skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Useful iPad Apps for Web Designers and Developers
Developing and designing for the iPad has never been so popular, free resources are currently being created daily to help aid and simplify design and development.
Hey, while we're on USPS feature requests, this one is a bit overdue: SPAM FILTERING.

Allow me to blacklist certain senders, that's all.
Nation-wide.
Origins of the Internet: Fundamental Publications
fantastic

reminds me of the design brief for the new pepsi logo that leaked:

http://www.fastcompany.com/files/PEPSI%20GRAVITATIONAL%20FIE...

although it was widely criticized, the brief really demonstrates what a hundred million dollars to design a logo can get you.
I posted a reply, but decided I was repeating myself. Thanks for the discussion.
I never said it would be an easy transition.

For starters, all political campaigns should be financed from a "single payer" system. You, Joe Schmoe, want to contribute money to politics? Sure, here's the big barrel, drop your cash in it, and we'll divide it up between all candidates.
Ask HN:Creating & displaying Status Monitor
I like the idea of letting customers know about potential outages and status of the site wide impact, on a public url like company.com/service/status

What are some great tools you might might have used to build it easily.
The reporting is poor, and people are right to diss it. But having written extensively for semi-technical audiences, the kinds of criticisms being levelled here are out of place. In this kind of article or publication there's no point in splitting hairs in the title over the difference between vacuum and "nothing". People who won't appreciate the difference will get turned off by what they see as excessive nit-picking.

You need to get people to read. There's no point in having a fantastic finish if no one gets there.

About the article, I think the phenomenon itself is amazing. The Casimir effect is remarkable enough - completely at odds with classical physics and yet trivally predicted by quantum physics, it's a great piece of evidence for how weird the world is. To see it demonstrated using time as one of the dimensions is brilliant.

OTOH, sp332 seems to have found the same story from another source, and in the discussion there people are suggesting that the quantum explanation is out of place and/or unnecessary, because it's more-or-less just like an antenna. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3511341

Then people just pick holes in the writing. I find that sad.
> "since income disparity has soared in the last 40 years and crime rates have plummeted, even if they have plummeted everywhere, this indicates that inequality, if it has any effect at all, is likely pretty minor."

The big problem with a simple comparison of the plot of inequality and the plot of crime, is that inequality and crime aren't evenly spread across demographics. The young are disproportionately on the losing end of inequality and the perpetrating end of crime. (Regardless of how poor they are and how rich their neighbors, the elderly simply can't flip a car anymore.)

If you had, say, a bulge in the poor demographic around 1970 and expected crime to increase with a rise in inequality, you would expect to see the spike in crime from 1970 to 1990 and you would expect to see it subside as that bulge grew older and transitioned out of the age groups that perpetrate crime.

So, again, we cannot trivially rule out inequality as minor just because a simple plot of crime rates and a simple plot of inequality do not suggest a straightforward correlation.
Well. Obviously. The syntax is much, much more complicated.

But if you were to adopt a ruby syntax subset, enough of the semantics are similar enough to not pose a significant problem.

How easy is lisp to implement in a language without first class functions?
pretty funny. I feel like I'm listening/watching my twitter stream. haha
This certainly would make homework easier.
Image Search Breakthrough: 0.98+ Precise Images of 500,000+ topics
It does, but it's not just SPYW. It's the endless amounts of "extra" stuff that keeps getting added to the formally very clean SERP.
_That_ I did not know. Thanks!
The example given with acceleration, velocity, and position? How is a compiler going to deal with that?

With an Euler integrator, you say? (every frame, p=p+time_scaled(v), v=v+time_scaled(a) ). Note there's an implied time, as well as frames per second, in there, but a compiler can know about time. Unless when you're saying "acceleration" you're not talking about real time, but calculating where something will be at a future time...but I digress.

What about a Verlet integrator? [1] Maybe you'll also want to add springs, and Verlet works better for springs. Or maybe a Runge-Kutta [2] integrator? You can get more accuracy out of one of those. Though some people claim that a higher frequency Euler integrator can do as good of a job, possibly with more stability.

And how many times per frame should the system run the integrator? Because the stability of a system can depend a lot on the interval size. In fact, you might want to experiment with different integrators, and different time intervals, to get the result that's best for your application.

These are all choices that a PROGRAMMER typically needs to make, and they can be different for every problem. More than that, unless your compiler can DERIVE all of the above equations and more, at least one and probably several would need to be built in to the compiler.

This "problem" hasn't been solved because, short of creating strong AI, it's not solvable. This can only work when you're writing something like a "game builder" app: A domain-specific problem solver that is designed to deal with a very specific problem -- and which is coded using a traditional approach.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlet_integration
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runge%E2%80%93Kutta_methods
I did mean orthogonal, though the difference between a declarative result-oriented language and an imperative one is perhaps not immediately apparent. In an imperative result-oriented language, sequence would become less significant—as in a declarative language—but imperative operations would still be allowed, because sometimes “what you mean” is fundamentally imperative.
The problem is, simple examples like a trivial sprite-based game are not generally found in the real world, or else already have libraries built for them. (Or you should build a new library yourself.)

In the real world, you write programs that connect to databases, transform parameters, perform a bunch of linear algebra calculations, invalidate caches, and output results to a webpage (for example).

The overall specification of what the webpage is, from start to finish -- is simply the program you wind up writing! You have to specify what information you're getting from the DB (the query), with what parameters, the equations to perform after it returns (using a numerical library), how to invalidate which caches (a bunch of specific function calls), and how the webpage should be constructed (the HTML template).

Writing all this in a "declarative" way seems to make as much sense as throwing away your cake recipes and just using cake photos instead, because that's the "result" you want.

The cake photo is useful for two things only:

1) Mentally, having an overall idea of what it is you want to make (lacking many details, however)
2) After you baked the cake, making sure it looks like the photo

Analagously, declaring things at a higher level in a programming project works marvelously in two areas:

1) Designing what you want to build, in a big picture
2) Testing that what you built satisfies the top-level constraints

When artificial intelligence is a smart as humans, they'll we'll have computers that can write our programs for us, and we'll have "declarative" programming. But of course, we'll blame the computers when the programs don't work, just like users blame programmers now... :)
Google Public Alerts launches, shows local disaster information in Maps
We are still around. Or at least I am. I do my best to keep Webmonkey up to date and sometimes that means running Ars Technica stories, like this one (Wired and Ars are owned by the same parent company and frequently cross-post in both directions). So, while I appreciate that Webmonkey made it to HN, probably the link should point to the original article on Ars: http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/01/google-takes-on...
Also, the Iraq war.
I'll rephrase that: adding a weight to an edge is not hard, I actually having several heuristics on hand to do that. It's just really time consuming the first time you do it, because you have to load a lot of data in order to be accurate. Moreover it requires additional permissions, which I'd rather avoid.
I believe that they spend all of their money on other companies that they own. i.e. Like a TV station where a lot of advertisement is done. Those TV stations have to pay taxes of the money earned. Even if money is lost by the film the contracting companies still have to make money (or their employees), and those are the ones that pay taxes. As long as they report where all the money is going it probably is not a problem.

Somebody eventually makes some money and as long as that money pays taxes the IRS is probably OK with it.

Knowing that this is how the game is played the actors just have to ask for a big pay check so that it works out the same at the end, more or less.
Software Security starts with Software Quality
1. You always know how much a standard letter will cost, no matter where it's going. If you're mailing 100 letters to 100 locations, they all cost the same. Standard exemptions apply for rate changes every few years and for heavy items.

2. Based on the cash flow of the USPS, you're not subsidizing anyone by buying stamps :)
Because, in theory, you care that they can vote and mail in their taxes at a reasonable price, even from places that are economically unfeasible to have a mail delivery system. Whether you actually care is up to you, but the US government has decided US citizens care.

It's similar to the gov't money that was paid to run telephone lines to rural areas (ref: freeconference.com article from the other day).
I'm on thin ice but I think it's true in the USA too - only source I can find (for USA) with a quick search is a Caltech IP law lecture PPT (https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:35Cr_88udtsJ:...; this is good for the general case, http://www.iusmentis.com/copyright/crashcourse/requirements/).

The issue is the burden of proof. In the tort of copyright in the UK I gather the burden is the balance of probabilities. Maybe in the USA courts the burden lies on the defendant proving they weren't able to copy (rather than on the plaintiff showing they [most likely] did).

It's not only a defence where a work is uncreative (that might stop it being an "original work" in Berne Convention terms after all) - if it's impossible for one to have copied the other then there is no infringement (eg the alleged copied work was privately held in a different country to the defendant).

---

Edit: http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php?topic=1377.225;wap2 link surprisingly has a couple of good quotations in the response from '"The essence of copyright is originality [...]"'. In particular - and I'm quoting quotes here - are these two points:

"Since his work need not be novel, all that is needed to obtain copyright is originality - that the work have originated with him; the author cannot have copied it from another." (17 U.S.C.A., Section 102(a) as referred to in 'Intellectual Property: Patents, Copyright, and Trademark' by Arthur R. Miller and Michael H. Davis, page 289)

and

"A copyrightable work must be original and fixed. Originality does not require that the work be exceptionally creative or unique, only that it possess a mere modicum of creativity and is the product of independent creation." ('Oxford Guide to American Law', page 661)

Lastly I'm going to grab my own quote from Feist V Rural Telecom (eg http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us... [why didn't I hit up FindLaw first, they're always good for this sort of thing]) - a US Court of Appeal judgement:

"Originality does not signify novelty; a work may be original even though it closely resembles other works so long as the similarity is fortuitous, not the result of copying."
Amazon Products Visualization in HTML5
I developed SVG/JavaScript based application to visualize customers preferences on Amazon.com. A link between two items means they are often bought together. By observing the graph we can guess what is more popular in the given domain...

PS: I noticed a post from zeratul (thank you!) to my old work in Silverlight, and wanted to share the latest progress... Hope I'm not violating hacker's codex at this site...
Great article actually.. I have been using Spring Data with JPA and a relational dbms. I have also built applications that utilize mongodb.. But never used Spring data with mongo.. Thanks
Wisdom of Life: Susan B. Anthony, Women’s Rights Activist and Abolitionist
Whilst not supporting first class functions, C is pretty easy on you in that respect. I reckon there are suitably small lisp implementations in C (less than 100 lines). It all really depends if your lisp implementation uses the language's VM or a VM layer over the top.
DRM period isn't a waste of money. DRM as it's commonly practiced is.

DRM always entails a hit to the customer's convenience. If you're not giving the customer more convenience in a different way, then you're fighting an uphill battle.

When you implement DRM, please be aware that you are engaged in an asymmetric conflict, and that you are the underdogs. The subset of the internet community interested in cracking your DRM most likely outnumbers and outguns whatever department in whatever company you're at. But asymmetric conflicts can be won:

- concentrate on detection, bias to false negatives
- separate by a significant interval in time the
detection and any consequences of detection
- never do anything that looks like a bug
- never fight where you are weak and the enemy is strong

You are strong where functionality depends on a server. If you ever have to keep someone out, do it there. If you can avoid doing that at all and fight in even sneakier ways, then do that instead. Remember, in this conflict you are the guerrillas, and the pirates are the big empire. You can only win if you keep them guessing where you will strike, not the other way around.
I'm sorry friend. It is not a "one size fits all" strategy.
"Absolute" vacuum is not attainable due to fluctuations though, not due to some semantic ambiguity.
I don't disagree with that at all, but the cynic in me feels like even with such an amazing team the org stuff gets harder (cash aside) as the company grows.

However, GH has always exceeded all of my expectations in every possible way, so good luck to you guys whatever path you choose.
So just by writing GENERAL DELIVERY instead of a street address, it gets held? I suppose the kick here is that the person needs to know they're getting mail. Do they need an ID to pick it up?
There are multiple paths of execution your code but they are never running concurrently. Only the underlying I/O is really executing concurrently with your code.
Jesus, that exists.
And 15,000 faxes not read. Moreover 15,000 people thinking they did something useful, without having done anything useful at all.

In my interviews with Congressional staff who actually work on correspondence desks, they laugh at people sending faxes in and come right out and say that sending faxes, vs any other method of communications, is ineffective.

I understand that HelloFax wants to market itself. But this campaign does more harm than good.
The argument that it is difficult to hold Apple as a victim when they're rolling in enormous success.

But yes, as a society and culture there is a natural disdain for excessive success ($100 billion in cash reserves? That is deeply unsettling), and as a natural course both the government and the courts are going to be less favourable to Apple.
I had written a post a while ago detailing why c/c++ programming was borked:

http://spottedsun.com/why-cc-sucks/

I removed the fundamentals and only posted a core problem I found with c/c++: prerequisites
Thank you. I start to feel cold and lonely whenever I go more than a day without seeing somebody trot out the old Father Niemuller quote for something wildly mundane and less important than the Holocaust, and I think in this case it had been two.

We're talking about Picasa having access to your address book (or whatever). Get a freaking grip.
Punjab National Bank 775 vacancies
We validate DNSSEC and Comcast still hasn't fixed their own issues with sz0071.ev.mail.comcast.net
Also, is that okay to handover all the information to the bookkeeper and let it take to his office?
Marketing Practices and Restrictions
If it's trivially breakable, it should be trivial for you to explain how.

Magic token, protocol identifier

Location in key to use

Length of message + salt

MESSAGE - XORed against OTP

Some salt is taken from the next bit of OTP.

Hash of plaintext message

If any of that portion of the OTP has been previously used, the message is invalid. If the hash doesn't match, the message is invalid. Under no circumstances is a new message valid if it uses a portion of the OTP that has been used before.

I can't guarantee a message will arrive. I believe I am correct in thinking that all messages that arrive and pass these tests, have not been tampered with. If the keys are physically secure, the message is secure.
That’s a fair assessment, but it misses the point somewhat. All I’m saying is that we should be able to write programs that clearly express our intent, and a result-oriented language would make that easier than a process-oriented one.

“The overall specification of what the webpage is, from start to finish—is simply the program you wind up writing!”

This is not true; the implementation is very far removed from the specification. It is not easy to look at a bunch of SQL and PHP code and deduce precisely what the requirements of the site are. But in a different sort of language, it could be.
Remember, when a headline like this ends with a question mark, the answer is probably "no."
The reason one is called static and involves 3d space and the other is called dynamic and involves time has nothing to do with stealing particles from the future or creating a perpetual motion/energy machine.

What differs in these effects (in space and in time) is the electromagnetic modes of the vacuum near the mirror(s).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mode#Quantum_mechanics

It's all about creating a differential - and the effect this has for static vs. dynamic is different for each.

In the static effect, a differential is created in 3d space: two mirrors are perfectly placed in parallel to each other with a gap less than that of a photon's wavelength. In the vacuum fluctuation of space, virtual photons and anti-photon pairs are created and annihilate each other all the time - but this tiny gap keeps them from appearing between the mirrors. The end result is a difference in the modes between the mirrors (total lack of any activity) and outside them (normal vacuum fluctuations) which results in a pressure differential (in 3d space) pushing the plates together (the static effect).

In the dynamic effect, a differential is created due to a change over time: a mirror is moved at a velocity significantly close to the speed of light (in this case, around 5%). Around the mirror, as always, the vacuum contains photon and anti-photon pairs coming into existence and annihilating each other. With a fast enough moving mirror, the mirror can change the ability of the particles to annihilate each other. This represents a change in time over the nature of the vacuum / space where the particles appear.

Thought example: Prior to pair formation, there is no mirror at coordinate XYZ. Proton and anti-proton pair appears - and mirror is moving so fast, it is now present at point XYZ, between the proton and anti-proton, faster than the two could reach and annihilate each other. Now, instead of annihilation, the proton is reflected by the mirror.

This is the dynamical Casimir effect. It is a change, over time, in the nature of vacuum.

Yes, photons are being reflected ("created from nothing") in this effect - but so are anti-photons, which quickly find some other photon to interact with and annihilates the pair of them. There is no net gain of energy here - in fact quite a bit is spent keeping the mirror moving at high speeds.
I actually consider everything tired to my account name a plus, as I can log in anywhere and get it. No secondary market, however, is the downside associated with that.

And offline is way better than it used to be. Is it still problematic?
Free Indie Games not featured on TIGS or Indiegames: Sling [Zack Banack]
I wrote a module based on fibers to help with these sort of problems. Take a look at https://github.com/scriby/asyncblock
What should I do when my boss asks me to fabricate audit log data?
shareholders might be in a better position to hold managers accountable than donors to a non-profit are

That was a comparative statement. You're right, it may be difficult for shareholders to sue the management even if they make inefficient or even self-serving decisions. But lawsuits are not the only means by which people can hold other people accountable. Shareholders have the right to fire the management, in addition to the right to withhold further investment. Donors to charities only have the latter right.

So I'm only disagreeing with your claim #2 that charities are more accountable than these new types of corporations. Too many charities are run in an unaccountable way because the directors are accountable to nobody but themselves.

> But to whom? ... [snip] ... you're introducing a layer of politics into the board elections.

Politics happens everywhere, including for-profit corporations and non-profit charities. There's no escaping it.
Dutch Courts Join Pirate Bay Blocking Bandwagon
An Introvert's Guide to Networking
i think we're going to see search engines become more specialized. If I am looking for something in my area, Yelp is great. I reach yelp through duckduckgo (!yelp)
At the scales he's talking about, 10gbps uplinks are easily available. That said, the killer isn't the equipment costs, it's the people.
Actually even lower level than that. iSCSI just makes a block device available over a TCP/IP network. You can use that block device however you like, write random data to it, partition it in to multiple volumes, use it as part of a volume group or disk pool, etc. The individual block device doesn't need to have a filesystem on it.
>> Oh really? What is that power? The power to get govt to things on their behalf? There's your problem

> No. That's one of the problems (others: cartels, influencing public opinion with your media, having people or ideas killed

Having people killed is pretty much a govt thing.

Larry can't buy everyone, and gets no benefit from trying. Govt, on the other hand, does both.

> (2) government = the ONLY power that is elected and somewhat controlled by the general public and its will.

You seem to think that that's a feature. It isn't - it's a huge bug. I have no interest in being "controlled by the general public and it's will".

> And you seem naive enough to think that somehow we could do with him not getting govt to do things on his behalf.

If govt has power, it will act in his behalf, no matter how much you'd like otherwise. Since I don't want govt to act in his behalf....
Spot on.

Why do you need a book on backlogs? That's just insane.

That's like buying books on driving cars: "volume 4: the steering wheel" and "volume 5: the indicator stalk".