skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I saw the paper referenced at the Trailblazing website. It's a nice visual way of exploring some of the most notable papers from the Royal Society.

http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/
From Print to Web: Creating Print-Quality Typography in the Browser
Seems like student loans would fall into this category.
Did anyone else find this rather rambling? I lost interest after a few paragraphs because it basically read like a recapitulation of easpouse. I'm not saying it was a bad article or anything; to be honest, I'm surprised that it didn't hold my attention given the subject matter.
The parts are pretty standard and the government can potentially buy them by million plus they can easily line up cheap manufacturing.
The OLPC was a unique and novel design with no real momentum behind it.

The main barrier to the success of this device is that since it's a government project at least 50% of the budget will be siphoned off into pork barrelling, ministerial pet projects and 'consultancy fees' to close friends and relatives of the politicians involved. Unless of course Indian politics is unlike any other variety.
Hacker Attacks Targeting Retailers Up 43% | Dell SecureWorks
I resubmitted this story with the non-plagiarized link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3159011
YOU Can Now WIN $3,000.
Thats 1732.5 INR. Thats pretty good. Lower middle-class should have not problem affording this. As it costs less then a family night out in India.
Bulk SMS - Text Marketing by Text Marketer
You can use this:

call_user_func($context->closure);

But yeah, some syntactic sugar would sure be nice. I'd like to see this in a future version of PHP...

($context->closure)();
This is pretty much how the new F-35B (STOVL variant of the Joint Strike Fighter) works. There's a ducted fan in the middle of the plane.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-35C#F-35B
I haven't read the Steve bio yet, however my guess is that his issue lies with the fact that Schmidt was a board member and how that relationship panned out, rather than the specific technology that showed up in Android. If technology of mine showed up in one of my board member's companies, I'd be pretty upset about it as well - but primarily on the basis that the board member "stole" from me instead of upholding his fiduciary obligation to my organization. Its a tricky one, but I think that Steve might have been right in this case.
This might be good for finding places in theaters and planes.
Let's say that for me it was profitable last January and I began to work on iOS in March 2010. Of course it really depends on what you need. You can check the figures in the post to see details.
If "culture" means anything, it refers to something self-sustaining. Initial conditions, which come from the founders, have a large influence. So do the values and behavior of leaders. Any development which is too deviant within an organization is eventually rejected the way an immune system rejects a foreign body. Culture is the agent in that process. That the rejection is executed by middle managers doesn't mean that they invented the culture any more than I personally manage my antibodies.
Compared to the top-end devices currently available it is a mediocre device. But it have the potential to introduce technology to an impressive amount of people. I live in Brazil and three years ago I worked in an international team that included three indian programmers. Only one of them had a personal computer in his house. It is a completly different reality.
haha.. evolution.
I think there's an easy answer to this problem but it gets obscured by an "either/or" mentality. Either you support patents or you think it's ok for Google to outright steal the iPhone interface.

Allow companies to patent innovations but legally force them to license it to others for a "fair price". That way companies can still build on top of each other's innovations but inventors still get financial compensation for their invention.

I recognize there would be a problem in pricing the license but since these cases end up in court anyway (where a judge or jury determines the fair value) I don't see how allowing companies to resolve what "fair price" means would be any different than what we have now. Except it would take out the ambiguity for the consumer(since a company like Google would never have to pull the product from the market).
Do you know anybody who acquires new knowledge by reading patents?

1. Because of the legalese language in which patents are written it's pretty damn hard to even understand what is patented.

2. Even if you understand what the patent is about, it's probably of little help in implementing the thing by yourself, as the patent just describes the general idea.

3. If you indeed understand the idea, you might then come up with an improvement, but there's no benefit for you in publishing it, as the underlying idea is patented, the only one to gain from it is the patent holder.

4. You are encouraged by the system to not read patents, because if you happen to infringe one, your knowledge of the existence of patent can be used against you.
Inglorious Applications
Quite true,but one would argue how many of those minds are actually brilliant.I guess that's what happens,when far too many people are "doing they're own thing" and "solving needs/wants"
What the heck is “Program Management”?
$200K if you count all the benefits, insurance, and tax reductions, $150K base on W2 is equivalent to bare $200K.

Many developers make $150K.
Maybe this is something that many grads might not realize too, as it's quite different in contrast with hiring processes associated with Enterprise Company XYZ.

It's one of my favorite parts about startup culture in general, though. Whenever I hear people saying stuff like this (re: hiring performance vs experience) my first thought is almost always "where do I sign up?!"
A question unanswered is wheter Walter actually has changed at all. Had he had to make life or death decisions before the diagnosis would he truely have acted differently?

Quite often Walter's actions are motivated purely by narcisistic reasons a tendency he showed even at the start of the show.
Right now the documentation is definitely lagging the features a bit.

This is what we offer end customers (i.e. parents): reporting on how much their kids play which apps, breakdown by subject, feedback on how their children are doing (if implemented by the developer), organization of educational apps by subject and age level, and finally recommendations for subsequent app purchases.

What developers get is the following: parents who buy more apps than the average customer, a sales channel via parents looking for their next SmarTots app, usage data of their app broken down by demographic, and a free evaluation of their app by a qualified educator.

We're also offering a few more things on a beta-basis: a system for developers add achievements for children to earn and "anti-achievements" that we call areas for improvement. Parents have been very positive about this kind of reporting. We've also the option of sharing the achievements on FB, which can serve as another marketing channel for app-makers. Also in the pike is the tracking of user data. This will be useful for app-makers in much the same way as analytics are useful for website creators. If you can test what actions users are making, you'll have more data to help you refine and improve the app.

One thing I can offer is help getting the app integrated if you want to give it a try. Either way, thank you for the feedback!
Kendo UI Theme Builder
I'm a CMU grad student and had to take a class using that over the summer. It's a cool idea, but sort of poorly written. Lots of time-outs, seems to only really work well in Firefox.
Congress only wants to investigate because they're hoping to get new sources of data to use against the people.
Halo vs Halo 2
It was more than that. Jobs issue was that Google flat out stole the entire interface. Not the look and feel but the entire thing down to resolution, icon placement, user interactions and app delivery.

He did feel betrayed by Schmidt but he makes it clear he feels animosity towards the whole company (there's a depicted scene where he grudgingly agrees to advise Larry Page because he feels its his duty as an elder statesman)
Deja vu - Apple has pretensions that everyone (and especially its biggest rivals) are stealing from them, while simultaneously copying successful features from countless other products.

The non-recognition of this fact of course is the biggest threat for Apple and non-recognition of pretensions of owning 'innovation' a threat. Because selling pretentiousness is the business model.
Nextdoor launches to bring your real neighborhood online
Is disproof by counter example allowed? Blizzard is one case of a company that has consistently produced masterpiece games in all of their major ip's at least since Diablo, Starcraft I, and Warcraft 3.
This is a nice theory, but Google manages to keep step if new material is produced. Gabor Szabo's tutorial series is really very new, but is the fourth result. The problem is that there is not enough up-to-date material connected with the term "perl tutorial".
“Developers” and the Fundamentals of Business
Please don't use IDE for automated testing.

As it says on the Selenium homepage (http://seleniumhq.org), use Webdriver for testing, and IDE for bug reproduction or exploratory testing.
Selenium IDE is a bad road to go down if you're in any type of continuous deployment environment. Your test suite is unmaintainable after a dozen or so cases. What has worked for me is to use WebDriver directly, and to separate the testing and implementation logic. The testing side is driven by standard JUnit fixtures, and the implementation side follows the page object design pattern. Now even with huge changes or "pivots" to the UI, you only have to update a few xpaths and setter/getters in your page objects.

There's more info here: http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/PageObjects
I think in theory, it's fantastic - the basic tenets of computer science are really fascinating, even abstracted away. I may look like an adult, but it's just a disguise.

It may be that the sample chapter wasn't representative of the rest of the book, but I found it a bit confusing. From an admittedly quick read, I got:

- commentary on jargon
- a mention of red-black trees
- reference to the Traveling Salesman Problem

What I found confusing is that if you have no grounding in CS, you wouldn't even catch the references - they don't seem to play a real part in the story.

If the traveling salesman were trying to find the shortest route to visit everyone, and had been trying for years and years and years on his own, and some days found one that was just a little bit shorter, and it was just enough hope to keep him going...the idea that figuring this out is difficult or impossible is at least well-explained.

I'm sure my algorithms teacher is upset by this, but I've completely forgotten how red-black trees work, and I didn't get a better understanding from that chapter.

I'm not trying to be an armchair critic, and I certainly like the story, but from this particular chapter I'm not completely clear on how it explains CS concepts.
Why do we use xorl to store 0, but mov for 1?

mov $1, %eax
xorl %ebx, %ebx # Why not mov for this one?
mov $0, %ebx # Wouldn't this work as well?

I'm guessing mov would work in either case, but there's some reason people always do the xorl instead?
The subsidized cost is $35, which makes it affordable to pretty much everyone who can afford a mobile phone. Obviously, this is not going to fix India's education problems. I'll go a step further and say that nothing anybody can do will fix all the educational problems in my country within, say, the next 15 years. Having said that, this seems a step in a right direction.
Totally agree. It is a great example of design. Design today is thrown around as something that looks almost Ikea-esque. But in actuality design is the user experience. Design is being thoughtful about the full process associated with a product. They thought of everything.
How to Apply for a Job in Silicon Valley
Hespress maroc
There's not exactly a lack of killer flying drones as it is.
I just got it working with PhantomJS and I must agree it does look a lot better. The problem with external fonts is still there so I'll have to crack open QtWebkit to see if we can't fix that.
But still no metered billing or check-receiving. These two features would really be a killer feature for Recurly/Cheddargetter/Chargify, as opposed to Zuora's $10k/month minimum fees.
Peek inside HP Cloud private beta
This is nitpicking, but no middle-class family can afford to spend 2k on a night out in India. Hell, I was earning a boatload (relatively of course) of money, and I wasn't comfortable spending more than 1k or so on a night out.
This was different. Look at the original Android Prototype: http://techcrunch.com/2007/12/17/android-prototype-lets-hope...

Google scrapped that and then turned around and copied the iPhone. And they copied everything about the iPhone. The resolution was the same. There were the same number of icons per row. Applications placed icons in the same place. You pinched to zoom on both devices. You switched between screens by swiping on both systems. Both systems had an app store (a previously unheard of way to deliver applications).

This isn't Mac vs. Windows or Xerox vs. Mac. This was way above that in the theft department.
I bet you're enunciating clearly and that the mic is not picking up much background noise. (Note that you may be in an environment with some noise but there are easy ways to create noise-cancelling microphones or directional microphones that are very effective. You'd have to check the recording to see how much noise is on it.) I could get the same results from Dragon's voice recognition software with careful enunciation and a bit of practice 10 years ago. It is also well-known how to get very good accuracy on a restricted dictionary. What has not been solved is improving beyond that. Situations in which humans will easily extract speech, so easily that we do things like casually lay music tracks over a speaker without much thought, software will still just fail miserably for, as far as I know.
It has do with paranoia and a government and civil services that have managed very nicely for 200years by automatically keeping all successes and failures secret.

GCHQ invented public key encryption in the 70s years before RSA. But instead of publishing it and making money for British companies and giving British citizens a way to keep their money safe they kept it secret. Note, that keeping the invention secret doesn't improve the security of any data encrypted with it.

They were given permission to publish it in the late 80s - a decade after it was making lots of money for R,S and A. But the permission was pulled at the last minute because the publishing of Spycatcher was proving embarrassing for the government and the natural knee jerk reaction was to keep everything - however tangentially related - secret again.
To grab the screenshots I'm using PhantomJS. The webapp itself is running on the Play framework though.
Is there any evidence that this thing exists anywhere but this specific shop? Because only this is not convincing enough.
It doesn't even have to be 'sugar' like that.

$content->closure()

It could look at the registered methods, then scan for properties of that name that would be closures, then fall back to __call. You could add this to __call with __set() checks for assigned values being closures, but it's rather ugly to have to do that for all class definitions.
Depends on the time frame that you have in mind. If you've been there in the last year or so, you could see yourself spending more than 3-5K for the 1K night out you're referring to.
You're thinking of Word Lens. http://questvisual.com/
He lost me shortly after the sweeping statement that "'Passion' is an excuse used by employers to mistreat their employees." This simply isn't true in all cases. If I'm hiring someone, I want them to be passionate about what they're working on. Even if they work exactly 40 hours a week, it means they'll do better work than someone who just wants a job.
Exactly, which means if Coke had patented the formula, society would be better off.
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The whole "imitate me and I'll sue" mentality is eventually going to stop innovation when we get to a point that you can't even use the same features regardless if they are accomplished in opposite ways.

This reminds me of Ford's stance when Robert Kearns took them to court for his design of the intermittant windshield wiper (the story was made into a movie a while back).
Nearest Neighbors With Apache Pig and Jruby
You're more optimistic than I am. I think the limiting factor in software development is the human brain. It has two critical limitations: an individual mind can only handle so much, and different minds don't compose easily. Yeah, XP was absolutely an attempt to address that. Did it work? Not in my book. It doesn't take the creative process seriously enough - not even close. Instead it regards creative minds as something to be harnessed as a resource (a nicer way of saying exploited). My body rejects that.

Another way of putting this critique is that XP is designed to work inside existing companies that are incapable of tolerating the forms of organization needed to produce software well, when what we ought to be doing is starting new and much smaller organizations, which in the local dialect I believe is called "startups". Of course it's not that easy, because once startups begin to grow, they bring back the old organizational assumptions. But that just means we need more deviant startups.

You, on the other hand, think there exist paradigms of abstraction that can fit the complex systems we're trying to build well enough to make the process tractable. I hope you're right. Certainly some such forms are better than others, so others could be better still.

How do you propose to demonstrate it?
This is perhaps naive, but why are the parameters to a model not considered as part of the model as a whole?
Bing Maps Tile System
> Another thing that Perl seems to lack is orthogonality, I always get the impression that the language allows you to solve the same problem in 10 different ways.

This is a deliberate feature of Perl, whose motto is "There's More Than One Way To Do It".

Not to defend the practice, since the fact that there are 10 ways to do something means that (1) there's a 90% chance that when you look at somebody else's code you can't understand it, unless you learned all 10 ways and (2) at least 50% of those ways are objectively worse than the alternatives, but people will still use them because Perl programmers are encouraged to solve problems in whatever way they can.

Contrast with Python, where "There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it".
wait!! you are saying a family night out in India would cost more than 1700 INR? Unless you are going to a five star restaurant, I am pretty sure this is not the case.

This would be awesome if they don't allow the cost to increase, down the road.
Is this an Easter Egg? When I zoomed out I couldn't find a way to get back in.
Performance. For this example it doesn't matter, but if you're trying to optimize something in assembly it tends to be a good habit.
The xorl instruction uses fewer bytes than the mov. (The movl instruction encoding has the bytes needed for a 32 bit constant, while the xorl instruction encoding would not)
The link for Part 2 seems to have been removed from the site, someone linked Part 2 on G+[0] on Lamernews, where I originally found this part 1 as well.

[0] https://plus.google.com/113789777314020158193/posts/8SekPWzx...
The xorl is one byte smaller, and can be faster. On modern CPUs it's more about the compactness of code than speed, but on some embedded CPUs you can save a cycle or two this way.
There was a similar documentary featuring the memories of the remaining people a coupe of years ago - called "Station X" ? IIRC
Either you support patents or you think it's ok for Google to outright steal the iPhone interface.

What if you think they copied the Palm Pilot GUI?

Music publishing has compulsory licensing, so there's some precedent about how it might work, but music copyrights are nearly as fucked as software patents. In neither case is the root problem addressed.

We need more pirate, less navy.
I think the UK is now like Canada; payments to the card issuer must now be offset against the dearest loan first.
How Google Apps works when actual people use it
Both will work. The xor version is an old trick that many years ago was faster to execute. I do not think that is still the case, but there is still the difference that the XOR opcode is only one byte and the mov version is multiple, so it saves a few bytes in the executable.
Thanks I checked out those sites too and added them to my list of competition for startup news that I've been making.

With your advice I think it would be better to focus on my service based website for now, and let a blog / guides develop on there. Since there is no well-made competition that exists for it. (Either it's an implementation failure or there's simply not a market, but we'll find out after I iterate. :)
Second Backbone. I use Underscore + Backbone + jQuery and it works really well.
Music Man Signature Electric Guitar Purple
Price: $413.15. Halloween Sale $20 off on orders $200 or more.
I like to play guitar, jam out, play the blues, go watch movies. I love movies.
Dane Cook
Yeah, I am really surprised that he was able to do it to both the pope and Obama.
Technological Unemployment/Looking Busy: My Adventures in the Useless Future.
If you clicked the white "backwards" arrow to zoom out and see the storefront (along with neighboring stores), click the "forwards" arrow to get back into the store.
I surrender (working with flow)
Indeed. It feels cliche to refer to something as Orwellian, but damn if this isn't a case study.
Love the idea, but the Street View UI has never felt all that fun to use and it feels worse indoors. Walking around a shop or mall at Street View pace—12-ish steps for every press of a small, non-fixed arrow—is something I hope I never have a reason to do.

The pancake (http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/04/introducing-the-pancake-a-l...) and the city-scale of things make moving on streets more tolerable (though Legoland is not bad: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=legoland&hl=en&ll=33.1...), what's the interface for person-scale, cramped interior navigation? Until there's a solid answer this doesn't seem very enjoyable.
Mass Vision Sunglasses
This is why we flag stories like this.

Zero people on HN are going to speak up for "National Security Letter" gag orders on ISPs.

So instead we'll have a "Price is Right"-style competition to see who can be as hyperbolic as possible "without going over", as you have by drawing an equivalence between post-PATRIOT America and East Germany or Myanmar. Oops! I called you on that! Next contestant!

Try some perspective. A nation of hundreds of millions of people is going to get shit wrong. We barely got out of the gate before we had Alien & Sedition. Just a few decades ago we had HUAC. We're the fine folks who brought us the Tuskegee experiments. At least the people running the show at FBI have a pretense of the public good.

Obviously, despite being too much of a blowhard aspie to avoid ranting back at you, I flagged this story. Hopefully 10 or so more people will too. Regardless how "important" this story is --- a story we've known about for many years now, in its specifics --- there's no purposeful discussion HN is capable of having about it.