skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
See this is the problem with press releases of scientific research. If they had said "we think we've got it", people would be clamoring that the Higgs boson particle was found, when it wasn't. If they say (as they did) that they saw signs of it but are hesitant to make claims of its existence until they have firm proof, people make ignorant statements like the one above.
I never understood how do those anti-counterfeiting defenses work.

How come anybody can't buy the tech and make it at home? Is it because you can't just get the machines, or maybe because they're expensive?
It's always hard to talk about these differences because 90% of the time we're actually just chest beating and comparing the length of our respective community's e-penises.

When people complain about PHP they often mean that in an aesthetic, and in an academic sense, the designers of PHP have, arguably, made a lot of poor choices.

What they usually mean is, due to the low barrier of entry coupled with poor aesthetic design choices the PHP community at large seems to have poor engineering standards.

These all being Turing machines though don't prevent it from having quality engineering being applied to it, as is the case of Facebook.

So, the corollary to "only a poor craftsman blames his tools" is "when you only have a hammer everything starts looking like a nail".

I wonder how many people are paid to directly hack on a Ruby implementation vs Python (yay Google) or PHP (yay Facebook).
Point taken, maybe I could rewrite the script :D. Just kidding.
I just wanted to show that a constructive argument like the one you made is appreciated and if you down vote me with that I will be glad, but the point that he gave was not useful to make my sentence skills better :D
Shopping –The Christmas Way
Festivals definitely do bring in a lot of excitement and happiness and along with it, burns holes in our pockets as well. How to manage this pre festival anxiety of shopping and yet enjoy this wonderful season of Advent. Let’s find out.
I couldn't agree more with this blog post. The drastic reduction in friction has allowed me to experiment a lot more painlessly. Mongo may not always be as robust as a mature SQL solution, but the friction is so low I just don't care.
Surely you used opcode caching?
The lessons they learned look very similar to the Y-Combinator selection criteria
Your point is valid, but personally I didn't read the comment as ignorant. What part of it is not true?
Gamasutra's Best Of 2011: Top 5 Major Industry Trends
Looks like the Alpha is back up! Just downloaded it.
Thanks for the feedback, backend is customized PHP framework. Mostly jQuery on the front with AJAX on most pages. The videos are from standard youtube RSS feeds.
I know some great Facebook engineers and some terrible ones. An ex-colleague of mine who loves writing spaghetti php code joined Facebook almost a year ago.

I would say that 30% of Facebook's engineers are top notch, and 70% are just average php and javascript developers.
Since they're hiring so many Googlers one presumes Python would be a top choice, but if you need an opportunity to whine about Ruby/Rails go for it.
The only reason you can't do that from the web is because nobody's build the APIs yet. You can certainly do it from the web once they are available, and they are about to be:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI
And just like that, NFC was killed before it ever even had a chance to mature.

Also -- and it pains me to say this, because until now I have considered him to be a nutcase -- but RMS was right.[1]

[1] http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/031411-richard-stallma...
Agency creates first person shooter using Google Street View
Ask YC: Where to find coders for non-profits?
I am trying to get a non-profit off the ground, with the aim of raising money for starving people in less developed countries. I need a few tech. people willing to work a few hours a week to help me get it off the ground.

Anyone here interested in helping or have any ideas on where I might find suitable volunteers?

Ping my email in my profile if you'd prefer to get in touch direct.

Thanks!
Industry Attackers Pose as Symantec Tech Support
PhoneGap exposes those features to JavaScript through Device APIs.
Canadian Supreme Court to hear arguments against Microsoft, Cargill, ADM
Also possible on Android is for apps to register themselves as link targets for certain domains. For example http://www.github.com addresses can optionally open in the github app.
Why? HipHop is already faster than your Dad's fancy sport car.
This does not surprise me.

I've been selling on Amazon for the past 5 years and they have only gotten worse. As an example, September-mid-November had bugs and glitches that caused sellers to lose sales (customers literally couldn't check out).

Amazon (like always) denied there was even a problem. Another thing that I don't like is their feedback system. Customers can leave feedback for any reason, but if it doesn't fall into a stock set of reasons, a seller can't ever get it removed.

During the Amazon glitch-fest, an item I cancelled wasn't removed from my listings. A customer ordered it and I had to cancel their order. They then left negative feedback. Amazon wouldn't remove it. If I get enough negatives, my account could get banned.

Customers will also almost always win in any dispute, which makes it very easy for scammers. You also can't block customers from buying.

I also love the fact that amazon charges you to collect sales tax (in addition to having to buy a $40/month account, you need to pay 3%).

The only reason I stay is because by far, they have the most amount of traffic and I get sales as a result.

Luckily, I have other sources of income.
Well, Mongo does support queries on embedded objects as described in http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Dot+Notation+%28Reaching...

It might not be exactly what you were looking for, but it could have the same outcome.
Ask HN: How do i find my passion
I am one of those folks who gets excited about everything. The past year, i have worked on 3 projects and finished 2. But my problem is that it's too easy to get me motivated on the next thing leaving what i'm working on in dust. How did you startuppers find your calling?
Nokia exec says iPhone is boring, Android is too complex
Insync is now free
Interactive Marketing at Its Best
You got me. Microsoft totally copied this. Nevermind their history, stretching back 20+ years, of providing support for integrating one application with another. DDE? OLE? COM automation? Yeah, none of those things could possibly be considered precursors to something like contracts.

But no. Microsoft totally ripped off Android here. eye-roll
"All of this should raise some major concerns with everyone."

Well. Yeah. How is it even possible that Google did not perform their own security audit for a new credit card payment tool?
Everything I hear about these sleeping patterns is anecdotal. As far as I'm aware there haven't been any serious studies done of people on these sleeping patterns, and most especially on the health effects (if any) it causes.
Agreed. Being able to pin specific app pages or features [edit]on WP7[/edit] is another example of apps moving towards a linkable page paradigm. Both have merits, and both have scenarios in which they're more suited to their particular environment.

Case in point being anything that requires encryption. I've seen .js implementations, but the web adds so many other threats not faced by apps that could completely undermine its use (depends entirely on the ability of the developer).
Gaming Google Scholar: how highly-cited researcher Ike Antkare was faked [pdf]
This is such a bizarre exercise, albeit interesting in terms of trivia, i guess.

"""Finally I feel that van Gogh’s astounding qualities are available to me."""

I've often felt that nerds (including myself here) shouldn't be allowed near artistically expressive mediums and equipment, such as cameras, because we nerd them up way too much and miss the whole point. And this quote just sums up what i mean. :S A minuscule colour shift reveals Van Gogh's genius? NOPE.
It's also a very good idea to find the right balance with allowing your brain to think, so not setting a fixed time for it, but recognizing when your brain is caught in a situation where it needs to finish a good bunch of thoughts. When you push yourself to get work done, you often end up putting that off for too long and your brain just hits back with a state of general confusion.

If that's the case - you finding yourself with a busy brain that seems incapable of finishing any thought - Stop working and allow it some time off to tie up those loose ends.

I have found that my brain has three modes of working when it comes to creative thinking - The first is in-the-moment thinking, where and work and thinking are one - Synchronous Thinking. The second is finishing up thoughts while I'm doing something else (literally, getting the results to a thought-process out of the blue) - Asynchronous Thinking. The final one is the one described here - Exclusive Thinking.

Learning which of those to employ at a given moment (based on your workflow and mental constitution) is an artform and hard to master, but just being aware of it is already a big step.

(And not to forget - there is also a fourth one - Exclusive Non-Thinking, but that's a whole different area of philosophy and more related to general mental balance than it is to getting work done.)
That is incredible. I'm not really advocating that way of playing - I never really play a word I can't define. But I'm trying to justify an exception for the two-letter-words because they're so useful. They're a bit of a special case - knowing them keeps a game feeling enjoyable and flowing pleasantly.

As for 'learning new words and their meanings', clearly Scrabble isn't that game. But to be fair that isn't its stated aim, either. If you know any good examples I'd love to play them.
"Both of the main detectors, ATLAS and CMS, have uncovered hints of a lightweight Higgs. If it pans out, the only remaining hole in the standard model would be filled.

Even more exciting, a Higgs of this mass, about 125 gigaelectronvolts, would also blast a path to uncharted terrain. Such a lightweight would need at least one new type of particle to stabilise it."

great to hear that there is plan B for LHC if Higgs is finally found :)
I work on a distributed team. Timezone is definitely an issue. But in a startup, folks work when they must, and get the job done.

We use Sococo Teamspace (I work for Sococo). It combines chat, audio conferencing, doc share and video conferencing. Everybody stays on all day. That means you can track what anybody is doing online, know when a meeting is starting, who's talking with whom etc.

Its not perfect, but it sure beats the isolation of working at home, checking email every 10 minutes.
Heh, I don't mind. Anything I say on the internet can and will be used against me.

I appreciate your advice and it's definitely something I plan to follow.
Lol, was about to mention PhoneGap.
It's tough. It took me years of doing exactly what your doing to find it.

I can't tell you how many projects in the past 5 years I've never finished because of this.
http://www.google.com/
I've been developing using MongoDB for a few months now and the thing that always comes back to me as missing is the need to group a set of actions so that they perform atomically. It's not exactly meaning i need transactions (i don't care about the commit/rollback part), just need the need to say - hey server, do X, Y, and Z as a batch so that another thread won't do something in the middle of that.

The general consensus on this is to structure your data so that it encapsulates your business needs in one document structure (which is atomic on changes), but i find it hard to always conform to in the real world.

So now i have to use zookeeper (memcached also works) to setup global locks on those specific batch update actions. I guess it's a small price to pay right? Right?
Amazon charges you to collect sales tax, but Amazon doesn't actually add sales tax to purchases, right? How does this work exactly?
It just works. While still in private beta, it works just fine. And best of all - they just made it free!

For those who don't know - Insynch.com is like dropbox. Only, it syncs with your own Google docs account.
It's the decidedly dismissive tone some people have a problem with.
I fell for a fake Polymer banknote while on holidays in Brazil (the same Ten Reais banknote seen on Wikipedia).

As the top post said, it only needs to fool a human, not be perfect.
>Living in confined spaces [...] is bad enough in a company space where you can actually go home or go out every now and then

The ship is supposed to be parked 12 miles off SF. It's like a regular job, you live in the city and commute by ferry. You don't like it, you stop going, and if they somehow try to prevent you from leaving then international piracy laws come into play.
I always thought it was because basic PHP was so intuitive for anyone familiar with a C-like language.
This is a massive exaggeration. Of course you can find correlation over specific periods between random series. But when you're doing real analysis, the series you use aren't random (like the shape of a mountain). The idea is to draw an inference first, then see what the associated data says.

Of course, anyone beyond the base level of wisdom in this field understands this. It just annoys me that people attempt to diminish the value of statistics with an argument like this.
I was actually not familiar with Intents. Good to know.
Try a startup weekend event. Pitch your idea with passion. Random Hacks of Kindness was held recently. http://rhok.org

All the rules for attracting talent to a VC-funded startup apply. If you are not technical, become the Pied Piper. If you are technical, learn to lead, to take charge.

The short answer is your potential team members are out there. And it is your job to find them. Talk about this with everyone you meet, the idea. Make it less broad, more targeted.
OMG I'm so excited because it is schema-less! Was there something insightful in that blog post that helped it bump to the frontpage, or is it just because it had MongoDB in the title?

Downvote away, but is it too much to ask to upvote meaningful blog posts that present something new?
The thing is, when they can't squeeze any more out of HipHop, the last thing they are likely to do is use one of those [insert-favorite-language-here], because HipHop will be so much faster than any implementation of those other languages. An important point to remember is that languages, as interesting as they are, are simply means to translate ideas into machine code. If they translate it into really fast machine code, it doesn't really matter that much (except academically) how "correct" the language is. I do not enjoy writing in PHP, but I have a lot of respect for the real world work that Facebook is doing with it.
I don't understand whether you're trolling or not. Google doesn't make you pay for access, last I checked.
In the meantime Wikipedia is still the most useful product of the Internet and the biggest database of human knowledge. It's only surpassed in traffic by Google, Facebook, Youtube and Yahoo.

the web serves little purpose other than a
clumsy virtual machine

That clumsy virtual machine can bring you Facebook.com on every mobile phone, regardless of the platform. And if good native apps are now available for Facebook, well, we are talking about Facebook.
While linking to other apps in Android is absolutely trivial and mostly painless (even considering it's java), the more tedious part is to implement the intent service itself. The "<a href=" example is the wrong one, since the call itself is practically a one-liner in java, whereas implementing the equivalent of a "Hello {{name}}, how are you since {{last-visit}}?" response would cause a hell of a lot more headache.

The API is solid though, the linking is done at a very low level, and to be honest when you get the hang of it, it's hard to let go of that awesome feature of the OS. I strongly support the use of RESTful IntentServices and ContentProviders, even if you don't open them to other apps, it's specifically the part that the Android OS got right. Opening them up for other apps to link to is a one-liner config change afterwards.
Sony, Universal, Fox, Google employees caught pirating TV, movies, music
Experience Tsunami-Affected Areas of Japan with Google Street View
Couchbase 2011 - Year in Review
I find it sad that one of the questions I asked myself before clicking the link was "Did he do business with Wikileaks?"
You can link apps in iOS too. You can do a simple test: open safari and type fb://feed and it will open the facebook app and go to your wall.

More:
http://wiki.akosma.com/IPhone_URL_Schemes#Registering_your_o...
Failed to provide details why they closed your account is kind of unacceptable. The least they could do is telling you why the account was banned.
Lamar Smith Waters Down SOPA
Storage Wars: The Battle for Convergence
Not sure whether you're joking, but since this is HN: That clearly ain't an actual mountain range.
Starting next year, they'll collect sales tax on your behalf for a 2.9% surcharge: http://www.internetretailer.com/2011/11/03/amazoncom-play-ta...
If you find yourself sshing into the same machine all the time, or a set of machines with the same properties (i.e. *.example.com), then you can set up an SSH config file with the following contents to do the port forwarding for you, so you don't have to type out a long SSH command every time.

Host remote.example.com
RemoteForward 52698:localhost:52698
I have tried überman for fun two years ago, mostly to practice napping. It did not work at all, people on IRC didn't have success either, but hearsay and wishful thinking were plenty.

It's crazy that Steve Pavlina's series of blog entries is still the #1 reference even though he turned his back on it afterwards.

That said, sleeping less at night and taking a deep nap or two after lunch is awesome. I wish it would've been socially acceptable in my German university. There is a lot of progress to be made (flux et al) without drastic and dangerous sleep cycles.
you can't do from a web page on a mobile phone, like interface with the

camera
Not yet.

GPS
Geolocation: http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html

compass
Slightly related, gyroscopes & device orientation http://slides.html5rocks.com/#slide-orientation

local caching
Loads of ways to locally cache things: http://slides.html5rocks.com/#offline-storage-title

2½ out of 4. Not bad
Terrible. I've been thinking about selling a few items on Amazon but now I'm wary. Thanks for sharing your story, I hope you can somehow get your situation resolved.
This is an awesome article. I've been working on a distributed team and have learned some of these things in a rather painful way. Are all these lessons learned just from experience? A Hacker News type subgroup for distributed teams would be nice to have so we can share experiences learned the hard way so others don't have to. Someone please let me know such a forum exists.
So that said, what specifically is your idea? Imagine it's up and running right now. How does it work? How do you raise money? How are you getting it to the starving people? How are you ensuring it is being used effectively? Congrats for wanting to take this on. I tip my cap in your general direction!
I'm currently working on an Android app, and started looking at couchdb a few days ago. I have to say I'm pretty intrigued, but I'm going to be dealing with location data, so the lack of querying has put me off for now.
I received a warning from Amazon about illegally having two seller accounts and they threatened closure. I believe they picked up on the fact that my girlfriend had a seller account and used my computer to update it. We ended up closing her account down rather than trying to explain to Amazon that they might possibly be wrong.

So depending on where you've managed your account from, you might be associated with all sorts of unsavory characters.
The insinuation that it's all just done for the grant money.
Saudi woman beheaded for 'sorcery'
Linking is really the only feature I care about in the web. And it's not a negligible one. I'm tired of all the Flash animations, the AJAX updates or other fade-ins and shiny effects. It looks pretty, but I'm not connecting to a website to watch a fashion show, I'm really here for the content.

I wish we could go back to a more "HTML-only" oriented web. You still find some of those (usually with old Unix hackers or computer scientist) and they're amazingly enjoyable to read. Also, parsing them and running grep/sed/awk/... is a breeze. Am I crazy to ask for data I can manipulate easily?
TL;DR: Something about marketing and science.
They did more or less say why: that their algorithms determined he was a dupe account of another banned seller. Presumably they don't want to give more details so people who really are making illicit duplicate accounts can't use the data to tune their avoidance strategies. But if there are false-positives, that's definitely super-frustrating.
I believe native and browser-based apps can and will coexist.

As a web developer, I've had my share of frustrations with the browser and I certainly would welcome a more flexible and feature rich alternative for some use cases.

To give an example, I can see native development overturn browser dominance in the manufacturing of Content Management Systems. For years these apps have been tied to browser technology and their usability and features have been limited because of it. Sure it makes them easy to deploy (all you need is a browser), but in exchange you get crappy wysiwygs, lack of remote access (ftp, ssh), image editing that sucks and a string of other annoyances that we've simply learn to accept out of convention.

But when you think of it, there's no reason it should be like this. Organizations typically only have a handful of people that require access to the admin panel. You could simply have them install a native client that communicates with the server via http, exactly like the browser does, but offers a much more elaborate API. The added bonus would be the possibility to easily delegate various other tasks to other tools (Unix style).

Other normal web users (consumers) can continue to access the frontend (as opposed to the admin panel) via browsers.

This is a future I can definitely embrace.
He practiced his Scala to get back at me, which is pretty cool =)

Totally worth the downvotes my comment receives.
As an aside, there are an enormous number of ways to deploy a modern perl application. For anyone who is curious, see slides 30 through 79 of http://www.slideshare.net/miyagawa/deploying-plack-web-appli...
Diagnostic accuracy of canine scent detection in lung and breast cancers
Strobing high resolution camera with picosecond time resolution
I know it may not be much consolation, but many people go through such phases at least once (or even more) in their life.

Think of it as a phase, which will leave you more skilled and happy when it's done.

When passing through a phase of feeling worthless, it is common to become inundated with things and not being able to take tasks to completion. The trick is to set small achievable goals. Make goals that will take no more than a couple of hours to couple of days to accomplish (start small if you can). Every time you complete something, cross it off your list. Every time you cross an item, it will give you a feeling of accomplishment and confidence.

Try using the Pomodoro technique to stay focused. It has helped a lot of people (myself included), and it may help you too.

I have a website for peer based learning of various computer science topics. I will be glad if it helps you in any way. You can check it out at http://diycomputerscience.com/

Remember that such phases often happen to bring about growth, and you will come out of this better off.

Take care.