skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How bad is fragmentation in the Nokia dumbphone ecosystem? I do actually think there's a market there, but trying to support 100+ distinct devices sounds nightmarish.
Judging from past conversations HN has had about things like Silk Road, psilocybin experiments, SOPA/Protect IP, Wikileaks, surveillance, and censorship, the majority have expressed a vehement moral opposition to helping "oppressors" of any kind. They'd probably see writing software for law enforcement the same way you might see writing software for terrorists (though they'd be opposed to writing software for terrorists, too).
Site's down for me
I remember, inserting this in pages with hope to show compass without success.
That isn't the normal way of measuring the length of code in code golfing contests. It's number of normal-sized lines, for some measurement of normal that is less than 1400 characters. Pretty neat, though; just a misleading title.
Checking David Heckerman's web page shows this paper from October 2011 in the Journal of Virology. I don't know how it relates to the news article specifically but it's interesting if you'd like to follow this stream of work.

http://jvi.asm.org/content/early/2011/10/20/JVI.05577-11.abs...

(Disclosure: I work at Microsoft Research, but not on this project.)
Take a wait and see attitude for now. Work in your field and get a sense of the opportunities. In ecology one runs into programming (models, data analysis, etc.) quite often.
"Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S."

Is this even a problem? How often do we have vehicle bombs in the US?
Without much research it sounds like Kepes and Svane got pwnd hard.
@ecaron - On that day,I did not know that someone else from my team was responding to you. As a startup we were just too eager to respond. I had sent you a grand total of two tweets and the second tweet was actually to apologize for the inadvertent ganging up - http://twitpic.com/7oh3ly
It's not at all laughable that most engineers can't translate business or compliance requirements into engineering or UX requirements. It's a different language to them. It's like asking an American to translate Swahili into English. It's possible that a few could do it, but the vast majority would be unable to do so. In this respect, having a domain-experienced programmer is just as "rare" (or even rarer) than a "great" PM.

The programmers are the ones least suited to figuring out what the product should do because they aren't the ones who are going to use it. They approach the problem from a programmer's perspective on the technical requirements of implementation, not on the user's functionality (PM) or usability (UX) requirements. Product Managers design the product from a standpoint of actual domain experience for the end customer to use.

(I say this as someone who has been both a PM and a SE.)
Sure, buy that huge desktop computer, and 27" monitor, mouse, ergonomic keyboard, swivel chair.... to watch youtube videos and use Facebook.

Nope. The desktop computer is dead. Home users will go tablet.

Enterprise users don't use Firefox today, and they probaby won't tomrrow unless something drastic happens.
I don't think PRT will win. The next transportation revolution will not require duplicating the infrastructure we already have.

I used to be enamored with PRT. It seems so logical.

And it might win if you designing a city from scratch and could layout everything to minimize the inconveniences inherent to a fixed track system.

But has it even been implemented in such a new community? No, usually people in even a new community have a strange need to go to other places. There's a system that already works for that. So they simply extend that system a little further and gain access to all of its advantages.

The next revolution in transportation will take advantage of this existing network.
And for our next trick, Python in one line of Brainfuck...
For a in-process key-value store, I'd use BerkeleyDB [1], I think it's pretty much the default solution and it's used by plenty of projects. The free license is copyleft, though, and the commercial license is pricey.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB
What about "publish or perish"? If you spend a year doing a study, then I'd say you're going to publish the results, particularly if a lack of publications is going to mean that you're denied tenure or promotion.

That doesn't square well with the data here.

One possible explanation (and I'm open to others) is that the data shown here are not necessarily representative, but were selected to illustrate a particular idea.
Did you start a blog in 2011? Celebrate it here.
I'm a fan of the "package once, use everywhere" approach.

Clients will use exactly 1 HTTP connection to download exactly 1 gzipped file, which is then cached and recalled from the cache for every subsequent pageview. HTTP overhead is significant! Furthermore, if you have everything in one scope, a Javascript minifier is going to be able to crunch it down significantly more than it could if you have a bunch of separate files in separate scopes.

What you want to avoid doing is executing a ton of JS in the top-level scope. JQuery plugins are great examples here, because they are often function definitions which require parsing, but are not executed until invoked. If you're worried about how much code you're executing per page, you can segment it by creating functions for your individual pages, and then calling the appropriate function on document.ready.

If you end up with 3MB of JS/CSS, then that's probably something that needs to be split up, but for a lot of use cases, combined is just fine. When in doubt, test it on a smartphone over a mobile data connection and see how it feels.
My suggestion is to bite the bullet and learn Haskell
No doubt in part because they benefit from the protection afforded by nation-states. Cruise ships tend to be filled with the citizens of powerful countries (or countries allied to powerful ones).
Thanks for the link. I wonder how hard it would be to make a wave guide for this band. Or of course a cloaking device which obscures THz frequencies.

On the one hand I'm all in favor of driving these around where there may be active IED activity but less thrilled about having them randomly running through traffic, only to suddenly pull me over because I've got 3 bags of fertilizer for my new grass sod lawn.

The older I get the more I realize I haven't thought too hard about the downside of living in the kind of places one reads about in science fiction.
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Yeah, I think that's the problem with these kinds of flame wars. Is freshdesk right that the criticism about them was out of line? Yes. Does responding by saying the criticism "reflects poorly on the intellectual ability of the person making the judgement" and "[criticizer should] exercise better judgement and ethics when making negative comments about a company" seem heavy-handed and just as ridiculous as the initial criticism? In my opinion, yes.

I've had people call me every name in the book over my projects: a copy-cat, a sad and pathetic developer taking advantage of people and those are just a couple off the top of my head. Did I respond by calling those people ignorant or stupid or unethical? No. I just let it be. I feel good about what I'm doing and I keep trying to make products I'm proud of. Haters gonna hate.
More likely is that hot meals will be delivered by a robotic transportation system. The same thing thats happened to a night out at the movies will happen to eating out at a restaurant. Except instead of a disc being delivered by snail mail, tiny robotic vehicles will text you when your meal arrives at the front door.
Any program can be called a "one liner" if you just strip newlines and don't limit the line length.
Despite being on land, Guantanamo is a nice preview of non-"libertarian" implementation of seasteading.
Thank you for sharing - unfortunate that it doesn't get picked up & voted on more - really enjoyed reading :)
Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin
Correct, it was @cloudgroupsyd (Christian Marth), who promptly apologized and explained what message it was trying to originally say.

Though he should've learned from Michael Richards and never said something that stupid in the first place. He had plenty of characters to phrase it right in his original tweet. But you know what they say about hindsight...
Ignore the blogspam, here's the original Linus post:
https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/WTLyn7dq...
this looks sweet. please, if the dev is reading this, make it installable with distribute/easy_install and register it on pypi (http://pypi.python.org/pypi). it's easy to do (see http://docs.python.org/distutils/introduction.html#a-simple-...) and makes everyone's lives simpler...
The idea of the devil in hell with a pitchfork is not from religious doctrine. It's used in satire as a caricature of the devil, witch or insert [evil creature].
IBM, Micron Go 3-D To Boost Memory Performance
I must admit I was disappointed - v2 of the original AmigaOS Brainfuck compiler is a 240 bytes binary, and the C interpreter is 1047 bytes of unobfuscated C source.

1400+ bytes of tightly packed Python just isn't in the same class.
Not in Python.
NEC Medias PP N-01D waterproof smartphone
The erosion in the paid media pyramid
It depends on how big it all is when it comes together.

For example, you'll have 7 plugins (and associated code that runs them) that won't be used at all on the splash screen. That's going to increase load-time when someone hits that page.

If someone hits a page direct and avoids the splash screen, it's not going to be cached in the first place so it'll all be loaded. Only this time they're loading 4 plugins and the related code that won't even be used.

IMO you should compress what's needed for each page. Several smaller downloads is often better than one large download, and you shouldn't be relying on a user's cache to gauge your own site's performance. If you're not going to use it, don't include it.
It does seem that embedded stuff pays badly across Europe. Maybe it's because it's close to the world of electronics development/industrial automation, which is seen (and sees itself) as a bunch of nerds soldering resistors together, and who are hired by guys buildings machines for which they themselves are afraid to ask real money for. As a consequence, the whole sector remains badly paid, working from poorly lid labs with cracked linoleum floors.

(Tangent: I was offered a job once to come work at a developer of medical systems. They gave me a tour of the facility and they showed me the 'desk' I'd be working from. It was literally a back corner of an electronics lab workbench, with a chair that didn't even swivel, right next to a dead plant and with a floor covered with previously-mentioned cracked linoleum that must've been 40 years old. C'mon bro, you serious? The hiring manager looked at me as if I was some sort of prima donna for wanting to work in an environment where I wouldn't feel like a necessary evil type of employee, just above or at about the same level of the guy working the loading dock. I declined the offer (one for which I was a perfect match, profile- and experience-wise, and one that had been open for 9 months because they couldn't find anybody even remotely filfulling the requirements) and then the CEO called me at home asking me why I had declined it, how could that be, such a great offer? He even 'upped' the pay - a whole 1000 euros/year or something like that, completely ridiculous, still below what I was making at the company I already had a job at at the time (I had told them how much I made and they didn't believe me). I told him a variation of 'pay peanuts, get monkeys' and brushed him off - he seemed to be not accustomed to that, weirdly enough.

Anyway, last year I was at a hospital when my wife was pregnant, and I saw that they used the equipment developed at that exact lab. I have to say that I felt quite queasy knowing that important things were decided based on results from machines build by people who would accept jobs under the circumstances there.)
Off the top of my head, I'd say the internet which you are ironically posting this on. The electric lines that are powering your computer. The sewer pipes that carry your waste away from your living space. The streetlamps you travel under at night. The legal system that protects your property from anyone who wants to take it from you. Should I go on?

You know who didn't invent any of those things? The folks living in the liberterian paradise of Vanuatu.
This made me wonder if it was illegal to bombard people with x-rays?

If I had an x-ray emitter gun of some sort, and I walked around blasting people with unhealthy doses of ionizing radiation without their knowledge (it would be silent and unnoticeable), how would I get caught and what would I be prosecuted with?

I feel like it's not too difficult for someone today to build something like that and walk around terrorizing people...
It seems overly emotional to me to write this article.

(Maybe it is perfectly sensible, but to me, it seems overly emotional).
Both the 2003^W1993 attack on the WTC and the Oklahoma City bombing attacks were delivered via truck. It's practically the only way to deliver a big explosive device.
The author, Andy Greenberg, has been covering backscatter and it's legal and health implications for a while. For what it's worth, this is a very old story.

Andy is either currently on book leave (writing about Wikileaks) or just recently back. I believe this is his latest on the topic, from last March: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/03/02/docs-re...
Very raw guide to creating startup cult following
you can't parse any non-regular language on any given computer

It is nice how the author completely ignored LALR parsers[1], peg parsers[2], and so on.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LALR_parser

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing_expression_grammar
Right, that's my point. I assume if I open it on my mobile, it will let me accept their friend request. Unfortunately, I'm not logged into my mobile browser.

The "right thing to do" in Android, is to register those URLs with the app. So that they open in the app.
To people in Oklahoma City... at least once too many times.
I think that in contemporary society, men and women are different---not due to simple biology but due to upbringing---and while this difference isn't what's reflected in so-called 'common sense' psychology, it is a valid difference worth exploring through science.

This raises a problem. Should employers speak to both men and women the same way, or should they take sex into account when speaking to people and phrase things differently?
It's generally accepted that a semicolon (in most languages) means two lines no matter how the spacing goes. In Python, it's particularly tricky to have a complex program evaluate to one statement because of limitations like no assignments in expressions. It's true, though, that this is basically the same as writing Lisp in Python.
Where exactly would one put a space port on a seastead? The minimum safe distance for a launch at Kennedy is something like 2 miles. And launching anything into space from a floating platform . . . let's just say that the basic laws of the universe are not on your side.
Hope, skepticism for cold fusion
Locksmith Lone Tree
For me too now, theres some info on their github page: https://github.com/ql-io/ql.io
I can't say definitively, but here's my two cents about the practice of social interaction....

Changing the way you speak to someone based on a single coarse criteria is a poor way to go about social interaction.

You have an entire person in front of you and can guage how to say something based on your past knowledge of their personality, context, the way they're dressed, their current body language, anything else you've gleaned about them.

If all you know about them is that they are male or female, then you'd best just adopt a neutral posture until more information streams in.

Right now the only thing you can guess at with any real degree of accuracy knowing someones gender is which gender they prefer romantically.
I love this future because it completely routes around the public transportation dilemma we have in the US. The fact is that automated electric vehicles on paved roads would work perfectly here, could completely replace personal cars, would provide huge cost savings, not to mention saving thousands of lives a year from traffic deaths alone.

And this is something we could actually do. The government could take $X billion, get a cost-effective robotic car platform off the ground, start replacing vehicles on a 1-to-1 basis, and outlaw manual driving on public roads inside of 20 years. It would make existing electric vehicle technology perfectly suitable for trips of any length, since you can simply change cars at the charging station and be on your way inside of a minute. Completely feasible.

But alas... Inertia.
Note to other commenters: No one gives a shit that you are an exception. It not surprising that there are outliers or that HN has a lot of them. You either don't understand the non-value of your anecdotal evidence or you are a narcissist who thinks we care about how you talk to your friends.

I expected that most people would be talking about how weird it was that the first application considered was to give a small advantage to niche marketing.

I had always thought the idea of a panopticon society was troubling but if you're telling me that I'll get better targeted spam because marketers will know who my friends are then I'm sold!
Oh come on. The evidence that tech like Rails can be used to build non-toy apps is abundant. When shops like Thoughtworks are bailing on Java for Ruby you know you can no longer shut down rational discussion of choices with weasel words like "toy" and "enterprise class". Rails is not the hammer for every nail but it wasn't long ago that doing the "right" thing meant pounding in every nail with a walrus like J2EE.
My point is that Freshdesk's marketing plan (spam anyone who hints at ZenDesk dissatisifaction) adds credence to the "rip-off" claim.
I'm sure others learned this before me, but it seems to be something you have to experience: Things take so much more work than you expect, and will take a lot longer than you planned (eg post-release building up to good traffic levels).

Also agree with delwin
Exactly. Before this I'd never heard of either one of them. Probably hard to keep in mind from the inside, but for most tech companies, almost nobody knows you exist. Certainly less than that number know about any of your smaller competitors.
Maybe "in one Python statement" would be more appropriate.
If nothing else of value exists on the seastead, there will be a bunch of rich folks with families in rich countries willing to give the invaders lots of money for the promise of their safe return.

Pirates are not picky about how they get their money.
Show HN: Netflix instant movies sorted by reviews.
There's a political saying that should be heeded, "never attack downward."

You risk more by attacking downward and you have less to gain.
Ah, thanks for the github link. It looks like an interesting project although I'm not sure what it brings over a more 'traditional' approach to API consumption
The obvious problem seems to be that he wants a 200km/h speed which causes problems on corners and for getting vehicles into the traffic stream.

This is causing a doubling of his costs which wrecks the business model.

However even a 50 km/h speed ( remember no stopping at lights or for jams ) is going to be good-enough for many urban areas ( perhaps amining higher between suburbs ) so he can bring his cost back down.

The ULTra system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULTra_%28rapid_transit%29 ) currently has a maximum speed of just 40km/h although they are working on faster speeds and reduced spacing between cars.
I think a lot of that will happen.

But what technologies power the vehicles or enable the roads are secondary. The efficiencies gained by reducing vehicle size will slash costs.

A great many people will commute in a single seat vehicle with 50 horsepower if its a quarter of the cost per mile. Especially if they aren't stuck with it the rest of the time. As long as they can just as easily get larger vehicles for other occasions.

As far as alternatives to conventional roads, we already have them in major cities. Some are elevated and some are underground. Today only mass transit uses them, but I fully expect robotic cabs to destroy mass transit. Even people who don't value convenience will ultimately go for them. So subways and elevated railways, once abandoned by trains, will be converted so they can be used by individual vehicles.
Your examples could just as easily be read the other way -- that "jerk", "lazy" and "asshole" are directed at the person whereas "shrill" or "emotional" are towards behaviour. I don't see what criteria you're using to put these examples in one category or the other.
> Nobody anticipated the immense variety of uses that would be dreamed up for the internet, Mr Keenan observes, and the same may apply to...

...any idea you can think of. It's always possible there are upsides to an idea that could not have been imagined beforehand. Technology is littered with them. But it's useful to have some sense of the probability of such upsides, and we can get some idea by looking at those from the past, such as the internet.

The internet has been so successful because it provides communication, better than others in many respects. That's the benefit that makes it valuable to people; the specific technical features that produce it are secondary. There's a long history of improvements in communications technology that have been successful. There's even been the idea that the benefit of airline travel is communication (e.g. for business travel, a large segment).

We can ask if seasteading provides communication - and also if any new idea we might have provides communication. If it does, it will likely enable many unanticipated uses that require communication, and could be as wildly successful as the internet.
... it is that managers call men jerks, lazy or assholes, but they'll say that women are shrill or "too emotional".

I don't really see a distinction. To me calling someone an asshole is equally a personal to calling someone shrill.
http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphan...
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Ask HN: Hiring Dilemma
Is it good to hire a fresh undergraduate who doesn't have any professional experience, but finds you (your company) while looking for the work of his interest, or is it better to hire someone from job portal looking for a change with 1-2 years of experience?

I know it also depends on lots of other factors (e.g. technical & communication skills), but do you think it is worth to hire someone who is interested in your work and give them some time to learn?
isn't logitech's squeeze an alternative? see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_Media_Server etc. i started hacking airplay to work with linux (rewrote the .net client in java), but gave up and bought the logitech hardware instead. it's open - the server is written in perl and runs perfectly on linux - interoperates with a bunch of stuff, and has been around for years, now.
This is my hobby project. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for feature requests. Also I am looking for ways to get traffic, are there any good sites out there to show off new projects and get feedback?
That's awesome. And if Google wanted to do it in the US, they could just rent a freight car, or perhaps even build a set of cameras into a standard freight container.
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