skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Parsing a byte and two length-prefixed strings is harder than a text-based protocol? I'm having a hard time believing anyone could think that.
The WireWorld Computer
This particular publication may add new data, but this basic finding about London cabbies is years old - it won the Ig Nobel prize years ago. Not sure if the previous work was by the same research group or a different one.

No mention of that in the article, of course, because press-release science exists in a timeless vacuum independent of context or references.

EDIT: Not surprisingly, the folks at the Annals of Improbable Research are better science journalists than average: http://www.improbable.com/2011/12/09/taxi-driver-brains-a-fu...
You should be able to figure out what the direct link is or you can just google it.
OK, now thanks to Wikipedia, I have a vague idea of what a higgs boson is and why it is important. But could someone explain to me what those sigma's are (in non Sheldon Cooper terms)? Is it a measure of the degree of certainty of the particle actually being there?
Drag them? How do I do that on my iPad? #mobilefail
A very salient point, which is a frequent discussion topic on HN. If you are interested, the following books are excellent primers:

http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-Machine-Accelerating-eboo...

http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/
COBRA payments for health care are what the company paid for your healthcare, not just your portion. I worked at a large Fortune 500, my monthly premium was (2006) about $150 a month. COBRA was $985 a month. Personally purchased Family insurance plan was $300 month (though hard to compare these plans for their benefits, just the dollars). Yes, if the large company did a great job in negotiating, super, it may be lower than individual plans.

Having a baby has some uncertainty; is the baby growing fine, is the mother doing well, how will the birth go, what about the first year, etc. That is why I suggest looking at the total costs, the mother's health, and what financially you are willing to take on up front with an HSA. Sorry I do not have a clear path for making a decision.

HSA: there are two parts to this. The high deductible healthcare plan and the HSA account admin. For a healthcare charges up to your high deductible you would pay for it with your HSA debit card or electronic check. The amount still gets sent in to the insurance company so they can record it.

Once your deductible is reached then healthcare costs would still be sent to the insurance company, and based on coverage, the insurance would pay its part and any remainder would be paid by you, with your HSA account.

Any reimbursements issues would be with the insurance plan, hopefully not with the HSA.
I don't think there is any disagreement about the speed. NaCl will be faster than Flash and other options.

But consider that Alchemy will run in 98% of web browsers (because that is how much range Flash has), while NaCl will only run in Chrome. So there is a difference of about 4X in market share.

I'm not saying Alchemy is a perfect solution. Each option in this area (Alchemy, NaCl, JS) has different advantages and disadvantages.
Much (most?) British comedy is cringe comedy.
Opportunity cost means exactly what he thinks it means. The idea is that it might look cheaper to develop technology in-house, but if it takes longer to build than buy, the company is losing out on sales during the time it's building. It also could be losing out on early-mover advantages. Those reductions in revenue are called the opportunity cost (because the size of the opportunity is smaller).

Factoring in the opportunity cost may make buying a more attractive option. Keeping opportunity cost in mind can help the seller get a much better price than they would if they just considered the acquirer's cost to duplicate heir technology.
To become a cab driver in London, you have to acquire "The Knowledge," which is their fancy way of saying that you have to memorize all the streets in London. It's quite a process that takes most three to four years to complete.

Crazy. Any bets on for how long they are going to continue this practice? Seems almost as redundant as to teach them how to drive a horse buggy just for the time their engine is dead.
The main point to me is we still insist on this being engineering as opposed to creative writing.

No-one sets out the specifications for a novel, or even
a marketing report.
The Velvets are The Velvet Underground, a New York band best known for songs like "Who Loves The Sun", "Sweet Jane", and "Heroin". They're one of the precursors to punk music.

Listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xcwt9mSbYE

The joke is, almost nobody bought the first Velvets album, but everyone who did started a band. Which brings us to the Pixies, which is a Boston band from the late eighties that combined sounds from the Velvets, surf rock, punk, and "college rock" indie like Husker Du and is more or less the greatest band of all time sorry Daniel but it's true.

Listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdzoK5jwESM

All this is just to build an elaborate and overwrought metaphor; Kurt Cobain from Nirvana famously claimed that everything on Nevermind, their best-known album, was more or less lifted directly from the Pixies. The Pixies are another band notorious for being more influential than commercially successful.

So the point being, Peopleware, decades old, blog posts today, &c, you get it.
Well this alternative (http://www.jetlev-flyer.com/) is $80K USD so the price seems incredibly affordable. Assuming it's accurate.
is this something we should worry about? If we, as a civilisation (forget countries for a second) hypothetically replace all labourers by robots, then what? Is it any different from using cheap overseas labour? Will we be able to find something else to do for these people? Should we turn to communism in the long term, if the only 'working' people are software&robotics engineers? We obviously can't all be tech workers, can we? And would that even be useful?
Yep, it was even in the news back in 2000: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/677048.stm

And the 1999 study: http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/4398.full
Or you could just talk to her like a normal person, instead of some little stalkery douchebag.
Automation poses a real threat to the factory worker

Correction: Automation poses a real threat to everyone
Is Beautiful Evidence good?

VDQA is an all-time favorite of mine, and I've even paid to see him talk live about this stuff, but I've found his books got fuzzier and increasingly subjective over time, so that I really don't even remember what Visual Explanations was trying to say anymore.
It's a point of pride amongst cabbies to have the got past the hurdle of attaining 'the knowledge'. And my guess is that their union will be able to pressure the taxi licensing body not to reduce the hurdle, since that is what keeps the 'riff-raff' out.
They've been holding out against GPS for quite a while already, I'm going to guess they'll continue to do so for far beyond what seems beneficial.
You haven't needed a PayPal account to pay through PayPal since at least 2005. Unless the merchant disables "Account Optional", it's just a run-of-the-mill credit card payment form with an option to log in to the side.
Make 1 User Visible Improvement Per Day or Pay a User $1000
I read Misha Glenny's _McMafia_ and it kind of left a bad taste, even before they got to the cybercrime stuff where I knew some of his sources were just making things up. How's _Dark Markets_?

Love that Skiena book.
It worked against Home Depot, "the world’s largest buyer of construction material" [1]. As a result of consumer pressure [2], they turned over a new "green" leaf, and are now lobbying to keep forests sustainable[3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_depot
[2] http://salt.claretianpubs.org/shake/1999/09/ss9909.html
[3] http://www.mongabay.com/external/wsj-home_depot.htm
Believe it or not, new surgical procedures are neither patentable nor approved by any Federal regulator. Typically I think there's an IRB and you ought to have hacked around with some pigs or something. Other than that - take a knife, start cutting. At least that's my understanding.

Has this regime resulted in (a) an absence of innovation, (b) an epidemic of horrific quack surgery disasters, (c) both? I'd love to hear someone argue for applying the drug/device regulation regime to surgical procedures. The argument for the converse sure seems pretty obvious.

Clearly, you can't have the FDA process without patent monopoly protection. If you kill one, you need to kill both. Bearing in mind, of course, that Washington being Washington, nothing short of a revolution can kill either...
I'm not completely satisfied by the explanation. I still have that uneasy feeling that you get when you solve a bug, but an unsolved mystery remains. "Also, I still don't know why not all consoles connected to that PC froze."
It might be also a cultural thing. Brits might be expecting a more "perfect" service while most NYC'ians might be fine with a more improvisation'al service for most of the time and when in need hire just a black cab/car service.
I remain unconvinced that it's crazy. I've been driven in London by a cabbie when there are unexpected road closures and diversions, and there is absolutely no doubt that he did better than any existing system at getting me where I wanted to go efficiently despite the problems.

GPS and SatNav is currently no solution for the streets of London. Remember, it's been there a long time, and initially grew without the existence of cars.
Doug Stanhope has a damn good go at it.
4) Buy a company working on something you are, shut it down, and not worry about the potential competition.
Be careful with that, since individual insurance can and will drop you when things go south. A group plan protects employees from that although rates will go way up if someone has a major health issue of some kind.
I would assume that it is simply the amount of thought and focus that is required to memorize thousands of streets that would cause these increases. I wish there was a control or a group of people that were studying something besides memorization to see if there was truly a difference. The time frame here is 3 to 4 years.
I have so many good ideas of my own, I don't think I would pay for one.
Elbow in 3D Sound
Yes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation . In that first graphical plot, the little σ after the number is lowercase Greek sigma. (The upper case sigma, which may be more recognizable, is Σ, which you may recognize as being used for summation.) Per the chart about halfway down the page, a 5 sigma result means that there is a 1 / 1,744,278 probability that it has come from pure chance.
Source: http://css.dzone.com/articles/mozilla-rejects-native-code
on a 10G planet, 200 miles at 0˚ would be plenty fun to walk..
But the words and actions are entirely out of sync. The fact is that very few running for federal office have any interest in limiting federal power.

Additionally one thing I have found interesting is how folks who supported Obama during the campaign when he promised to reduce the impact of state secrets, create a more open executive, etc. have more or less continued to follow him (more often than not) as he has done the near exact opposite of his promises. Sure we can argue why Gitmo is still operating as a prison, but the executive has made an about face on the "war on terror" (after about a day in office) which quite astounding, though not as surprising as the willingness of Democratic supporters to go along with it.

Of course the excesses of the Bush and Obama years are probably why we have both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall St, but that's a discussion for another time.
Filsh.net: Descargar Audio y Video de YouTube
Beautiful text, this is how engineers should think.
Make real assumptions using all the knowledge they got.
How to prevent drunk users from using a mobile application?
In someways I feel fortunate to not work in gaming. There are so many platforms and languages you've got to hit and probably by the time you've gotten your game's reach maximized the landscape has totally changed. I know Unity is helping to solve this problem but from an outsider's perspective it almost seems like there needs to a really strong standards group like the w3c (maybe there is one for gaming?)
Y2K Finally Caught Up with Me (in JavaScript)
I contacted a journalist through her Facebook account and today just heard from her thanks to the Slate article. She was sorry she did not see my important email.
>The infection, an “I.T. service interruption virus,” has affected systems intermittently, Okun said. Viruses are not an infrequent occurrence at the hospital, she said, but it’s never seen anything like this one.

"Not infrequent"? Imagine if one of those was scraping data and sending it somewhere else, rendering HIPAA and the various security requirements entirely moot.

I really wish more people knew more about computers. Such rampant ignorance gives the few who know even a little such incredible ability to abuse, we should really be taking steps to improve things.
It's an interesting point: if some programmers are x10 productive, shouldn't there be programmer-organizations that are x10 productive?

Some possible explanations:

- an organization's productivity has many other factors that influence its productivity - optimizing part doesn't necessarily translate into the same optimization of the whole. Other factors, such as business skills (e.g. obtaining specifications, negotiating, adroitly managing scope creep, etc)

- it's easy to be x9 more productive if you are creating a "program" instead of a "systems" "product" (Brooks)

- massive productivity results from choosing what to solve, rather than how. I.e. redefining/reframing a problem instead of confronting it directly

- x10 productive programmers work on interesting problems, which are different from those that x1 programmers tackle, so it's hard to make a direct comparison. Who can you compare Jane Street with? RADgametools? If they do have a competitive set, they are probably competing against other x10 programmers - e.g. Id, Unreal, Crytek

Also: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/12/23/why-programmers-are...
They've poorly defined spam. That's their fault.
UFC 140 JONES VS MACHIDA LIVE 
UFC 140: "Jones vs. Machida" is set to take place at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on Sat., Dec. 10, 2011, in the promotion's return to pay-per-view (PPV).

http://ufc140freelivestream.blogspot.com/
Here you go: "Musical training-induced functional reorganization of the adult brain: functional magnetic resonance imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation study on amateur string players."[1]

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15449354
In addition to just memorizing facts, they are building a mental structure for all the connections within the city. I wonder if learning the structure of any large system would have the same effect? For example, a large software system, the economic system, or the political system -- where you understand the relationships of all the political players.
Reminds me of the time I had written a physical simulation engine back in grad school and there was a "minus" sign error. Of course, the error was rare enough that we didn't notice it until after the code was used in a real production environment. Tracking down one minus sign in several hundred thousands of lines is a pain. Not to mention the uneasy feeling you get after you solve it, "How was everything ever working correctly before!? What else did we overlook?"
Waterfall has no such history in the software domain. Analogizing software to construction has a long and worthless history, and it has failed to produce one actionable insight that I'm aware of. (It has produced some really dangerous pronouncements about how software engineering should be done, of the kind that you can crash and wreck a company on, though, so there's that.)

The problem is that construction has a completely, radically different cost model than software. If they could possible throw up one building today, tweak it, and throw up another tomorrow, they'd go iterative too. Instead, they have horrifying implementation costs that have no analogy to software; if Waterfall "works" for them it is only because they have no other choices. That's hardly a ringing endorsement, as wpietri observes.
Really, these are anecdotes, not evidence.

And I think he chose his words carefully, he said median, not average. Of course - to paraphrase Greg Wilson[1] - if one were to go further and compare the "best" driver to the "worst" driver, the difference would be to the power of infinity because the worst driver is dead. The comparison is not useful.

I'd love to see some studies on this sort of stuff though.

[1] "Greg Wilson - What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It's True" http://vimeo.com/9270320
That's easy for them to say now. If NaCl becomes the new hot thing, Mozilla will probably change their line.
They went over this phenomena in a 60 minutes piece that chronicles are far more advanced version of this, where the people studied actually remembered a highly detailed version of their entire lives. They call it Superior Autobiographical Memory and I strongly urge people to watch it, the details of the things remembered from 30+ years ago are shocking.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/16/60minutes/main7156...
The difference though is that as you move to a more local level, the ability of people to organize in opposition or support gets greater. There are problems on the state/local level, but not quite the same as on the federal level.

I was in Jakarta recently and saw a diagram of the process to get an ID card. Very clear flow chart, going around in an infinite loop. The way out of this infinite loop, I am told, is to hire an agency to process your application. Of course we call that corruption, but when we pretty much require an immigration attorney in the US to navigate through bringing one's spouse or fiancee into the country, we call that professionalism. I think on one level, we have to accept that some level of corruption is inherent in human organization and it is a problem to be managed rather than eliminated.
Golden rule of spam filtering: a false positive is much, much worse than a false negative. Friends only messaging is a kind of Gordian Knot solution that is admirable in its boldness, but spam is a complex problem that requires a complex solution. Facebook shouldn't be taking the easy way out, especially as it becomes the de facto communication platform.

Just to add a personal data point, I had a very similar experience with the author of the piece. Lost my wallet recently, and lo and behold, I got a Facebook message I never saw till today. Yes, 99% of all the "Other" messages were spam, but this was probably the most important FB message I ever got. Lucky for me I also had an ID card in there that the finder was nice enough to extrapolate my work email address from, but Facebook needs to address this.
Buy that same table at 3 sigma there is still 99% chance that they have found the damn thing.

Isn't it usually accepted that it is statistically significant when p goes above 0.95? If so, why aren't they happy with a 20 times better result?
I think there are two different ideas being mixed up here. As a developer, there is the code and the vision. Given a particular vision, the differences in developer productivity will be small, perhaps even normally distributed.

However, developers are not simple compilers that translate a human problem into a programming solution. There is an artistic, creative side to the process that can radically impact how effective a solution will be.

To muddy things even more, there are developers who are great visionaries but poor coders and vice versa.
It seems like there is a quasi-religious fervor around "climate change" and many are using it as a reason to remake the world in their desired fashion. People can both recognize the validity of climate science -- the planet is getting warmer -- and oppose the political "remedies" being cooked up.

Never waste a crisis, I suppose.
I think it looks pretty damned good, until my eyes fall on to that godawful background image, urgh.
Different fields have different acceptable levels of significance. Social science and engineering fields generally except significance at 95% or 99% levels , physics has higher standards.
Fuck yeah, BBC.
That's incorrect. Maybe you don't notice it if you're running as an admin, but the /Applications directory is admin-owned; since I'm running as a regular user, I need admin credentials to move items to that directory. I also get asked for admin credentials to perform any file operation in the /Applications directory, including those affecting apps I put there under my non-admin account (with admin credentials). You can make a ~/Applications directory for user-owned apps, and you won't need admin privileges to change that, but it would be less secure.
From the link: "And just to be clear, you don't have to join PayPal to do this. You can do it as a one-time thing."
A job opening
What about Ausum.js (pronounced awesome)
Other idea:
Sauce.js (you can keep the same namespace if you remove the vowels)
I've been following (and looked back at) NoScript's development and realized that it does much, much more than blocking execution of scripts and clickjacking protection. XSS-protection, their ABE-system and the ability to block all kinds of media content that I want, are among a few. Much of it appears to be hidden "behind the scenes".
Is that available commercially in the US? I can see many potential applications for something like this.
Just to add on to what hendzen said, they are already rather expensive as it is: $15,000 for 20 years (in Canada, where I'm from). Hardly affordable for the average small-time inventor. A friend of mine whom just patented a method of preventing over-the-shoulder spying for PIN input devices and could only afford to buy patent protection for 1 year (and for some odd reason, it cannot be increased with future payments--so whatever you commit to buying in the outset is how much protection you'll receive, period.) Increasing it further would simply make the price far too prohibitive.

As for limiting the patent validity period, the current 20 years that most nations follow is not all that long depending on the circumstance. A better method (if it's even regulatable) is X years of protection OR until you recoup your original investment + X % of return (whichever occurs first). The problem is to then police the claims of cost to invent the patent, which is a whole can of worms on its own.
You just need to build up your cringe tolerance.
Particle physicists usually require 5 sigma for a discovery. They've apparently had plenty of 3 sigma results that didn't hold up, so they have high standards. 3 sigma to them now is merely the point where people start to get interested in your result.
Trent iCruiser 11000mAh External Battery can keep your iPad powered for weeks
Yup, got the reference. Thanks for the musical links as well.
You'll be able to rent these in tourist shops. I'd wager flying around by yourself gets old after a while anyway, no matter how awesome this seems. Remember your first RC helicopter? How long did you keep playing with it?
AmberCore.js
At that point why not just use the HMAC and drop the weak hash entirely?
Ben Gibbard, sadly.
The Poland state. About 100$ per month. Almost in whole deductible from directly from income tax.

Coverage? My life partner had CT, MRI, fMRI, little more than a week of hospitalization, and a brain tumor removed within a month by one of the top neurosurgeons (by Yelp-like recommendations) in Poland. Additional cost? None.