skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see how incomprehensible amount of legalese can help more than it hurts.

Sure there are some useful gems in legal system, but most of the laws are more of a burden.

Yes, we need government, but we need smaller government and smaller government is more efficient.

Government gridlock reduces government and makes it more efficient. Really useful bills still can go through gridlock, but amount of legal junk is significantly decreased.

Less legal junk output results in improving economy. You can actually see that unemployment rate started to improve in 2011 - the year when Republicans took over Congress while Obama (Democrat) still holds President office.

http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_&...

Comparing US Government with Google is not correct, because US Government is much bigger and is pure monopoly, while Google functions in competitive environment.
I just read the paper. The authors actually make no claim about the reality of the wave function, so disregard anything I said above (which is still true, but not relevant).

However, they do claim to have disproven the statistical interpretation of QM.

This, however, is impossible: It can't be disproven from within QM, as all it says is the following:

"We have no idea what happens when performing individual measurements. However, let me tell you what you'll see when you repeat the experiment often enough."

All the authors have shown is that their λ mechanism is flawed.
Thanks for this, enjoyed watching it this morning. I took the intro to Modern Physics a few years back and this was a great refresher! So fascinating...
Yep, good observation, it really is the same thing, and amazing people put up with it.
Yahoo Billboard to be decommissioned
Prototype 2 "Welcome To New York" Developer Diary
More Discovery Bay  Real Estate buyers Seek Help with Higher Closing Costs
Darth Vader Requests Spaceship-parking Land in Ukraine
Jobs was a visionary and a tweaker, an artistic/design idealist, and a businessman. he strove for subjective perfection, but ultimately shipped product and charged for it. there is no conflict here. because he was all of these things is a big reason why he accomplished so much and became a billionaire.
My first impression was that the combination of lossy compression and transparency would give WebP better traction (because before designers would have to choose between JPEG and PNG for those features). But lossy compression is mainly useful for photos, and transparency is mainly useful for graphic art. How often would a designer want to apply lossy compression to graphic art? How much would would lossy compression compress graphic art anyway?

Now I'm thinking that the combination of lossy compression and transparency will mainly be useful for adding transparency to photos (as demoed in the article).
Turneul Fericirii
Pentru inscrieri trimite un email la inscrieri@turneulfericirii.info in care sa specifici orasul, data si evenimentul la care te inscrii, iar noi iti vom trimite inapoi contul unde sa-ti autorizezi investitia!
Sendwrite for India: Register as a beta tester to send free postcards
I remember looking for a way to send out postcards online in India while I was in a long distance relationship with my girlfriend who is now my wife. She and I thought that email was unromantic! I couldn't find a single service that met my needs.

I recently saw what SendWrite was doing in the US and thought of creating one for India myself.

Most of the development is done except for the fact that I need to now work out the costs and processes of physically sending email in India.

If anyone is interested, I would love some feedback on the design and usability of the product. I would also like to provide the service free(to an extent) to the beta testers. If you would like to participate, please go here and leave your email address http://mailbhejo.com/ and I will send you an invite in a few days time.
If I release a proprietary software app and users start sharing copies of it for free online, I should have some legal recourse.

I'm really tired of hearing the same old arguments about how somehow this is helping me as a business by giving me "free advertising" and that "it doesn't actually affect sales negatively". It's not and it does. My own stats over the course of 10 years shows me that this is true. Big companies like Microsoft and Adobe can handle it because they have billion dollar budgets. I can't.

The problem isn't necessarily that one copy that's taken. It's the fact that when piracy isn't stopped, people start to first think that it's okay to get your stuff for free..and then they start to expect it, potentially putting you out of business.

Open source falls into a similar category. Except, it's your future job that's getting cheapened. Why would someone hire a software engineer to build an app when they can take a free one and hire much cheaper software mechanics? I've seen it happen already. In 10 years when the current generation (which is used to getting software free and is even more tech savvy than the previous generation) starts taking over current businesses, tech job salaries will be on the decline. I predict a developer union at some point.

I'm not going to take this and just let my business get ruined. I've converted all of my software products to services. Customers essentially are paying per-month for something they would have gotten for a flat-fee.

I don't mind, because it means I can more easily determine my profits for the year and I will make more money in the long-run.
I think part of the problem is that WP is still mostly incomplete (which is a horrifying thought :D).

By which I mean; if you pick a topic to turn into a book your likely to have articles of a wide range of quality (from featured status, the top, to stub, the bare minimum).

Couple that with potentially disparate styles of writing and it can become difficult to stitch several articles into a book form.

Not that people don't do it; the volunteer email support service regularly gets people complaining about the $50 "text book" they bought of Amazon simply being Wikipedia articles.

It's always been in the back of my mind to try and do something like it though; perhaps an "obscure topics" book with some of the more interesting articles put into it.
And if they were in newsstand, maybe they'd have 40% more people, and making even more money.

That said, I'm glad to see people can go at it without Apple as well.
Razboiul pentru Pace
Viata este ceea ce ai. Ce faci cu ea? Ai viata in propriile maini. Iti dai seama ce detii? Nu cred ca esti constient mereu de magia care sta in inima ta. Iti propun ceva: in clipele de ratacire, adu-ti aminte ca inima iti bate pentru a-ti sustine existenta fizica.
OUCH.

Doesn't django let you check if models are valid without saving them?

In rails I can do:

Family.all.select {|f| !f.valid?}
Bradley Horowitz "kind of" explains why pages look like user profiles: https://plus.google.com/113116318008017777871/posts/QBPAvCBa...
Sergey's wife, Anne Wojcicki, is mentioned.

This is interesting because Anne's mother, Esther Wojcicki, is on the board of Creative Commons [1], which is what Wikipedia uses.

------------------------------

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Wojcicki
A decent portion of the latest budget is going into hiring technical staff; and from what I have observed of that "department" things are improving rapidly :)
You can't plug that $10 USB stick into your 60" LCD at home and have a computer.
Sounds like a poor manager to me.

Agreed, sounds like an absolutely abysmal manager. As long as the developer wasn't in the habit of making such mistakes, I would have put her in charge of any future similar changes.
I assure you that if it's cheaper to pay parking tickets than to feed meters, people will stop feeding meters.

Hey look, it actually happened in Mumbai: http://www.freakonomics.com/2007/03/26/how-to-cheat-the-mumb...
I bought an iPad 2 this year and haven't gone back to my Kindle DX since I got it.

The Kindle has a huge advantage in battery life and some advantage in weight, but neither of those are critical in my experience (iPad battery life is sufficient for a day's use, which is good enough for me, and weight is close enough).

e-Ink and LED screens each have advantages in some lighting environments. For my purposes (indoors, airplanes, low light), LED works better.

The iPad has a huge speed advantage over the e-Ink Kindle, which comes into play for any activity with an eBook that goes beyond "read a page/turn the page". Finally, the iPad has better fonts; especially for technical material, the fixed-width font on the Kindle is incredibly annoying (with e.g. the dot on the "i" near-invisible).

[Full disclosure: I work for Apple, but in non-iOS engineering]
The two advantages of using Python for me are being able to use utilities I've already written, and the comprehensive standard library.

For example, I wrote a macro to split long Python function calls into multiple lines, and I could access a parsing function that I already wrote, along with Python's own compile() to detect when I've parsed a complete expression (yes, this one is Python-specific).

I also wrote a macro to submit the current file to a private pastebin, and AFAIK you can't make web requests with Vimscript.
If I occupy it, shouldn't I install it? I'm confused..
I asked an interesting question here, why the Palm Pilot (and Newton) didn't originally ship with a hardware keyboard. It's fascinating to me that devices originally used handwriting recognition, then moved to physical keyboards, then to on-screen keyboards.

http://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-Apple-Newton-and-Palm-Pilot...
Or even better, SELECT(*) FROM some_table - that way the developer won't be tempted to skip the step because of too many records scrolling through their screen... not that I learned that from personal experience or anything ;-)
Django's ORM does (obj.full_clean()), but he's not using Django's ORM, he's using mongoengine, I have no idea if it does.
The Technocratic Nightmare
Language / Library / VM co-evolution in Java SE 8
Interesting. I'm afraid my on-line persona can be equally misleading.
comforting, not.
For bonus points, clone your production db locally and test your script against it a few times first.

Or, you know, have a staging server.
The Two Year Window for Brain Development
Potential lifesaver for anyone using MySQL, you can start the client with --i-am-a-dummy to prevent DELETE or UPDATE statements without a WHERE clause:

http://sql-info.de/mysql/notes/I-am-a-dummy.html
Switching costs for users are too high, that's why i.e. most of their friends can't be bothered to move.
I dunno, I can imagine how accepting donations could make that an even bigger problem.

Selling ads, they'd get a little money from a lot of people. Angering a company that's paying $50 a month isn't a big deal because it's just $50 and if they pull out Wikipedia can sell the ad to somebody else.

On the other hand, in this case they're getting a lot of money from a single person. They might think twice before posting negative information about somebody who just donated $500k.
Das neue Gl�cksspielgesetz in Schleswig-Holstein
Theories on Jobs' character aside, the Jobs biography is an utter mess. Some sentences feel like they were pulled from a 6th grade book report. It's riddled with obvious statements and reads like it should have been published in People magazine. I realize I'm probably being too harsh, but I wish that I felt like Isaacson had invested into this biography, this once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity, the way Jobs likely invested in developing any of his products.
I would love to see this for reddit (all of reddit, and for specific subreddits as well).
That's a huge amount of trust you've placed in bit.ly, and in insecure http. You might at least consider typing out https://bit.ly/newbox so that you only have to trust bit.ly. Better yet, memorize the URL that bit.ly links to.

Also, why do you symlink your dotfiles into your cloned git repo, rather than just checking out the git repo as ~? Personally, I just move the .git directory from the clone to ~, and then "git checkout -f".
Think You're Anonymous? Google Analytics May Prove Otherwise
newly shipping MacBook Air's don't support WebGL.

How new? My MBA is only 2 or 3 months old and WebGL runs fine (and fast) under Chrome 17. Indeed, under the test on the parent link, I get about 500 objects on Canvas, 6000+ on WebGL.
Fax Ad's Broadcast Service
List of Hosting Providers compatible with Node.js
Umm but Linux probably has the largest OS share of embedded devices; smart phones (Android), ADSL / cable routers, et cetera.
Drawing and animating with music sequencers
Watch Buffalo Sabres vs Carolina Hurricanes live stream nhl online tv.
Jobs was no Edison or Einstein. Hopper, Ritchie, Turing, and even Gates contributed more to our collective future...
Everything You Know About Android Malware May be Wrong
"C-w =" equalizes the size of splits. That works fine if you already had them near-equal, but I frequently shrink or maximize split windows, and I don't want them equalizing every time the window resizes.
A long time ago I once had a "rm -Rf ..." in a bash script. Missed a space, and yep, it deleted everything. Luckily the DB wasn't owned by the logged-in user so everything was recoverable. One of these "learning the hard way" examples of what NOT to put in a script (this may sound all very obvious but when you're in a hurry, really stupid mistakes do happen).
Good. Malicious crackers, please destroy as many non-safety-critical water pumps as it takes for people to take security on these systems seriously. It seems most of the industrial controls industry is used to operating on a proprietary network, and when moving to IP their guess at security is "uh, firewall?".
You can, albeit inefficiently, by installing a VNC server on your phone (e.g. https://market.android.com/details?id=org.onaips.vnc). The downside is that -- today -- this requires rooting your phone.

Here's another option -- http://code.google.com/p/androidscreencast/ -- I'm not sure how it works. It claims to show the display when non-elevated, but require root send input.
Wow, and almost a month after AmericaSpace.org broke this story.

http://www.americaspace.org/?p=9946
The main barrier for this are Wikipedia’s authors and editors. Many would feel that Wikimedia is trying to make money off their work – no matter whether that’s a justified view or not. Wikipedia risks alienating large numbers of their authors and editors if they introduce ads.

The Wikipedia authors and editors I have heard speak about this topic seem to be strongly opposed to any kind of commercialization and ads. Writing for Wikipedia is not always fun and sometimes tedious and annoying work. I don’t think Wikipedia can afford to ignore their authors and editors or risk losing them. It’s not like they have to do any work for Wikipedia and it seems like many are doing it for idealistic reasons.

For that reason alone I don’t think it’s very likely that there will ever be ads on Wikipedia.

Wikimedia would have to try very hard to win over as many authors and editors as possible beforehand and would probably also have to give them a lot of say in how ads are implemented and how Wikimedia is run (I think many would demand absolute transparency from Wikimedia and that they justify any and all spending in detail).

Another way to bring ads to Wikipedia might be some sort of grass roots movement from the community. I, however, don’t see anyone who would be willing to start such a movement and I also don’t see how such a movement could win over large numbers.

Wikipedia’s relatively federal structure would certainly allow for interesting experiments. It would be nice to test ads in some smaller Wiki, maybe the Russian or Spanish Wikipedia. That would be a lot more responsible than just introducing ads everywhere. But political pressures inside Wikipedia would require a political genius when it comes to actually implementing that.
Watch out for database locks if you do this.

I once opened a transaction, did an ALTER TABLE, and the site hung until I either committed or rolled back the transaction.
The Kinect Accelerator
Exactly. And it's not like it's a good idea to put your DB in an IOPs enhanced cloud, and your applications in another.
And this obfuscates the point that many web games rely on scripting languages on the server side to handle most tasks. You can't rely on the client to do much game logic without (rightfully) being paranoid about the user themselves interfering with what's in their active memory and that being sent back to your server...
Raytheon gets $10.5M to develop “serious games”
Why should they. It's YOUR government. You do it.
A familiar refrain with questions like this one is "negotiate for that."

The best thing you can get out of these kind of books/articles (IMHO) is empowerment to think independently about the terms you need, and to speak intelligently about those terms in a negotiation.

Don't buy one just to hear about what everyone else has or has not successfully negotiated in the past. That's interesting and relevant, but it's peripheral.

Get the deal you feel you need, or walk. At worst, they'll remember the kid who wasn't a sucker, and you'll respect yourself in the morning.

Update: Do as I say, not as I do. :)
You don't get competition without redundancy.

Anyway, if I were founding a startup today, I would use the Closure suite over Sass/JQuery/random templating engine/etc. Despite having worked quite extensively with JQuery & random templating engines before Google (I even wrote a JQuery plugin that's in use at a dozen or so different companies, judging from the support emails I get), and still using them occasionally to prototype with at Google. Why? Because it's an integrated set of web tools that's better than the competition, because:

1. There's still no alternative to Closure Compiler. It type-checks your JavaScript, checks your dependencies, globally renames properties and variables, strips whitespace, replaces expensive constructs with shorter ones, and does this all basically transparently.

2. There's no alternative to Closure Templates if you want to fill templates on both the client and server sides (alas, if only the server side weren't Java-only). This opens up a lot of possibilities for rich AJAX apps, having an efficient JS templating language.

3. It can globally optimize your CSS classes across JS/HTML/CSS, something that no individual library could ever accomplish. Sass will minify your CSS, removing whitespace. Closure Stylesheets will minify your CSS, and then rename all your CSS classes to the shortest possible identifier.

4. All of this is easily debuggable, with development mode flags to give you the original names, so that you can use meaningful names in your source code and get fast output code that doesn't make your users wait.

5. Closure Templates are trivially internationalizable, and it's not hard to extract all text in them for translation.

6. Closure Stylesheets can Bidi-flip the entire page for RTL languages, so that when you want to launch in Arabic, you don't need to worry about changing all your Sass rules to include a $left variable that's 'left' in LTR languages and 'right' in RTL ones.

7. Closure Library has a wide array of UI widgets, including some pretty esoteric ones.

I'd argue about Closure doing less than Sass. It does less syntactically. But that's not the point; syntax is rarely the bottleneck when programming. Closure lets you completely avoid thinking about several things that are a pain in the ass to get right if you have to do them manually. Like making your JS tight and optimized so your site doesn't take forever to load. Or internationalizing - heaven forbid your users want to use a language other than English to read your site. Or creating separate debug & release versions of your code so you can understand what's going on and still release something lean & mean. Having worked in another corner of Google where many of these things are still handled manually, I guarantee you that you'll lose more productivity on them than on not having nested selectors.
The latest generation wasn't working in my testing. Hmm, well as of Chrome 15/Firefox 7 they were not supported. Would you try out http://drawwith.me/demo and let me know if that works?
The enduring popularity of DVR and Adblock suggest differently.
Django offers a validate function that does exactly that. Unfortunately, the email uniqueness constraint is handled in our save function, due to some backend complexity. So it wouldn't have helped here. Plus, it was a typo that caused the problem, not the function :)
I wish everyone who defends the patent status quo could read and understand this. The ideals they espouse have no resemblance to the reality you describe. Thanks for sharing your insight.
USB stick plus monitor equals an Android computer
Acceleration usually comes as single-trigger or double-trigger.

Single-trigger is what you are talking about: when all of your options vest immediately upon acquisition. It could be argued that this is unfair to those that have worked their full time to earn their full options grant. Usually, in this arrangement, a certain percentage of your shares are subject to the trigger (so, 25% vest immediately, for example). I think it would be unusual for 100% of your options to vest immediately upon acquisition: what if you were acquired a month after you joined?

The second type is double-trigger. Let's say that you have 75% of your options unvested in an acquisition, and you have 3 years remaining to vest at the new company. If they fire you, you lose the rest of your options. Double-trigger acceleration is where your options vest immediately if you are not fired "for cause". That means that, as long as you are not being grossly negligent at your job, the new company can't screw you out of your unvested options by laying you off.

The one thing to remember here, is that a lot of this is subject to your leverage over the company and the leverage the company has with its new acquirer. All of these terms are subject to renegotiation in an acquisition, and anything could change at any time -- look at what happened with Zynga.

Consider it a gentleman's agreement, for the most part. Good people will honor it, shitty people might try to screw you. As with anything, you should only do business with those you trust.

And finally, the absolute best way to make sure you get the full value of your options (as an employee or a founder) is to always make sure you are indispensable to the company. A company who needs you can't screw you.

(final note: IANAL, this is my understanding of how things work)
Or even just a slow update rate on monitors
It depends, if you're working with a smaller database with a smaller team with a smaller client base, there's not as much harm. There could possibly be more harm in having more ceremony for doing simple things.
"Bockris further advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatible and yields optimal penetration capabilities, particularly with regard to existing military systems...."

"How about an AI?"

"Existing military systems and artificial intelligences."

"Jesus Christ. What did you call it?"

"Kuang Grade Mark Eleven."

"It's Chinese?"

"Yes."

Wiliam Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984
Awesome. When I first heard of Thoonk, I failed to grasp its utility, but after reading this I can't wait to try it out.

The ease this will afford in isolating features is really exciting. Anybody else think this after reading the article about Williams, master of the comefrom?
Eh, I doubt it. 1M is pretty impressive for FT's "niche." Unlike the WSJ, it's not dumbed-down for the general public, so it's audience is going to be significantly smaller than a mainstream newspaper.
I'm sure you will get great advice here and in addition would post at www.diehards.org
So they stole username/passwords the SCADA vendor kept for the clients.

There are better ways to gain access to systems. But even then, you have to prevent access to your own systems first...