GA release by looking at the build (e.g. 11A494A)
Must have Google+ Chrome Extensions.
It is ironic that people would complain about someone taking ideas from another article to present them in another way. The more exposure the better.
Vertical tab management is far superior when managing a bunch of tabs. I am not sure how anyone who has more than a handful of tabs can get by horizontally, not sure how people can tell tabs apart when only seeing the favicon & a few characters of the title. What with widescreen displays being the norm now it just makes sense to do vertical tabs.
Why Companies Knowingly Ship Insecure Devices
Legally, it's presumed valid. It may be easy to prove that the invention is not novel, but doing so would still involve time, effort, and money. The patent holder needs only to settle for a smaller amount of money than would be required to invalidate the patent.
Yelp already has most facebook functionalities, and listings for service professionals.

You should just say 'we're competing with yelp. wish us luck'
Try Helvetica: Handmade Signs In Brazil Updated Using Helvetica
Yeah? For example?
Security Flaws in Encrypted Police Radios
Doesn't read so nasty, though perhaps a bit negative. The question that springs to mind, is the comment true?
On rereading, I realized this might give a false impression. OCaml does allow the user to define an operator, but a confluence of the type system (which doesn't allow overloading and makes abstracting types sufficiently difficult that it doesn't justify the minor syntactic nicety of a custom operators) and precedence rules means that most OCaml code you'll see does not use a lot of weird operators like you'll find in advanced Haskell code. I'm not an OCaml guru, but that's what I've seen.
Functional programming trivia
Same story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2873003

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2873501
Best News site
What is masked by some of the hoopla around cancer is exactly this, gene therapy is advancing, and it can rewrite your DNA in-situ. This meets pretty much every definition of the term 'game changing' from atheletes who want the Sherpa gene for making more red blood cells to a host of genetic disorders that lead to a myriad of complications in the patients life. Some resarch has been marred by some very serious negative outcomes [1] but if it can be mastered, the world will not be the same, for any of us.

[1] http://www.medpagetoday.com/Genetics/GeneralGenetics/6275
It's not about what they eat, it's about what it becomes in the digestive system.
But people are asking this type of questions. Look here for instance:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1059226
If you really wanted to follow your favorite service provider, wouldn't you just friend them on facebook or follow them on twitter? The relationship is already there, so wouldn't reviews be unnecessary?
This likening of entrepreneurs to roller coaster riders ... I guess you just have to be a little bit mad for this gig :)

A good question someone should research is whether a thrill seeker makes a better entrepreneur than a steady individual looking for "safe" ways to increase key metrics, whatever they may be.
To most people, HIV is a disease. What's the more elegant alternative?
What about linux? depends on what you mean by losing.

then with the qualifier 'that does not restrict users and developers', what restrictions would suffice to push users and developers out vs. the incentives that drew them in in the first place.

open for openness sake is not enough - it's just one more variable in the ecosystem equation. A couple of examples: as a user I do want developers to be restricted from putting malware on my device. And as a dev I would want users restricted from going against the TOS of my app.
Zombie movies have also started with re-entering spacecraft and teenage experimentation with the occult. Don't think much of it.
Ask HN: how much to budget for design?
I've been working part time on a web app for the industry I work in. I've almost finished the back-end but have next to no design skill and very little front-end experience. What would be a reasonable budget to outsource the design? I'll need 5 unique pages and another 5 generic ones to use as a model for further pages. I'd like the design to be responsive to be mobile devices, tablets and desktops.
My dad was reading Game of Thrones and got to a shocking spoiler at the end of book 1 (you can guess which one). He told me he stopped reading the series right there. He probably wouldn't even have begun reading if he knew beforehand.

He reads a lot in the genre and he just couldn't take what GRR dished out.

I thought it was a brilliant move and I certainly would have been sad to know it was coming. When an author is reversing tropes and dumbfounding your expectations, when you're suspended between possible outcomes and don't know what's going to happen next, that's the golden time in reading.
Software patents are a problem. But perhaps software engineers are biased about this particular regulation because this is the field they work in. Seems to me similar arguments can be made about all other patents, and all other IP laws, and even all other regulations period. They do more harm than good.
How many postal mailboxes do you know that trigger automated out-of-office responses and all the other noise?

Bounces do happen in postal mail, but 1) the PO usually has the option to discard marketing mail instead of bouncing it, and 2) the sender has a much higher incentive in wasted postage cost to avoid bounces in postal mail, as compared to an email bounce of a few packets.
Never (before you) have I heard someone talk about multiply-linked lists as simply being "linked lists". That term is generally reserved for the "standard" linked list types. Skip lists are also a variant of linked lists, but very few would generally refer to them simply as "linked lists".

Singly-linked and doubly-linked lists are taught as standard linked lists. Multiply-linked lists are not, because they are not especially useful in most cases. With a doubly-linked list (perhaps more clearly called a bidirectional linked list), all the standard algorithms work with minor or no modifications. With multiply-linked lists, even just inserting an element becomes much more complex. You're now traversing m lists for insertion instead of 1. I would question the quality of your CS101 course if your professor taught you about multiply-linked lists. It's a rather specialized data structure that is generally not beneficial. That time would have been better spent covering a more useful data structure.

I don't have an intro data structures textbook anymore, but I just checked "Introduction to Algorithms, 2nd Ed." and they do not seem to mention multiply-linked lists. "A list may have one of several forms. It may be either singly or doubly linked, it may be sorted or not, and it may be circular or not." For further evidence that multiply-linked lists are not widely considered simply "linked lists", I'll note that Wikipedia didn't mention multiply-linked lists as a variant until 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linked_list&di...

As I've already said, I agree that the patent is invalid. It's not novel. But I do not agree that it's simply a "linked list". That term is far more generic and its usage without further clarification implies a much broader claim than the patent makes. Out of curiosity, where in the original Unix were these multiply-linked lists used?

As for why I infer anti-patent tendency, why post this at all except as an example of how the patent system is broken? And why assign it the very broad title "Someone patented linked lists" instead of, say, the more accurate (or at least more specific) "Someone patented a variation of linked lists"? Maybe because the former is more inflammatory?
There's a difference between patents that happen to cover software and a carved-out subsection of patents designated specifically for software by law. We currently have the former - Niley believes we should have the latter.
Twitter Maps and #ukriots
Depends on the scale. Check sortfolio.com for some ideas though :)
Isn't this discussion premised on a server configured to allow fast password guessing indefinitely?

This is 2011, shouldn't every server be configured to allow a guess every two seconds for 20 guesses, then every 10 minutes, or something similar?

I'm not familiar with common practices in this area, but why wouldn't all such services be configured to limit the incorrect guesses?
Previous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1548013 (many comments)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1106846 (2 comments)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2873902 (no comments)
> But the user still needs to copy the data between servers, no?

Yes, if you want to use multiple servers you need to get your data on multiple servers. But that's just a consequence of the laws of physics. It has nothing to do with DSSID.

> And what happens if the personal clears all the cookies in FF and deletes the Local Storage?

If they haven't made a backup copy of their key then they are screwed. You can't stop people from deliberately shooting themselves in the foot. If they have made a backup copy of their key then they can just re-import it.

> Wouldn't it be better to use a personal cert?

All else being equal yes. But the UI/UX for certs is so hopelessly bad that not even technically savvy people use them. DSSID's goal is to be secure and simple. That's a currently unoccupied point in the design space. (It's not easy to do.)
I attended the first startup school (in Boston). There was a large gathering at YC's office the night before the talks. A few of us were still there when pg was ready to leave. Despite having never met any of us before, he let us stay, asking only that we double-check that the door locked on our way out.

I'd like to think that I would have the same trust in my attendees if I were him. Not a big deal, but a special moment that I'll never forget :)
> Mentioning the color just serves to describe which of the two pillars has the weaknesses. Nothing else.

Would that that were true. In your example, one could instead identify the cracks or other structural problems and focus on those, rather than which pillar had more of them.

Otherwise, one gets left with the impression that the color is what made the pillar weak, rather than the cracked foundations. Focusing on the color of the pillar is an unnecessary and harmful distraction.
The point is for the cheater to not ask for the name. Even simpler than an overlay, if you figure out how cheater detection works, is to filter the outgoing name request packet.

Edit, looking at your other post: Can't the packet editor that's marking people visible send a fake name to the client?
Gartner Adds Big Data, Gamification, and Internet of Things to Its Hype Cycle
Such viral vectors are routinely used in the lab to knock in a variety of genes in the cell. Vector is really the packaging. What was important in the study was the actual antigen which has packaged in the vector.
First you have to get to the "increase key metrics" phase...

And it usually takes quite a roller-coaster fanatic to get there in the first place.
Logic programming on the JVM and Javascript
You had an idea, not a full theory. The gap between "Hey, maybe we can piggy-back on a virus to specialized white blood cells to target particular kinds of cells" and an actual treatment is enormous.
I detest spoilers so much that I've been known to leave a good book unfinished to avoid ruining the end.
I spent 8 years in pharmaceutical industry R&D and this is so ill-informed I feel compelled to refute it every time someone says it. I know it sounds like it makes sense on the surface, but it's just outright false.

I worked in cancer research with some really, really smart people. Every single one of them was sincerely hopeful that the drug they were working on would be a total cure. I know it's hard to believe, but pharma companies are composed of real people who have seen patients, friends, and relatives die of cancer or similar diseases. Researchers want so badly to find a cure for the disease they are working on. The existence of vaccines are proof that when pharma companies can cure something, they do it. I have been in conversations where business factors for a drug were discussed and I can tell you the one thing that was never said was, "Hey guys, make sure it's not an actual cure, or we'll need to kill the project".