skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does BrowserID addresses in any way authorization? Is it compatible with OAuth2?
VizRank: Data Visualization Guided by Machine Learning
>What you're talking about is a "Single Source of Truth"

What is with all the random nonsense comments here lately? I am not suggesting a single source of truth, the person I replied to was. I simply pointed out that if you are trying to have such a source, the database is where to put it, not a shared library that all the codebases maybe use sometimes.
Zynga hopes to turn $10 IPO into $1B
5 Links for Developers and IT Pros 12/16/11
The Male Lead as Entrepreneurs May Be Slipping
What would be the best way for an indie guy with a budget hosting to share an interesting article?

Amazon Cloudfront with the cheap hosting as a custom origin. Use a CNAME like cached.domain.com and share that link. If the original link gets shared, you could at least change the links to images, css, and js to the cdn copy.
I love the picture of the programmers at the bottom of the page. Clearly not the best working conditions even though the office has nice desk space available (see background). Just shows how much more developers are respected now. ...thanks in part to these guys.
they backpeddled much much later by 'reintroducing' some of the aspects of the site that were there before. Thing was, it was really quite a long time after all of the users had left. Initially, imo, the real problem was the shock of change and some serious downtime/bugs in the first 2-4 weeks is what killed it. As an active, dedicated user, not being able to use the site for so long left me no choice but to drop it from my daily habits.
I believe Hitchens point on this is taken directly from the bible. There is no biblical basis for your description of heaven. If you read Revelations, though, heaven is described exactly the way Hitchens described it.

To put it another way, I think when Hitchens calls it "the christian conception" of heaven, it wasn't a description of what certain christians believe, but of the biblical description.
The Year of C.E.O. Failures Explained
An introspective look at David Karp
That seems to be between you and Google. If paying for Google Apps doesn't result in having reliable video hosting, then Google's service may not be worth it. UMG's "rights" don't really come into it if this is a voluntary agreement between Google and UMG.
Satellite View Of China's First Aircraft Carrier
Crunching Data to Stop Baddies Before They Strike
the article generally reeks of employees that are too lazy/complacent/comfortable to pull out the big guns and aim for what they want in a big company

The article is about employees who leave companies. Such people are not lazy, complacent, or comfortable; quite the opposite. They don't like wasting their time playing the games you describe in order to do their jobs. If they have the opportunity to leave for greener pastures, they will. More power to them.
couldn't they just say, assuming iid:

on Thursday you know that the probability that the exam will be on Friday is 1
on Wednesday you know that the probability that the exam will occur Thursday is .5
etc. etc.
on Sunday you know that the probability that the exam will occur on Monday is .2

So if you look at it from (naive) probability, you can never make the 2nd assumption that on Thursday you will not have surprise test.

you could say the pmf is: .2, .5 .8 .17 .5 and the cdf is .2 .25 .33 .5 1 Which from memory looks like a Beta Distribution.
As I understand it, "old age" is a euphemism for "getting X after a certain age", where X is something like cancer.
I don't see this as an example of a bubble. With a track record of success with Vimeo, there's a good chance he'll succeed again in the future. Frankly this is probably a safer bet than a group of founders straight out of college that have some decent traction. He'll know the stumbling blocks and the connections to make things happen. The only thing I'd want to know as an investor is what the salary situation is like. Assuming its nothing or very low, I'd say good investment.
This video is appallingly deceitful. E.g. where he argues that the USSR was not only not socialism, but in fact as far from it as possible. He deftly redefines the core idea of socialism to make it look superficially plausible.

If socialism was ever about one bug thing, it was the collective ownership of the means of production. This was the slogan of all socialist movements, particularly Marxist socialist movements.

And the USSR was exactly that kind of society: the defining feature of its economy was a total ban on private ownership of the "means of production". Meaning, you could own an apartment, a house, a car, a wrench. You could buy and sell goods privately at a market. But you could not own a factory that made toy cars, or a tool shop that sold wrenches, or a company that wrote software. That was owned by the state collectively.

Now of course one can argue that the implementation of this ideal was twisted because e.g. the actual workers at a particular factory didn't control its planning or production, which were governed by the party apparatus. But even if true, (and it's actually not true; centralized control over the means of production is perfectly compatible with Marxism), this is still infinitely closer to the actual ideal of socialism than, say, a capitalist state with an oligarchy at power, where means of production can be and are privately owned. To claim that the USSR was not socialism and in fact some kind of anti-socialism (Chomsky: "as about remote from socialism as you can imagine"), is just such so offensively misleading; such a gross lie, clearly meant to influence people who've never lived in a socialist economy or actually read Marx.

(And it's in fact not true that workers were "virtual slaves" in the Soviet Union. They had shitty lives, to be sure, just as everybody else except state bureaucracy, but they were quite free in their choices, and made more money on average than any other class in the society. It was peasants who were virtual slaves, disenfranchised by the state and in fact forbidden to move to a different village or city without the state sanction well into the 1960s).
Detecting Novel Associations in Large Data Sets
It's not what design looks like, rather it's how you use it that helps to determine value. Otherwise it's a work of art.

Design with utility has inherent value that can be quantified. It's silly to categorically say design is horseshit.
They are brilliant, but they need to be more accessible. Hmmmmm... maybe I should provide a patch for Chromium/Firefox.
You Should Care Less
On top of that, you have an epistemological problem. How can you separate culture and biology in something like this without repeating the same experiment in a wide range of people in different types of cultures?
“I just don’t think it makes sense to have a product idea, THEN raise money, THEN build a team,”

Yeah right, thats what a good founding team is for that actually HAS an idea on what to build.

Lets face it, no first time founder or anyone without a big hit like vimeo would ever get a deal like that.
Greatest Card Trick Ever
>Even when using ACID compliant databases

I am genuinely sad that such a statement would ever be uttered. "Even when"? Why would you choose to use a database that isn't reliable?

>Consistency check should be replicated in your application layer, atleast for mission critical data.

Maybe if there were some way to do that, but there isn't. It doesn't get replicated, it gets re-implemented, which is quite different. And it results in application code in app X that says data is bad while the DB says it is ok, and then application Y also says it is ok and inserts it fine, and then app X pukes getting it back out later, etc. Leave the DB in charge of the rules and when it gives you an error, you can go ahead and relay that error to the user (in a nicer format one would assume).
Giving the public what they're asking for has no necessary relationship with morality at all. Simply because it's what they're asking for doesn't mean it's moral either.

For the downvoter(s), a thought experiment: lynch mobs.
If you're looking for someone good who isn't terribly expensive, my very close friend just went solo and started up his own illustration company.

His rates are EXTREMELY flexible as he is working up to the 'ramen' phase of his endeavors.

He's got some of his portfolio up at http://scotmaupin.com/, is a joyful person to work with, and is extremely talented at illustration, logo design and all that for both print and digital.
The problem with this question is it's simply a logical contradiction. If I say a = 1, b = 2, a = b most people will object. But, simply saying a = 1, b = 2, c = b, d = c... z = a then most people give up on that conviction and assume they made a mistake.

PS: I suspect this comes from the limits of logic in the real world. If I do the same thing with a really long computer program it might though some internal errors flip that 2 into a 1 even as you simply copy it from one memory location to another.
Technology beyond the cloud has got some interesting things to say
Coral Cache: http://www.chrismcovell.com.nyud.net/secret/weekly/Stars_of_...
I first read of the ‘paradox’ in one of Raymond Smullyan’s excellent books. My favourite formulation goes like this:

A philosophy professor tells the class there will be a surprise exam this week. He and the class discuss the exam, and they ‘prove’ that there can be no surprise exam. When everyone has accepted the proof, he announces that there will be an exam on the spot! The exam has only one question: Prove that the exam is indeed a surprise, invalidating the proof that there can be no surprise exam.

This formulation suggests that the exam is a surprise if the students convince themselves that there can be no surprise exam, which is an entertaining trail to follow.

Smullyan also tells an anecdote from his childhood. He and his brother liked to ‘fool’ each other on April Fool’s, and one year his brother announced that the coming April Fool’s Day, he would fool Raymond as he had never been fooled before. Well, the day came and Raymond steeled himself for the prank. He waited, expecting a prank or lie with everything they did and every cinversation they had, but no prank, no lies, no fooling.

As he lay in bed that night, Raymond realized that his brother had, in fact, fooled him. Or had he? How could not fooling someone constitute fooling him? According to Raymond, puzzling over the nature of ‘fooling’ was part of his lifelong journey into philosophy and logic.
> Inlining integers in pointers by shifting up and adding 1 is a quite common trick though and I have seen it in more programming language implementations than MRI.

Yeah, I know about it, I just did not think MRI had bothered with it anymore than CPython.
Since it is a joke, Vonnegut used it on more than one occasion.

There is a version in Timequake as well. That was where I originally read it [see: http://books.google.com/books?id=ggiR05avpw4C&pg=PT73...]
Error handling not working in "base" Sinatra app
Let he who has flown on untrustworthy instruments in the soup cast the first stone.
Same, on a TRS-80 when I was about 14.
The checklist for checklists seems like gold for making certain a group of people are on the same page when making checklist items.

http://www.projectcheck.org/checklist-for-checklists.html
This seems like a somewhat rough diagnosis.

The pilots were not making an 'absurd error'. They did not forget to fly the plane.

It is that what they thought they were doing was not what they were actually doing. Their mental model broke away from the reality. (They thought the plane was in 'normal mode' when it was actually in 'abnormal mode' -- an expression of which: one them declaring "this cannot be happening!")

Telling them just fly the airplane is not (quite) the solution -- they thought they were flying it.

But the remedy is sort-of basically correct. It just seems better expressed as: when nothing makes sense (your mental model has suddenly utterly failed), fall back to a more basic backup mental model and system -- like primitive manual override.

(How clear can such separation of a basic mode be? How practical would it be? How reliable? It leads to a set of engineering/UI questions . . . were they well designed in this particular case?)
Local Bookstores Call For Boycott Of Amazon For Advertising Their Prices
> Does python have standard implementation of odict already?

Yeppers, since 2.7/3.1: http://docs.python.org/library/collections.html#collections.... http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/collections.html#collect...
What a bunch of nonsense.

Not necessarily a bad way to attract some good hackers though. Ideas are like babies, no-one wants to feed and change someone else's so I guess the one thing this phenomenon has going for it is that he'll attract developers who think they can sire the company vision.

He'll end up with a lot of cooks though - will probably lead to a bit of a frankenstein product
US watchdog bans Photoshop use in cosmetics ads
I'm a huge Jake Lodwick fan and am glad to see he's back into the game. I wish him the best. CollegeHumor, Vimeo, BustedTees; we need more creative entrepreneurs in the world.

To everyone thinking he's crazy for raising before coming up with an idea, the idea is irrelevant.

Your first raise doesn't validate your idea, it validates how good of a pitch man you are.

Your second raise validates your idea as a business.
Reset from alternate law to normal law is - afaik - a pilot induced operation. The airbus computers will never initiate such a change by themselves. I.e.: They will drop down into a lower mode automatically; but they will not up the amount of support 'by themselves'.
Wow -- I've read most of his books and never realized he "plagiarized" himself like this. Thanks!
Although I agree with your statements concerning matters of which you describe, such as people downloading music illegally, this is not what the discussion is about.

The reason they clearly demonstrate they are not responsible enough to have such power over the internet is because this is a case of a content creator removing content they do not own. It does not matter the reasoning behind it, whether it be DMCA or private agreement with Google.

Going after people for illegal downloading their property is one thing, automatically removing content they don't like is another.

Plus, they have the lousy reasoning behind the whole thing anyway, "we're protected by the DMCA even though we admit this has nothing to do with the DMCA".

Which, I'm uncomfortable with the whole notion of content creators being involved in this in the first place. If the actions being taken by people are "illegal" then the private company should be reporting it to the proper authorities who have the, well, authority to do something about it. But then again, lately the people with authority have shown they are just as incompetent in handling these matters as well.
The statement of accomplishment can never be truly significant because there is no proof of identity. Anyway they met the ultimate goal in a great way. They took a great step forward and should be applauded for it.
>"this could have a really nasty effect on free speech rights."

Youtube is a business unit of a publicly traded company.

It has users, not citizens.

Free speech rights are irrelevant to the way in which it establishes policies.
+1000. I'm a PPSEL of the Cessna-exclusively-outside-the-soup variety, and these kinds of transcripts often bring me to tears. I understand the fascination with (and importance of understanding) accidents and human-error events especially, but the pilot in question was just about my age, and I can't begin to put myself in his shoes in the first moments of this tragedy without crushing pressure entering my guts.

Rest in peace holmes, and don't take it personal.
It´s true it is not possible to stall the plane in normal mode AND stable air conditions, in fact at high altitudes is possible to lose control of the plane even in normal mode, due to sudden changes in air density or extreme turbulence. This is highly improbable but sometimes happens when changing from one mass of air to another or flying into clear air turbulence.(I know some pilots who have suffered this, flying close to the equator due to captains trying to save fuel climbing above the recommended altitude for that day, or the case of a A320 loosing 4000´ while flying above the Pyrenees due to turbulence and once again trying to save fuel going high).

Once you are at stall there is a protection in alternate mode (if I remember properly) that will pitch down the plane to help getting a recover speed (not like normal law that will prevent you from performing stall and over speed maneuvers), BUT that protection can be overridden (unfortunately in this case) by side stick input. I don´t think you could engage the autopilot in such situation even in normal law(I´ll try at my next simulator). Read my comment below about the maneuver I think they were trying to perform.
I've sort of viewed the entire circus in a defeated light. If SOPA goes down another version will crawl up either on its own or stapled to the "think of the children" act of 2012, 2014, or whenever they get enough campaign funding to draft it.

But what does that mean for Hackers? I think with enough work we could make a network off of the regulated lines. I live in a rather sparse city and even now I can throw a ball far enough to hit the next techy over. Push comes to shove we could have a mini network several blocks wide that doesn't touch a single www link.

Wireless is almost ready, security is probably the biggest issue right now but the technology is available, just not affordable. But what about the tech giants against the SOPA? If "push comes to shove" would they fund a new network that has less control?

Then at what point is the government allowed to intervene? If a sizable network was built from the ground up separate from the internet are they allowed to slap down regulations? I want to say no because they didn't fund it, but then at the same time what's really stopping them? If they're able to throw SOPA through, convincing these dweebs that a private uncontrolled network is not worthy of SOPA2.0 would not be difficult to do.

Can I get some hacker-friendly input? I know a lot of us here are software oriented but I'm certain I'm not the only one that lurks this site with background in network provisioning.
I loved that book. It feels good sometimes to know where that quote came from without Google.

My path to becoming a fan of his work started young when I was no more than 11 or 12 and sitting in a pediatrics waiting room with my dad on the East end of Long Island. The man sitting next to me cross legged with a pile of loose curly grey hair was reading a magazine and gruffing every few moments. I noticed my dad staring at him.

Anyways when we left my dad said do you know who you were sitting next to? Of course not. That man was Kurt Vonnegut, I have a book on my book shelve you should read...That night I read the entire book Slaughter House Five. Then he gave me Galapagos, and then I was reading Schopenhauer, but I digress.

I have since read every single one of his works, which is why I cloud have told you where that quote was from. Vonnegut introduced me to the American Humanist Association, of which I am a member now, which means I send them money every year, also contribute to their lobbying group in DC, and read their magazine Free Inquiry.
C++11 multithreading tutorial
What does memory_get_usage() actually do ? Does it report the "heap" size assigned to the process, or does it use PHP internal counters for the allocated user data/variables ? A C malloc subsystem will assign a whole lot of virtual memory, in steps of pages, or more if it decides to attach a piece using mmap().

In order to make this test case relevant, I'd say one have to know what memory_get_usage() does - it's at least meaningless to determine the overhead of an array based on it, if for whatever reason creating the 1. PHP array in a program also initializes "big" memory pools that count towards the memory usage.
A closer comparison is probably novelists, but yes, the same "only works if you're famous" applies there. If you're Stephen King, you can get a book contract and advance royalties without a manuscript or even a concept, but that's not the common case.
Yep:
"Radio waves are electromagnetic energy, which means they travel at the speed of light (about 186,000 miles per second, 300,000 km per second in a vacuum). The receiver can figure out how far the signal has traveled by timing how long it took the signal to arrive." -
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/travel/gps2.htm
"When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so, of course, I was surprised". — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Our Western popular[1] perception of Marx is heavily colored by the usurpation of his name, and bastardization of his philosophy

Not to mention the view of many Americans of "Socialism" as both the politics of the Soviet Union and those of present-day western Europe. Given that, fat chance people would know the distinction between Marx and Stalin.
I've never heard of pixel-tracking before. But Will wont it break if the user caches it? Then It wont be read again and thus not count the view.

Or?
The Future of Physics
Ruby On REST 2: Representers and the DCI Pattern
Animating border-width in CSS3 to reveal content
the pixel doesn't get cached
The Poverty Trap: earning more can make you poorer
> Considering PHP's scope and its limitations (lacks things like threads for example)

Please look up PHP-FPM. I use it in production, with great success.

> If you're storing 100.000 integers on a PHP data structure you're most likely doing it wrong.

What if I had a ton of price points and I needed to do statistical analysis? Well, those would be floats, but you get my point.

PHP is capable of doing the work efficiently, you just need to put a little thought in it first or you'll very quickly trash your box.
Has it occurred to you that if God created everything, than the standard by which you're judging heaven might be short sighted?

I like to think there might be little racism and infanticide and much discourse on creating universes.
Hmm.. so if my browser has integrated support, then any site I visit can add itself to my list of primarity authorities as evil-username@evil-domain. And I will be asked to choose one of these authorities to log in to other sites. And a rogue authority can impersonate me on the sites where I use it. Is this correct?

I can see a slight potential to trick the user into using a rogue authority. Imagine the evil email address is somehow tailored to a site the user is expected to log in to, in a way that makes it look like the "right" selection for that site, in the BrowserID dialog. I can't think of an explicit example right now, but when you allow untrusted parties to inject text into trusted dialogs, there are often many possibilities for trickery.
But my original question was (expanded for clarity): "Why was there a sharp drop from 2007 to 2009 after many years of very gradual decrease or even flatness? Your answer could explain a steady drop as safety features become more widespread, but that didn't happen from 1995 to 2005, even though presumably people bought new cars during this time.
True, though I generally treat such checklists as a code smell. Ideally all the items should live in your makefile.

[edit: added emphasis to the word "ideally".]
Neat, it's cool to see pixel tracking as a middleware component.

What i'm not clear on (and i'd love to hear your thoughts about) is why you'd want it as a middleware component vs a daemonized external service such as http://documentcloud.github.com/pixel-ping/ (and if you care about such things, check out the annotated source: http://documentcloud.github.com/pixel-ping/docs/pixel-ping.h... )

full disclosure: i joined DocumentCloud a few months ago.
Famous Last Words by Bosses I've Had
Hah! Downvote it all you want, you know it's true. He needs to stop crying.
BlackBerry 10 could be ‘too little, too late’