skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not only rough doing a startup in Detroit, it's hard to find good people in Detroit, specifically designers and developers that have done "web" stuff before or are even interested in it. You have a lot of people who have worked for the big 3 or GE, but not too many who have picked up "newer" technologies and methodologies that a startup would use.
Unlocking Academic Success with Frame Games for Learning
NASA's Latest Near Orbit Camera Takes Good Shots
Apache considered harmful
That's kind of what I was wondering. Will tech companies ever start lobbying back? They have the money.
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3267187
It makes a huge difference in my experience. I use a 30" most of the time with side-by side, but occasionally use one (sometimes two) of my side monitors (20" in portrait) if the need arises. It is rare for me to use more than just the 30", but if you think about what you'd like to be visible it could be as much as; code, browser, specs/reqs sheet and api/library documentation.

I am getting a laptop for coding soon and plan to get an external USB display to complement it for this reason.

To the OP; just try using two displays for a couple of hours. You'll never go back.
I'm sick of hearing stories about how Groupon is so awful because they ruin businesses. Here's a tip: don't offer coupons you can't honor. Here's another tip: don't offer coupons that will lose you money.

Seriously, 75% off a box of cupcakes? 75% off is what you offer during a fire sale. It's what you offer when you want to ditch the product. It's what HP offered to get rid of their stock of Touchpads. In rare cases, it's what you offer as a loss leader. If that's your only business, that's your fault. There could have been some good from this. She could have gotten repeat business and raised her profits back up. But running to the press to complain that you have too many customers? I would never go back. It's just whiny and self-serving, and gives the company a bad name.

It's not news when someone makes a bad business decision. This is only "news" because it tangentially related to Groupon.
Grooveshark Responds to Claims By Universal
The problem is that there is no reasonable way to draw the line. If the government should remain in the business of providing frontends to their data, where do you draw the line as to where they should and shouldn't go?

It's not as if publishing a smartphone app is exactly "bleeding edge" these days. Third party smartphone apps have existed for almost four years now.

My point is - I fail to see how this is an issue with the government trying to pursue "too much innovation". This could have just as easily happened with an overpriced website contract, but I doubt we'd be sitting around arguing whether or not governments should publish data on a website!
That's a 24-hour-news-network-pundit grade straw man he's created there. The replication strategy used by Cassandra is sourced from the Amazon Dynamo design (shared with Riak and Voldemort) and is intentional. It's not a bug; it's the way it's supposed to operate. There are many large scale distributed systems built on this replication strategy that have excellent durability track records -- Amazon S3 is one of them.

The back pressure argument is laughable. In Cassandra, a write consistency of greater than ONE will ensure the data is replicated to more than one node before acknowledging to the client.
Netflix VP of Engineering on designing a rating system
Thanks for the great answer, I appreciate it :) I'll continue reading up, too.
Doubleplussorry!
Love the concept but fear the implementation. We live in a world where one stupid person tries to feed a grizzly and gets killed, and the 'fix' is to ban hikers / campers from the region where the Grizzlies live. The US has temporarily lost the concept of 'personal responsiblity' and so when someone does something poorly and pays a price, every one who could do it and benefit are banned from participating.

This bill, if it becomes law, will survive until one stupid person loses their 1% net worth and then sues anybody and everybody because they were 'tricked' or otherwise decieved and then the whole thing will become illegal again. The reason the existing rules are not kicked out is because they are setup only to screw 'rich people' who are not considered a 'protected class' by the voters.

Yes, its a bit cynical but you can see evidence of this thinking everywhere. From banning dogs in National parks to making chemistry sets illegal.
Seems the key is timing. Right before taking a free throw, the visualization helps. No benefit to worrying about misses. Three months into a six month development? Then it's better staying up late thinking of the competition. Save the champagne for later.
Quick, try "Turkey". You might get a Sandwich!
Evolving ECMAScript
50% Of Ecommerce Site Visitors Are Logged In To Facebook
From the article:

What is the One True License?
I prefer the MIT license and almost everything we open source at GitHub carries this license. I love this license for several reasons:

It's short. Anyone can read this license and understand exactly what it means without wasting a bunch of money consulting high-octane lawyers.

Enough protection is offered to be relatively sure you won't sue me if something goes wrong when you use my code.

Everyone understands the legal implications of the MIT license. Weird licenses like the WTFPL and the Beer license pretend to be the "ultimate in free licenses" but utterly fail at this goal. These fringe licenses are too vague and unenforceable to be acceptable for use in some companies. On the other side, the GPL is too restrictive and dogmatic to be usable in many cases. I want everyone to benefit from my code. Everyone. That's what Open should mean, and that's what Free should mean.
Any idea which company this is?
One of the strongest arguments is modularity. It's definitely true that you prevent your code from rotting and acquiring random dependencies if you think about how you can export it as a useful open source library.
A bit off-topic, but I'm curious: why do you think that's impressive? I thought it was pretty commonly accepted these days that readable code saves more time than it costs over the life of a project...?
Why do you have that impression?

That makes very little sense to do - every single project? Don't you think someone would have released a library to implement the "new and improved allocator" if everyone needs to use it?
Interesting how fast they distance themselves from SOPA now they know we are paying attention. Won't fool me. I only hope the next SOPA, wich will certainly sound less outrageous, in special when compared to this, is met with equal opposition. SOPA is not commendable. Nor will be its offspring.
Just posting some sort of list of unaccepted challenges would solve most of this problem with relatively little effort, and seems like a large improvement.
I agree with the sentiment, but the correction here is unwarranted. He starts the post with "Here's what I've been doing". Assuming the poster is actually married to a woman, it's not incorrect to use "wife" here. His use of the second person in the list that follows ("your wife" and not "my wife") looks like a grammar mistake, not a sexist goof.
Victor Frankl, IIRC, covers this in his book Man's Search For Meaning. Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who wrote of his concentration camp experiences. One of these concerned a prisoner who was positive that the war would end (and the prisoners would be liberated) on a specific date. The date came and went. The prisoner went with it, dying shortly afterward. The book is a fascinating read about motivations and inner strength.

I've been pretty skeptical myself of the whole "positive visualization" crowd and its various forms. Say, "neuro-linguistic programming".
Would you happen to know if this is Carmack's reverse or something totally unrelated?

Edit: OK. I just googled and it indeed is Carmack's reverse.
Erm, what I mean is that foreigner as in not from the country the project is originating from.

To you, the American were foreigners which further enforces my point that working with foreigners in an issue.

I'm not saying that because I'm American my code is better. I'm saying that because I'm local and I care more I produce better quality.

BTW, in my story some of the most incompetent people were indeed American. The other developer did the best he could, and the recruiter too. The process was broken from the beginning. They wrote really bad documentation, and incorrect formulas. The source was bad, but it took much longer to get all the formulas properly documented and figured out.
Anyone have a non-terminating C compile? (Other than X11. I compiled that from scratch back in ancient times and it took a whole day. At least it seemed like it wasn't going to terminate.)
I think you mean "Adobe" and not "Apple", since "Apple" is not mentioned anywhere in that article.
There's one here:

https://github.com/TTimo/doom3.gpl/blob/master/neo/idlib/Hea...

Surprisingly there's not a lot of platform-specific cruft in that code. The Xbox version of Doom3 must have been a separate code branch.
Do you have a link to the full story? DevX101's link doesn't say anything about DMCA takedown notices.
Suggestions? The Dark Mod looks interesting.

http://www.thedarkmod.com/
Thank god they're getting rid of Knol.
Quake 2 didn't have its own memory allocator either. Maybe the system allocator(s) got better with the years.

http://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/index.php
Some good points, but github doesn't take the place of a community. When it's working well, it helps, but when there is a breakdown of collaboration and communication, you get one of those codebases that has been forked 1298 times where none of the people doing the forking is sharing anything. That's a community fail, not a version control system issue.

I do think that it'd be nice if the ASF offered git alongside svn, and concentrated on the community aspect of things, which it does tend to do fairly well.
Unix Command Line Fu (for beginners)
Yeah, that is how I expect a templating system to work. The one in Rails (modified ERB)works in the same way. It has a SafeBuffer (name taken from memory) class which is a subclass of String. Strings can be converted into the safe class either by escaping or through unsafe conversion which emans that we say the string is safe.
Strictly speaking, there is still some cell division shortly after birth and into the early phases of post-natal development. So the brain increases in size, slightly, via that method. But mostly it is from the elaboration of the dendritic arbors of the existing neurons. The size and branching factors increase many times during development. Check out the beautiful (and stunningly accurate) drawings of the famous neuro-anatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal.

For example, the Purkinje neurons of the cerebellum:

http://www.gladstone.ucsf.edu/wp/2009/06/knowledgegrows/

Note how the number of branches increases to sample more of the volume.
I am a depression patient. It is certainly true that various substances can induce depression. I do not believe that the original poster was implying that depression is without very real biological causes; merely that these causes are more nuanced than the phrase "chemical imbalance" implies. Here is some food for thought.

SSRIs, or serotonin reuptake inhibitors, are the most commonly prescribed antidepressants in the United States due to their relative safety and efficacy. It is widely thought that these drugs achieve effectiveness through their ability to increase serotonin levels in the brain. Now, here comes the mystery: while serotonin levels rise almost immediately following introduction of the drug, the antidepressant effects do not become apparent until several weeks of treatment have passed. Why is that? No one knows for sure, but a few interesting theories have emerged.

The most interesting theory, in my opinion, involves hippocampal neurogenesis and BDNF levels. A few recent studies have shown that one thing that the SSRIs share in common is that they all promote neurogenesis in the hippocampus. A further study showed that the antidepressant effects of SSRIs on behavior in rats exposed to artificially induced stressors could be completely nullified by slightly irradiating the hippocampus, thus negating the growth of new neurons promoted by the SSRIs. The antidepressant effect was gone even though serotonin levels remained elevated.

This conclusion provided compelling but not conclusive evidence that neurogenesis is involved in antidepressant effectiveness. Yet even here, the picture was not altogether clear: while patients diagnosed with clinical depression generally show less hippocampal neurogenesis than controls, it is not at all clear whether this deficit is a cause or effect of clinical depression. Is it possible that depression, once established, can cause physical changes in brain structure? If so, that might explain why cognitive behavioral therapy in conjunction with antidepressant medication is a more effective depression treatment than either of the two alone.

Interestingly enough, strenuous aerobic exercise is known both to be an effective treatment for mild to moderate forms of depression as well as a promoter of hippocampal neurogenesis. An increasing number of psychiatrists are in fact prescribing exercise regimens as treatment for some forms of depression because it seems to work.

The bottom line is: there's a lot we don't know about depression, and while we have effective treatments, the reality is that the causes of depression simply cannot be adequately summed up as a "chemical imbalance." Drugs are appropriate for some patients and inappropriate for others. I encourage anyone interested in the subject to do some reading, as the brain is (at least, to a layman like me) the most fascinating information processing system ever.
"The twelve-factor app stores config in environment variables (often shortened to env vars or env). Env vars are easy to change between deploys without changing any code; unlike config files, there is little chance of them being checked into the code repo accidentally"

OK guess I'm a moron here but....surely the suggestion isn't that a huge set of env vars are entered at the console manually - they have to be in some shell script or file which produces them...which is then...the config file ! Someone help me see what I'm missing here.

Unless the idea is, "well it's a shell script! that's nothing like a config file!" in which case I'll be searching for the HN downmod button I can't wait to have someday.
No, I'm Linacus! http://www.githire.com/user/MostAwesomeDude
This looks like a self-referential issue. If anything, it's a bug in mathematics.
> It's like the rats scattering when the light turns on.

Don't insult the rats.
Unfortunately for the FPGA guys, it seems like in general the closer they get to CPUs the less compelling their product becomes.
When I read the headline but before I read the article, I had the gut "Great, what thing is Google killing now that I'm going to miss" reaction.

After reading the article, I can safely say they're making the right decision killing off all these services (Google Bookmarks Lists, Google Friend Connect, Google Gears, Google Search Timeline, Google Wave, Knol and Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal) as part of their effort to streamline Google. I'm guessing we're nearing the point where we'll start seeing some random projects coming out again, but until then the more people they're putting towards spdy and WebP the more I'm returning to being a Google fan-boy!
The question is: are they not here at all, or are they disconnected by virtue of the lack of a community element. I find the former hard to believe -- some of the biggest tech innovators in the US have come out of the state.

With regard to the latter, that's one fight we're making our own, in the hopes that our combined efforts can foster a more united scene here in MI.
Ghostly International launch iPhone app
I think this sounds ridiculously cool and at $20 I could probably afford to play around with it. But I have no knowledge of hardware, just programming. To me chips just look like thin green rectangular prisms. How would I get it to actually, you know, do stuff?
Objectively, her work is not that great. She wrote simple stories with repetitive plots and cardboard characters. And yet...

It's tempting to try and compare one of her books to, say, one of Louis McMaster Bujold's works, and sneer that McCaffrey was just a hack. And perhaps she was, but that rather misses the point. Bujold started writing in a world that already had McCaffrey in it (and McCaffrey blurbed some of Bujold's early work very positively too).

McCaffrey was a pioneer. No, she wasn't the first, but she was one OF the first, and one of the first to be widely popular, and certainly one of the first female authors to be widely popular. All of which are major achievements.

I couldn't begin to imagine how many kids got their first taste of sci-fi/fantasy because their local library had a pile of McCaffrey's Dragonrider books. And if many of them went on to "better books" later in life, and have barely gave McCaffrey's work another thought in the years since, well...it doesn't change McCaffrey's contribution. There's a non-zero number of readers (and, come to that, authors) who wouldn't be around reading (and writing) if it wasn't for McCaffrey.

RIP Anne McCaffrey.
There is a huge difference between supporting DSP and being good at DSP. My $0.50 MSP430, clocked at 32kHz, "supports" DSP.
It's possible that it's all a politics game. Either some weird political stuff with the people that actually run the BSA or some idea like "Let's not speak out against this because it will hurt competitors like Google" (so they implicitly support it by not speaking out against the BSA's support of it).
Statutory damages are different from an estimated measure of lost profits.

US copyright act: "the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action".

Statutory damages in the US are a minimum of $200 per work and a max of $150k. The minimum is quite the minimum too: "In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200".

s. 504 "Remedies for infringement: Damages and profits" http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.pdf

Also can get lawyer fees under s. 505. So statutory minimum + big legal costs.
The BSA represents its members. How could that not possibly suggest complicit support?
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45 seconds that'll change your game
By the way, if you are interested in the Austrian School of economics, which advocates a free market, the Ludwig van Mises Institute has a very expansive collection of over 4100 articles, books and essays freely availiable as PDFs and eBooks here (http://mises.org/literature.aspx).

Also, I recommend reading about the Keynesian School of Economics, which advocates central planning in the form of a central bank (The Federal Reserve), so you can best make your own decision. Wikipedia has very good introductions to both schools, and can provide a basis for your further readings.
If 15,000 computers was all you needed for AI, we'd have it by now. Major datacenters have way more machines than that, which are far more powerful than a milliwatt microcontroller to boot.
Weedify
Cure Hemroid
"Between nodes there are 18 bit,
bidirectional parallel buses called Comm
Ports. The handshaking on these ports
is trivially simple and the latency and
jitter are low, on the order of gate
delays, tens of picoseconds. When a
node is reading or writing a Comm Port,
it proceeds with no delay if its partner is
ready to transfer data. If the partner is
not yet ready, the node waits until it is.
While waiting, a node’s power
consumption drops, within picoseconds,
to nothing but leakage. When the
partner becomes ready the idle node
resumes its work within picoseconds."

http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/WP002-100...
Just wondering, what's your experience besides Classparrot? It's great but I'd like to see more before getting in a bigger commitment.
SAIC also screwed up the FBI's Virtual Case File, NSA's Trailblazer, New York's CityTime (with a extra helping of fraud thrown in). It would be interesting to hear of any software project they did do which was not a multi hundred million dollar software engineering disaster.
Samsung makes fun of Apple’s fanatics | Where Am I?
Question 1: Why did you run cloc as root?

Hmmm, because of a really bad habit I need to break. ;)
A Look at Tech Companies With IPOs This Year
That has been borne out by my experience so far too.

There have been several successful efforts at writing better performing general-purpose allocators:

* TCMalloc (http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc.html)
* jemalloc (http://www.canonware.com/jemalloc/)

There's a great Facebook Engineering blog post about jemalloc which describes why a fast allocator is needed & why the standard malloc is not always sufficient:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scalable...
I'm an EFF member and strongly support the overall cause, but also strongly disagree with many of its initiatives and positions. I imagine the situation is similar with regards to the BSA and its members, as it is with any group.
Carriers don't have access to the source code AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong but they can only change the "cellular" part of the phone (baseband, carrier packages, etc).
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Can anyone on the inside explain how this kind of thing works?

This is my thinking:

These companies belong to different trade groups. They pay their dues, contribute opinions on different things, but mostly leave these groups alone and go on doing their actual business.

Meanwhile, the trade groups advance their own agenda, given a mostly free hand by their constituency, which again, has better things to do. The group doesn't actually do all that much that's useful, otherwise their staff would be working for real companies. But they shuffle papers around, undertake activities like, say, harass small businesses about software licenses, and generally look like they have a reason for being.

Then, occasionally, these groups will step in dogshit and have to field a bunch of phone calls basically saying "Why the fuck am I paying you dues in exchange for this bad press? Make it go away."

And then the offending group needs to walk back the cat as happened in this blog post.

Plausible? Is that how this works? The explanation with the most incompetence involved seems most likely to me.
Note that this article is about the Apache Software Foundation, not the webserver.
FCC Chairman speaks out against AT&T/T-mobile merger
Maybe their previous strategy was fully backed by most of their members, maybe some members changed their opinion during the last days, maybe some members were always against their previous strategy, maybe the BSA acted somewhat autonomously until members started waking up, it’s hard to say.

One thing I might be willing to infer from the change in direction is that there was no consensus before and that there still isn’t one. I think it’s very plausible that some members were always against and some always for the BSA’s strategy. Members seemingly also decided to solve this problem internally by lobbying for their position privately inside the BSA.
Is this something I would use in the place of something like an Arduino (for example, putting a brain on an RC car)?