skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nintendo predicts first annual loss, lowers earnings forecast
Darpa progam seeks 75-fold increase in power for embedded and sensor systems
Increase sales by publishing knowledge and expertise
That would be cool if we could find those
Was this really that "long-awaited"? I for one quite like a clean New Tab and if I did want something like the envisioned, then I don't think 3 by 3 would quite cut it. Not to mention that if people were really that anxious for it, I would be pretty sure they could find an addon with that kind of function.

Good thing that like just about everything in Firefox, you can configure it to your needs when it lands. :)

Side note, for those interested of an overview of planned features in Firefox: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Release_Tracking
Nice! Hope you like the first shipment
Yeah, I've been meaning to learn Python for a while now, and the sudden surge of posts here about Python have only re-enforced my desire to learn Python. That's next on the list (with the plans to learn enough to be "dangerous").
Happenings in Rub
How do you know you never had? Are you saying you've never had any component failure, or any inexplicable crashes or unreliability?
January 28th is Data Privacy Day
Difference engine: Let the games begin
Because someone is paying for the code you write to do predictable things that they want.
Privacy Clashes with Data Collection Capability
Arch has kinda blossomed into a nano-debian status, people start to build stuff upon it, archbang, archhurd, it's great.

The former has filled the 'out of the box' niche sort of, now you have a minimalist yet ready to use system.

# note aside, about nixos, I can't tell how it's gonna turn out, but for once it's a linux system with a real paradigm shift. Funny how non-mutable ideas are spreading these days, btrfs, nix, even git.

# second note, have you seen this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jULGE0rq8M ? makes me wanna say 'tiling' is the only 'management' right now, stacking doesn't do sh*t.
Note that post is from 2008. They must be at way over 28TB now.
"Hogwash"

I wouldn't dare to say that about Dr Fuller...

"Mathematics is a way of describing nature, not the other way around."

He doesn't say otherwise, he says that our description of nature (that we are using pi) is flawed.
Before I worked at Google, 864GB of RAM would have impressed me. Now I think I have that much in my laptop...
You can't get it big without getting something along the way. My blog is not big, but sometimes gets a huge spike (say, 8000 visits in one or one-and-a-half days), and so many visitors imply some kind of nay-sayism. This is the internet, so it's a place to learn to cope with naysayers and a lot of BS. Slowly you grow a thick skin and just don't give a sh*t as long as you are happy with the results.
See also [1], where Terence Tao suggests that 2 pi i may be even more fundamental than both 2 pi and pi, and [2] for some explanation on why.

[1] http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2007/08/is-pi-define...

[2] http://qchu.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/pi-is-still-wrong/
the problem isn't necessarily that NASA is too risk-averse when it comes to human lives, it's society at large.

I couldn't agree more. I'm continually saddened that the traditional salutation to a guest leaving your home, for example, is "have a safe trip". In my dream world, people would wish each other a "a rich life of fulfilling experiences".

We shouldn't be trying to wrap ourselves into cocoons, setting a goal of simply surviving for the longest possible time. The length of the life shouldn't be paramount: it should be the area under the curve: how much did we experience, to what extent were we able to pursue our dreams?
Here is where you supposedly "smart" people are morons.

We didn't go to the moon in the first place.

They jumped the shark when they showed people on dune buggies on the moon.

They won't go back because when people see how hard it is to land and relaunch with human life in tow, the world will know we didn't go in the first place.

Nobody will be going to the moon until it doesn't matter that the world finds out we didn't go in the first place.

Ask yourself. What is easier: scamming a trusting, patriotic 60's public on TV or landing a human being on a foreign planet.., whats harder? Having people drive a dune buggie, then relaunching and landing safely back on earth or setting up a desert set piece to look like the moon. Or maybe a Hollywood studio to look like the moon. I've seen the video. It's a joke.

And you're shocked we never went back to the moon? Please! How gullible can you be?
The wiggle room is that maybe, when Twitter, Google and Facebook, and every other company that values free speech (if in fact they actually do) pulls out of their country, the citizens will realize how shitty their laws against free speech actually are, and have them repealed. Twitter may have principles, but they're sacrificing them here in favor of German/Chinese revenue.
How Important Is Antivirus For Your PC?
Less than the cost of them watching their parents die of obesity and heart disease. But we don't get all panicy about that...
You have to be there when the program runs. That is a criteria. Otherwise, location should not be a problem, I know of at least one startup here from India with India based co-founders who was part of the program.
Yep, FWIW there's a little 'X' in the top right that lets you hide the tiles.
Venture Capital: This Week in Venture Capital - Mark Jeffrey, CEO of ThisWeekIn
Good questions:

1) Right now we don't have the design for the month posted. Will do that soon, though. First month will be this Hipmunk design: http://i.imgur.com/bIL5v.jpg

2) The shirt and sticker will be from the same company. The rest will be from others

3. Not yet, but this has been the #1 request so far
The Lord Of God Sri Vishwakarma Jayanti Celebrated On 5, January 2012
>brave men risked their lives

>men like them

It wasn't just men:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Resnik

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christa_McAuliffe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpana_Chawla

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Clark

Language has power, and using "men" in this context makes invisible the contributions and bravery of these women and others like them. Sorry to seem PC, but it's important to get this stuff right if we want our kids to grow up in a better world.
FTC to scrutinize mobile payment technology
your customers are telling you what they want. don't find em, make em!

these vintage NJ devils t-shirts are brand new

http://www.fansedge.com/New-Jersey-Devils-Green-47-Brand-Vin...
One thing I do is keep old books in the trunk of my car. Whatever a store won't buy I put back in my trunk. Every couple of weeks I add some newer books and try again. Sometimes books that were rejected the first time are bought later.
A few months ago I was on a short road trip and tried to sell
my stuff in another town. They bought everything I had, even some old pc games.
A Year Of Clojure
as we involve the U.S. military in more and more missions that look highly political, we're going to end up with a badly broken military, for exactly the same reasons.

<cough> Libya <cough> drones <cough>

Yep, the writing is already on the wall.
When discussing the 2 rovers with a 90% success rate, the author comes to the conclusion:
<blockquote>The right answer is to go for two rovers, because if you do it that way, you will have a 99 percent probability of succeeding with at least one of the vehicles</blockquote>

Which is not exactly right. It's correct if you're looking at random, uncorrelated factors. However, two rovers from the same program are not going to be uncorrelated. If one rover is hit by a software blunder, it's likely the other one will have the same problem. (e.g. using mks instead of english units in the flight computer, using a 16 bit counter that overflows to name two)
You can downvote me, but this is an overkill;

All gungho just because pi sounded like pie and it went viral just like kolaveri di.
Apollo was a national security project -- demonstration of our system, exploration of technology of potential military importance.

Fixing Hubble was really important. I'm not sure how much the shuttle's work was of the same magnitude, or couldn't have been done with automated gear.

BUT bureaucratic and political imperatives called for continuation of the space program, at scale, and that called for justification of the costs. The money is no big deal, but if those justifications aren't that good, the collision of those weaknesses with the human risks will cause cognitive dissonance. If the people concerned haven't the will to rethink the whole thing -- and there are many examples of much, much larger failures -- you're going to see some strange behavior along the way. Shuttles failed twice in 100 missions, is the milestone of first senator in orbit really worth a 2% fatality risk? No, but rather than admit that and cancel the mission the response is to imagine that risk can be driven down to negligible. And if that isn't possible, the standard is going to shift from "known but justifiable risk" to "we're doing the best we can / no expense has been spared".

Of course it doesn't make sense. But if they recognized that, they wouldn't have flown such missions in the first place.
How To Attend a Conference - some really useful tips
The same story from a different source was posted two days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3508615. As was pointed out in the comments then, this ruling is nowhere near as broad or unreasonable as any of the knee-jerk articles make it sound. Essentially, the judge found it to be infringing because the evidence showed that the people who commissioned the photo were trying to make a counterfeit version of the original.
It isn't that- I've looked into it myself.

The delay seems to occur somewhere between the pagebeforeshow and pageshow events- so by that point the click action is definitely already registered. But there must be some function call that slows the whole thing down, interestingly, it doesn't on the iPhone simulator, so presumably it's relatively CPU intensive.
Where are you located / are you limited to a certain area?

http://www.meetup.com/bostonphp/events/43895122/

Not sure what the details are, but there's a PHP conference coming up in Boston in August.
They are really late to the game. Apple, Google, and Amazon are still on a trajectory to eating Nintendo's lunch completely.

Until Nintendo announces specifics for developers as well as the percentage take they'll get, it's hard to get excited. I'd be really surprised if they even allow indy devs in like the App Stores, and also if they don't charge 4-10k per dev kit.
Because if it wasn't for men like them, we would still be sitting in a cave poking a fire with a stick.

That's a false dichotomy. Children don't need to watch a shuttle burst into flames in order for science to progress.
Technically true, but misleading. I've installed Arch on four machines of various hardware, and this is actually the easiest part of the installation process.

You have to select a driver from a comprehensive list of which drivers work for which cards, and you don't have to make any (non-trivial) changes to xorg.conf, unless you want to set up multiple monitors. (And even then, I was able to avoid that for a long time by using XFCE, which apparently doesn't mind when xorg.conf settings are unspecified/improperly specified).

Yes, everything has to be set up manually on an Arch system, but that's a feature - you know where everything on your system is, and you know that there's nothing you didn't add yourself.

And with the wiki, setup may take some time (again, by design), but the process is incredibly straightforward.
Those are fair points, although I did qualify my statement with "In the absence of fraud". If the employment agreements forbid the behavior then that would be a clear case of fraud. When it comes to implied expectations, I'm not sure it's so clear. My understanding is that bilateral agreements with no-hire stipulations are not explicitly illegal, although the court may rule a specific agreement is depending on how it affects competition in a market. So how many employees actually assumed no non-hire agreements when they signed on and was that a reasonable assumption? I think that's a difficult question to answer.

Either way, I hate that the focus is on the "letter of the law". If this were a patent troll case, or Hollywood copyright, or if SOPA had passed, how many people here would be demanding damages or jail time from the defendants? They would be guilty of breaking the law just the same, and the plaintiffs could also claim that they need to be compensated for their losses (cost of filing for patent, "lost revenues" from pirated material, etc.)

I have to say, though, that my initial post was poorly worded. As I was writing it, in my mind, I thought I was railing against antitrust laws in general and describing how non-hire agreements in the abstract were victimless crimes. Reading those statements again, it seems more like I'm just talking about this particular case. That's totally my fault, I apologize for that. I tend to get worked up about issues like this and have to do a better job of choosing my words, or even stop myself from ranting in the first place.
I think this is a little disingenuous. The Arch developers do their best to make sure that nvidia and amd drivers work with new kernels.

Sometimes updated drivers are needed, but not released for months, and the developers have to make the choice between holding back the kernel update for that small minority or releasing it to the benefit of everyone not using that driver.
"pair programming is an excellent way for both parties to get a sense of what it is like to work together." So true and if you can convince a developer to do this, power to you. We are an early stage startup and we are two for two with this method and have carved out a strong team.

I would argue that high salary requirements can be negotiated if you can frame a strong vision. Developers are not investment bankers and often are not doing this for the money alone. Often, good developers are looking for a place where their voice has as much weight as anyone else and where they can grow with company. We wouldn't have it any other way.
This is a bit of a long shot, but Mozilla is actually in the preliminary planning phase of building a highly-parallel browser engine in order to take better advantage of the parallel nature of future hardware, specifically in the mobile space.

A presentation on it here: http://www.slideshare.net/BrendanEich/future-tense-7782010

Of course, students of history will remember what happened the last time that Mozilla/Netscape tried rewriting their browser engine: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Hopefully things will go a bit more smoothly this time. :)

And of course this is all just research at this point, none of this might ever see an actual release.
Author premise only half right. The cost over-runs of the shuttle program were composed of two deep expensive factors.

Infinite human safety and the costs of having a horizontal system of sub contractors building the shuttle system instead of a vertical approach.

But, conversely while close to infinite safety costs can reach military objectives, for example using tracked-light heavy armor in places of urban combat(less civilian casualties thus locals want to work with our forces), the same cannot be made for civilian space agency in terms a full benefits.
Sherlock's Folly (SOPA Ireland) - the problem is the system itself
>"the problem isn't necessarily that NASA is too risk-averse when it comes to human lives, it's society at large."

The change in attitude is almost certainly generational. The Apollo era presidents (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford) were all World War II veterans. So were most decision makers within the space program.

By the time of the Challenger explosion, American attitudes had changed to the point where 241 combat deaths in Beirut saw America remove its boots on the ground - a reaction to troop casualties unlikely during the island hopping campaigns forty years earlier.

This is not to say that Americans are necessarily placing too much value on life. Space Shuttle flights - like Beirut - lacked a compelling vision to underscore the mission; servicing the Hubble is not a giant leap for mankind.
Exactly. I can see this being useful in, say, coal power plants which release a lot of water vapor, but also a lot of toxic chemicals. If one could develop a useful filter from this, could the burning of coal actually become a clean source of energy?
Twitter isn't Censoring You. Your Government is.
"he says that our description of nature (that we are using pi) is flawed"

Every description we'll ever have will probably be flawed to some degree.

I concur that it's hogwash
IMO boot time isn't a big selling point anymore with SSDs in the market (albeit not exactly affordable). A MacBook Air can boot up within seconds and that's plenty fast for me.
Not sure if troll.
I got some further clarifications from Leonard Schulman:

He writes, "Yes, a tree code is a near-isomorphic image of a tree metric. No, this has nothing to do with the Shannon capacity of graphs."

Thank you again for your comments.
'Super Wi-Fi' Blankets First County in U.S.
From their supplier responsibility site(http://www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/):

We insist that all of our suppliers provide safe working conditions

Notice the word "insist". How about requiring it? There is a massive difference between insisting and requiring.
I have done the exact same thing as you, saltcod. I have been reading on Ruby on Rails for the past 4 months prior to December. After the new year hit, I told myself that this is the year I fully understand and learn Ruby on Rails to the point of putting out a product. I had started the Rails Tutorial by Michael then stopped, probably from confusion or disinterest. I watched/read many other tutorials that are around.

I have also signed up as of Jan. 11th with a monthly Lynda subscription just to watch the Kevin Skoglund tutorials on there, I have probably 4 hours of tutorials left. I skipped much of the environment setup since I have that down. This tutorial so far has helped me to understand a lot of concepts. I hope to revisit Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial and fully complete it with TDD and all.

If you ever need a kick in the ass shoot me an email.

I will probably do a write up on my experience learning RoR after I get something built. Like the OP, coming from HTML & CSS & Some database background.
Working in Silicon Valley while not from Harvard, MIT or Stanford?
Just an aside, Foxit[1] is much faster than Acrobat, and I'm pretty sure FireFox can open Foxit inside a tab.

[1] http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/
U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra is stepping down
Imagining the Perfect Freemium Horror Game
I'm considering selling my Nintendo stock at a loss. I don't see how they can come back considering the rise of mobile gaming on phones and tablets... something's got to give somewhere and I think it's Nintendo.
Difficult to answer without more information on what you already know, what you already tried, and what level of proficiency you have as a goal.

I took a course in this book, Introduction to Algorithms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms), and it has provided a good foundation for my career. There is MIT Open Courseware and video lecture available for it, which you can get in the previous Wikipedia link or via iTunes U (http://itunes.apple.com/us/course/introduction-to-algorithms...). This book says "You should have some programming experience... [with] recursive procedures and simple data structures... You should have some facility with proofs by mathematical induction... and elementary calculus." So you may need to look into some discrete math and calculus first.

This list of free resources pops up here a lot: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-ava...

There are several algorithms/data structures books in the "Language Agnostic" section.

Good luck.
How Zynga cloned its way to success - Edge Magazine
Tricks of the Trade: Recently Closed Tabs on the iPad - Donny Acoca
>scamming a trusting, patriotic 60's public on TV or landing a human being on a foreign planet

Not only 60's public but also the public of every subsequent year (and by "public" you have to include scientists, engineers and otherwise intelligent men and women from all walks of life). Given all that I'd say the former is much harder (downright impossible) to accomplish.
Why SOPA/PIPA/ACTA don't matter
Summary: Scientist B failed to replicate the results of Scientist A. Scientist A stands by her continuing research. Research continues and is not definitive yet. New Scientist has a slow news days and publishes said results, mucking up an extra controversy for the day and getting a few more clicks through to their website.
Generally speaking, you don't want to run a server without ECC.
Sounds like Scott Kargman doesn't take trademarks too seriously.
You should have seen the community 7+ years ago! They've done a lot to make the community more friendly and inclusive.
"There are only three hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, off-by-one errors and pedantry."
Amazon is not saying it, but EBS is probably lying when doing an fsync().

Given that POSIX says "the nature of the transfer is implementation-defined" and they've defined what fsync does on their implementation: No, they're not lying.

I wouldn't say that they're being misleading, either. On a local physical disk, once fsync returns your data is safely stored unless/until the disk dies. According to the forum post you linked to, semantics on EBS are exactly the same.

fsync does not mean "has been written to spinning magnetic media".
I can't see Sky's lawyers taking very long to settle out of court, £1500 is a miserly sum compared to what the lawyers will cost them in the first place! Sky took his copyrighted video and broadcast it to the world et al., everyone could have recorded it and might be watching it back repeatedly at their leisure, removing any chance of Mr Eden ever monetizing it (at least that's what his lawyers should say!).

Interesting note: would this be a single copyright breach, or would it have been breached for every person who 'illegally' received (their terminolgy: stole) it?
Will change the settings on this as it shouldn't pop up every time. Have gotten lots of good feedback from the widget, though.
>He seems to assume that the extra research measures push the likelihood of a successful mars mission from 90% to 95%.

He doesn't assume that at all. That was just a hypothetical situation, he never implied that those were actual figures.
Mozilla is working on a PDF reader and "integration with Firefox is a possibility if the experiment proves successful": https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

It's mostly working already. I rarely ever find PDFs that it breaks with.
NASA is a political organization, but that's why the manned space program exists. It long ago ceased to make sense from a cost/scientific-benefit perspective. Manned flight continues only on the argument that it excites the public and fuels interest in space.

Bearing that in mind, the entire thing is showboating on TV, and it's pretty silly to angst if over this, that, or the other bit of it is compromised by politics.
30 hermosas obras artísticas de Animales por Carol Cavalaris
Isnt gentoo still like that? I have been using gentoo since I got into using and learning about linux (cant really remember how long now). And it seems pretty much the same.
In 2016, G-20 Internet Economy Will Be Worth $4.2 Trillion