skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is why God invented std::shared_ptr
It's my observation that industry in general and technology in particular is dominated by a kind of group think that makes certain 'ideas' unassailable once they've reach a certain level of critical mass from the crunchocracy, irrespective of their objective merits.

Roughly: I think most organisations would be better served with a culture that encourages less inhibition, less self censorship and more encouragement of brainstorming ideas, and a much more rigorous critical, analytical investigation of ideas before accepting them.
'Active House' Upends Russian Energy Habits
Coming from a dynamically-typed language perspective, (2) seems like incredibly not a big deal. If you're unclear on the return type, just look at the declaration of the function that's being called.

Compare this to, e.g., Python, where you have to look at the actual definition of the function being called (and maybe eve n the definition of functions it calls, and so on), which is way worse.
It's not just a British cultural problem - everyone everywhere in the world ridicules people and things they don't understand, don't want to admit may be true, or just don't have time to think about.

If you would create something like the Silicon Valley in the UK and bring the brightest minds and hard working people from all over the world, you'd also get better odds at success for ideas that seem ridiculous.
Clearly another case of wired.com diving into the fantastic and inspirational.

Actually, Ny Teknik, one of the publications cited in the article, is a serious engineering/technology news publication. They do voice strong concerns, so I wouldn't say the media is obviously manipulated.
Stereoscopic 3D motion-controlled timelapse
It sickens me that the police would waste the time prosecuting this, instead of catching murderers and rapists who are free.

Do you honestly believe that the two are exclusive?
Good idea, I rushed to release MVP, but I also think it will make sense to have different modes.
Bajar calorias
a/b test for sure!!
I would think they wanted more intervention in the middle east. Why? To drum up more support for their cause and to have an easy villan. I would say their attacks were fairly successful.
Ask HN: DIY 'Body-coupled communication'
Any leads on where and how to get kits/chips?
Indeed. E.g., I am using git for more projects than I use mercurial. To these projects, however, I just submitted a limited number of change sets. Most heavily I am using mercurial instead, which I also would choose for future projects. Maybe it would more accurate to measure the number of submissions per time interval.
Any feedback on my app: Create PDF album from your photos
It is a lean project I have been hacking on in my spare time. The app is a result of learning new (to me) technologies - backbone, celery, django-piston.

I'm not sure if the app is useful or if it solves some real problem in its current state. I would appreciate any feedback and ideas to iterate on.

Link: http://images2pdf.com

You can use this registration code: FORHN150D
So here is the fundamental question: how did Indians/Chinese break into the "tech clique" and why can't Blacks do the same thing?
This could be another little error, or it could be intentional. It's hard to tell:

It is <%= Date.year %>
I've learned over the years that no amount of criticism, ridicule, feedback, input, commentary or lauding should kill an idea. Its all positive if you take it that way. Every statement made about your idea should be taken onboard and evaluated and used as fuel for improving your notion. Some feedback is shit and some ridicule is useful - if you love your idea, its up to you to figure out which is which and how you can use it to propel your plan forward.

I love it when I run into someone who has nothing but negativity or ridicule for my plan. At least it means I've come up with something worth reacting to. The worst is when I hear nothing. Crickets hurt :-)
Now I see what you mean, but I wouldn't say your source is reliable. I can see where your opinion comes from, but you should consider more sources.

Most of those points are either incorrect or don't take into account what the goal of all companies on this planet is. Making money.

Ideology is good for yourself but won't feed you or buy you a house. A middle ground is the way to go.

And Apples middle ground is quality products with proprietary software. You can't control the quality of your products, when opening it up to the competition (Palm Pre).

As some said before Google does this too. You won't get their search engine code, nor will Apple give you iOS.
This c++ is very different from the c++ I remember. I'd like to learn more about modern c++ style and idioms. Can anyone recommend a good text?
That's silly, had Steve Jobs wanted Flash to work on iOS it would work fine on iOS. Of course it doesn't work.

Power consumption in HTML5 is still higher than equivalent Flash, touch is a non-issue but standards is where HTML5 shines. I believe many times technologists focus too much on the platform rather than delivering a product. There's still a place for Flash and HTML5 is getting better (but is hindered by fragmented browser support).

http://www.craftymind.com/guimark3/
I dunno, git spawned a revolution in how we think of version control (even mercurial came out of the initial discussions of git); that's a pretty big deal.
That's what grad students are for.
Epic programmer fail #12: wants to optimize for write spead, not for review speed.

As an employer and an engineering lead, I really don't care about how hard it is for you to type a little more if it means other people can read and understand your code faster. You are not what we are optimizing.

Assuming everyone wants to use every feature of every obscure language you love is a fail. It's the same fail I've heard over and over from the lisp people for 20+ years.
I know females that say "guys" referring to both males and females.
That which is not explicitly forbidden is by default permitted becomes that which is not explicitly permitted is by default forbidden.

You tell your "public servant" what you want to do, and he decides if you will be allowed and how much it will cost you to obtain that permission.
Or as my anti-motivational book will be called:

"If You're So Smart, Why Are You A Motivational Speaker?"

I just, errr, haven't got round to writing it yet.
The offers were mostly to work in office setting, but, I was once asked to work in home of a film actor here, through a contact of mine.
It depends on the job, I think. I'm not even a C++ wizard myself, and yet it's pretty easy for me to tell apart the people who've been doing it for 6 months versus 6 years. If they're good, both will know the language in some sense; the main difference is that the one who's been doing it for 6 years will have a much bigger mental database of gotchas to be aware of, idioms to use in common situations, interaction between features, etc.

Somewhat true for C also. It's a much smaller language, but there's a fair amount of best-practice and idiom to pick up to be a great C programmer.
This is terribly sad and I'm sorry for your family and your neighbors. You have somehow trained yourself to see your locality through the abstractions used by organizations that reside elsewhere. Instead of seeing the child, the water, the table, the lemons and the sugar you see an indistinguishable member of a data set called "street vendors" or "foodservice" or "business establishments." Ironically the ability to use one's senses to observe one's surroundings helps one to create better laws, so your interest in regulating lemonade stands helps in a small way (as you only vote and talk to people) to create poorer regulation.
How long have you been out of grad school?

If you are still in grad school... Write us back in ten years and tell us how academia is coming along. Meanwhile, carpe diem.

If you're out of grad school, tell us how much more awesome your career is than those of your relatively-untrained peers. More money? More respect? More challenges? What?

I went to grad school, and then I did a postdoc, and these things were indeed very fun hobbies [1], though very very expensive in lost income and opportunity cost. But now I support a large number of PHP apps, make significantly more money than I did as a researcher, have significantly more impact on human lives than as a researcher, work less hard than a researcher... And am, gosh, approximately ten years behind my peers career-wise. Oh, those expensive hobbies!

Still, nothing wrong with having hobbies. Just do be sure to know the difference between hobby and career. It can be similar to the difference between the transient and the steady-state.

And if you're out of grad school and have managed to secure an awesome steady-state career as an academic researcher with job security and good pay and time to spend with your family, your other hobbies, and your community, please do write back and tell us again how arrogant we are.

---

[1] In much the same way, I imagine, that the triathlon is fun.
Article with photo of logo: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/10/26/german-family-owne...
It's a shift from the philosophy "that which is not expressly forbidden is permitted" to "that which is not expressly permitted is forbidden".

It seems it's good to have health inspectors, and shut down the dodgy operators. It's also good to force restaurants to follow good practices. But the regulations always seem to grow, and don't always prevent disasters.

The problem is, disasters are "black swan" events. Builders take reasonable steps to avoid hitting their fingers with hammers, because it's a high incidence / small impact kind of thing. But low incidence / high impact things (like cutting off your hand with a buzzsaw) need a bit of regulation.

The problem is, regulation doesn't work. Someone will put up a sign spelling out how to use the buzzsaw, which people will follow for about 30 seconds before putting their hands in danger again.

You need education (safety signs), but you also need enforcement. And one of the best methods of enforcement is encouraging whistle-blowers. Whenever a real disaster happens, there's usually a clear paper trail of people making complaints about the potential hazard. People know the risk, but aren't able to escalate it to someone who can force mitigation. Obviously this is a sort of inverted survivor bias (no-one cares about paper trails when there's no body), but the point remains - people usually knew the disaster was waiting to happen, and weren't able to figure out what to do about it.

The most important regulation (I believe) is that safety complaints need to be made, and dealt with. No system is perfect, but overregulation encourages a system that looks perfect on paper while problems go unnoticed.
Inadequate security breeches, Stuart, Martin County, FL
Ask HN: have you ever marketed the same product under two different names?
I remember that, a few years ago, two French smog check companies had ad campaigns explicitely comparing each other, even though they were actually owned by the same group and were providing the same service, just under two different brands.

The goal was to raise awareness of both brands at the same time and make each other look like a leader in the market: if company A is comparing itself to company B, it must be because company B is a leader. (didn't Fedex do something like that by presenting itself as #2?)

I can find plenty of reasons why it would be a terrible idea: brand dilution, distraction from actually building the product, extra work…

But I can also think of reasons why it might work: you're effectively A/B testing your whole branding; if you create a market, having two "players" makes it look more important; in some cases, people want to be able to compare, even if the products end up being the same thing, etc.

What do you think? Have you done it? Do you have examples of successes or failures with that?
Anak Indigo
I had the same expectation, thought it would be a witty article on some over-zealous law enforcement on small businesses or similar. But shutting down actual lemonade stands run by a few kids? I'm very surprised this is actually real. How silly.
"parallelizing a cellular automaton is trivial" != "build my own, special-purpose hardware"

You can parallelize a cellular automaton trivially with any form of parallel computation, from multiple cores, to a GPU, to an FGPA. Hence my skepticism that their application is particularly revolutionary or brain-relevant, as the article seems to imply.

As for FPGAs you can get them fairly cheaply if you aren't looking for a top of the line beast. [1] Given that you can emulate anything up to and including a Pentium on a sufficiently powerful FPGA, I fail to see how you are "limited by the manufacturers design choices" or why you can't "apply a wide range of computational topologies" on one.

In any event, the breathless tone of the article about "brain-like" computing and this somehow being a parallelism silver bullet are unwarranted.
Buy your kids a soda machine and teach them real business.
I think people assume fun HTML5 HN links are probably going to use Javascript
To hear the police talk about their budgets and shortages nowadays, yes.
Does Flash work fine on other mobile devices? Every report I've heard indicates that it performs badly (to the point that watching video doesn't really work) and uses a great deal of power, although my sources certainly could be biased.
Which field? Materials Science? Parallelizing CAs?
Here's the Instapundit in 2004 on how "Terrorists Attacked Gun Control Movement": http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,41735,00.html The Instapundit posted this as a note to a link "Gallup: Self-reported gun ownership rises, especially among women, Dems": http://dailycaller.com/2011/10/27/gallup-self-reported-gun-o...

It's got some good theories, and I'd expand on the point that "though it is little publicized, much of the gun-control movement’s financial and institutional support comes from non-evangelical Protestant denominations". The United Methodist Church (one of several different Methodist denominations in the US) established the National Coalition to Ban Handguns (now the Coalition Against Gun Violence), which at last count had an office in their D.C. HQ, etc. etc. That denomination's option on when self-defense is warranted is quite vile. From footnote number 11 of a paper by Don Kates (another good pro-gun author):

Though implicit in the sources already cited, the immorality of owning a firearm for self-defense is most explicitly avowed by the Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church which founded, and still sponsors, NCBH. The Methodist Board of Church and Society deems it a victim's moral duty to submit to whatever a criminal demands rather than do anything that might imperil a rapist's life. The editor of its official publication rhetorically poses the question "Is the Robber My Brother" and answers "yes," arguing that although the burglary victim or the "woman accosted in the park by a rapist is [not] likely to consider the violator to be a neighbor whose safety is of immediate concern, [c]riminals are members of the larger community no less than are others. As such they are our neighbors or, as Jesus put it, our brothers." Allen Brockway, But the Bible Doesn't Mention Pistols, Engage-Social Action Forum, at 39-40 (May, 1977) (This article also appears in a separate pamphlet put out by the Methodist Board of Church and Society under the title Handguns in the United States.)...."

That's in: http://www.guncite.com/journals/krealsym.html
What this article fails to state is that its not about the "Apple" trademark. Apple holds the trademark for "Apple Cafe" (background: http://blog.guifx.com/2009/06/03/the-apple-store-that-almost...) in the corresponding category that the Apfelkind cafe is applying for (afaik something like "entertainment and consumption"). So its not as arbitrary as some try to put it. Whether the practice of holding to trademarks forever by enforcing them makes sense is a different story.
Make native phone apps with Construct 2 and PhoneGap
I think it's hilarious that Forbes is framing this sort of thing as crazy-berserk anti-business activity, when it's just a valid to interpret it as pro-big-business activity.

The fees and licenses are barriers to entry that prevent established businesses from having to compete with a thousand nobodies. To an established business, the permit and license costs are trivial.

Once your food stand / hot dog cart business reaches a certain level of reliable revenue, it's rational to support increases in license costs for this very reason. I don't know, of course, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that this is exactly what happened.
As described, no independent validation, power cable connected, all smoke and mirrors; it's an egregious wrong to call that a "test".
Microsoft made the same statements about Flash for IE10 on tablets with Metro UI.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/09/no-flash-windows-8-me...

Would they have not made this statement if it were not for Apple?
Hm, apparently, there are at least two meanings of "how Linux works".

To learn how Linux works, I would recommend Linux internals, because from skimming the TOC, it seems similar to "UNIX internals, the new frontiers". The latter book does not mention Linux, but probably learns you more about what I would describe as "how Linux works" than this book.

This book is more of a 'how do you build a new distribution from scratch'. Doing that will learn you a bit about the userland tools and their dependencies. That can be fun to do and useful, but it is a different thing.
Really? I thought Adobe had some say into how well Flash works. I was under the impression if Adobe could have gotten together some code that actually worked well it could have had possibly had a chance. It appears I should have been blaming Steve Jobs for not fixing another company's crippled technology.

Flash's crashing 3 times for me this morning, across two computers, shows Adobe's commitment to excellence.
Forza 4 & Gears of War 3 Reviews -  what a cool game
Add to that it's all being done by an ex-convict entrepreneur and it looks to me like the only reason this is a story is because it's a story. He did a good job hyping it.
I have a TouchPad, Droid X, and CR48 and Flash seems to work great on all of them - Flash outperforms HTML5 at least for this example. One major issue is the sheer content of Flash advertisements which will drain your battery if you don't set the "touch to enable" option. Obviously this isn't an issue with the technology though and would (will) happen to HTML5.

The good thing is HTML5 performance will continue to improve across browsers. The bad news is that devs will still need to tediously test across every browser and mobile device.
Quite nice, might need a few more options/tweaks.

For younger kids, you might want to have fewer colors, and make the color circles on the palette bigger. It would be nice if the interface rotated on page where you choose the photo. And a way to clear the photo completely, as opposed to having to paint it all in white. I looked for an undo button, but I think it was just reflexive... you probably don't need it. Something that looks like an eraser might be good for kids, as opposed to painting with white. And maybe a few more drawings with big blocks to color and less small nooks to fill (hard for kids).

Overall, great MVP.
Don’t you have to use a trademark if you want to keep it or am I thinking of something else?
There's already options that are at least closer: iTunes, Amazon VOD, Youtube, etc.
No; the pointer-to-Foo will always point to the original Foo (unless it's reassigned). The point of the example is to show that type safety depends on not having access explicit heap management.

You're more likely to get silent data corruption without memory safety, than with it.

It has nothing to do with Java specifically, FWIW. Ruby, Python, shell script, C#, Haskell, they are all memory safe. It's a big church.
Well I do agree, Adobe totally dropped the ball. However, it seems to be stable for me across several windows machines, linux, touchpad, and even Android. Now that it's "more" stable, iOS users don't have a choice to install it. Why?
Fascinating article, but I'd still like to know more about that 8th figure on the inflation model. We are told that the y-axis represents energy, but what is the x-axis? It clearly isn't time because it's being measured in phi over something measured in GeV.
Ask HN: How to get into Startup School without being admitted?
I got a long way here, would be a pity to stay outside the doors.
And for anybody still reading...some "Knopfler Bends":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wADwIZ6V3NY
Poland's Hardware Hackers
Leaving aside the speculation about whether this is real or not, the E-Cat is not cold fusion.

Rossi: "is not cold fusion but weak [force] nuclear reactions."

New energy times quote from Rossi - http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2011/36/3626-energycatalyz...
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer
What kind of buddhist was Steve Jobs, really?
He did say 'stop ridiculing' and not 'stop criticizing'

Yes, but in the example he gave when he pointed out that even himself falls for that, he says "instead of complimenting it or saying what I liked about the idea, my first comments were massive flaws I saw in the idea and how it could all fail."

This shouldn't be confused with ridiculing.
That's precisely my point. The question in the businessman's head is "are you one of the decent ones? are we getting our money's worth?"
The fact that potential terrorists know that the security in the US is so high is most likely stopping many from attempting attacks in the first place.

You also can't say they've never caught a terrorist. There have been many stories on the news in the past couple of years about the TSA catching potential terrorists.

It reminds me of all the Y2K people that said: "See, nothing happened. Everything was fine!" When 1000s of man hours went into preventing computer problems.

"terrorizing millions of citizens"

I suppose your definition of terrorism includes checking your shoes and belongings for contraband. I've flown a lot in the last couple of years and the security is a pain-in-the-ass, but necessary. I would rather be safe in this situation. The US has many enemies.
You have to enforce it, which is why companies are so aggressive with trademarks. Patents are a different story.
If they used US tax dollars to buy this, there would be serious hell to pay.
Yes you do. But thats US law, your mileage may vary in Germany...
I don't think this is categorically true. Critical responses to ideas are also a cultural thing (think: Americans tend to be over-the-top positive, Eastern Europeans tend to be bluntly negative).
I would like to see proof of this.
Perpetual motion doesn't need testing, and never did. It is a gross violation of thermodynamics, all of the science that has gone into that is sufficient. The so called inventors of cold fusion machines should make perhaps even the slightest attempt to not look like skuzzballs and actually demonstrate their work, then ask for reproductions.
Keratin Treatment - Some expert advice from a user for 5 years
This kind of science has always been hard for me to integrate. Thinking as a Bayesian, these arguments seem to be meant to influence my "prior" over possible initial states or natures of the universe. I'm not accustomed to that.

I'm used to science presenting me with evidence meant to influence my "posterior". I can handle that.
That’s not what I mean. Here is what the Wikpedia article about trademarks says: “Trademarks rights must be maintained through actual lawful use of the trademark. These rights will cease if a mark is not actively used for a period of time, normally 5 years in most jurisdictions.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark#Maintaining_rights)

I’m not sure whether or how this applies to this case.