skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The other article suggests that the cars cannot be towed when bricked; and that the battery pack is not rechargeable after bricking but needs replacement.

I'm not sure what happens to the value of the dead battery pack when they fit a new pack. Do you get to sell the dead battery back to them or to anyone else? Or is that included in the $40,000 charge?
Start-Ups 'Shame' Bigger Companies in Trademark Disputes
Did it. Lvl 3 now
Yes it is. Herein lies part of the problem; the way GDP is calculated and what is meant by GDP. The whole GDP idea has little merit. Essentially the health of the economy is measured by how much money is spent. We should stop relying on GDP to measure economic health and measure wealth and lack of debt instead.
The 25 Most Anticipated Games of 2012
If 2011 was a big year for games, 2012 is going to be off the charts. Don't think of this list as comprehensive; it would have to be a top 100 to cover every game we think is going to be worth playing this year.
It would have been possible but probably not in a week. The code base was written using QT and half the singletons would be lazily created at seemingly random places through hundreds of signal/slot calls (sometimes through the event queue if it came from another thread).

The singletons were just one of the many problems. I remember there was a "database.cpp" file which handled all access to the SQL database. It was over 10k lines of code and had hundreds of structs to represent all the tables in the system. The person responsible for that ensured he had a job by only working with that source code.
Understanding Public Key Cryptography
Goggles will do nothing.
Why do you say that? Last I checked, I don't have the right to expunge any/all data a corporate entity has collected about me that I deal with in the brick & mortar realm.

I can sue for it, but I can't just walk in and say: Where's your form for me to have all my records shredded?

The only big difference here is that our vehicle for traveling through the various sites of businesses in the electronic realm leaks data about us like a sieve: I'm a Comcast customer, I live in state XYZ, I'm using a Mac, I've been to another site from your .com and here's my cookie, etc.

Tor, UserAgent modifiers, strict cookie settings and many other tools can help hide this information - but the average consumer doesn't know about them or how to use them.

This attempt at a rights bill is purely to put some "common sense"-style consumer expectations in place and give them standard tools/methods to learn more about what a particular company is doing.

Where the real failure comes into play is that, unlike in the brick & mortar world, it's quite easy to stroll down an electronic avenue and enter a shop that's actually housed in China - where suddenly this bill becomes a moot point.
Mountain Lion’s Gatekeeper and the Scarlet Exclamation
Well, you aren't guaranteed that people can't collect information on you. You'd never see a news paper story mentioning anyone ever again. I mean that's information about me - it needs to be purged!
I experimented with Tesseract OCR: https://github.com/rcarlsen/Pocket-OCR/

In my field studies, I found it was not very reliable. Text recognition would often fail even on printed receipts. Also, several of the restaurants I went to used hand-written receipts. So I ultimately decided against OCR. If it had worked well, I do think it would be a nice feature for the app.
"Most people say it's easier to pick up languages when you're younger," says David Green, of University College London, who specialises in bilingualism.

"But people can learn languages at any point in their lives. Being immersed in a language is important. Personality is a contributing factor too - not being able to tolerate feeling foolish from making inevitable errors will make learning a new language a difficult process.

"The cult of the hyperpolyglot"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17101370
I think Blogger does the same thing; it kills Instapaper functionality. (Net result: I don't read things published on Blogger.)
Turntable.fm "may as well be dead"
Isn't this all about interest? When you are interested in a subject you are more likely to try again and learn from your mistakes. People with an almost unhealthy interest in a subject (people with Asperger for example; they think Newton had this) are the brilliant people on the subject.
Notice it's all about "consumers" and "companies," not "citizens" and "government." I'd hardly call this a bill of rights. It's more like a campaign advertisement for Obama. If I wanted to be more of a conspiracy theorist about it, I might believe that if this were passed into law, it would be to force companies to maintain readily exportable data about their users, which is only a court order away from being exported to government officials.
You can. Many people do. At least with the 7" Kindle.
So what would happen if someone put it up on wikileaks or similar?

Let's see:
-No peer review, ok, but after this publicity some other scientists could comment on it and judge it.
-The lobbyists could claim it was fake. (Probably not a problem, the institutes could back it up.)
-Now, who would the "consequences" be directed at? The two institutes (NIOSH and NCI)?
I think about Spolsky's post on programmer productivity quite often [1]. I think the most interesting part of the post is when he says, "The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time." Obviously, I wonder if I am a programmer who can hit the high notes and, if not, what it will take to get there.

When I read a post like this, I try to apply it to making myself a better programmer in the "high note" sense. Trouble is - it just doesn't apply (and I am a huge fan of Dweck's work). This article is one for the masses - not people who are trying to create the next Google. Motivation, hard work and an ability to learn from mistakes are all necessary, but ultimately not sufficient for our craft.

If I had to guess what the missing ingredient is, I would say creativity.

Heck - we are programmers. We get immediate feedback on our mistakes all day long and anyone reading this post has most likely gotten really really good and learning from those mistakes. ...but, how many of us are hitting those high notes?

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html
While I do agree that learning from your mistakes is a huge part of education, I think your interests are a close second. Generally, I'm intrigued by something that others deem to be difficult. I scored better grades in all of my engineering, math and science classes than my intro courses like psychology, economics and so on which I attribute to being more interested in science and thus being able to focus more.

For example, I was always very intrigued by calculus because most people talk of how difficult it is. I wanted to know why it's so difficult, so the first opportunity I had I took a calculus course. The subject itself wasn't necessarily interesting, I wanted to know what the fuss was about.
Innovation Without Age Limits
1. Not as quickly as I'd want, but for the most part, yes.
2. Definitely.
3. Absolutely.
I've been noticing a lot of health related submissions lately on HN including my own. The future is looking bright in this industry, hopefully we can get more collaboration to bring some of these ideas together.
Title taken from this quote in the article:

"Turntable’s traffic has fallen off a cliff and stayed down. Of its million registered users, the company has said 20,000 to 40,000 use it every day. That’s fine for a six-month-old startup, when it’s a growing number. When it’s stagnant, it may as well be dead."
Technically, "narcotic" means "opiate" (or more generally, a sleep-inducing drug), which Adderall is not. I think you meant "schedule II controlled substance", or something.
Maybe so, but a person that truly wants to succeed will continue on and find other opportunities and act on them when one passes them by or they fail.
The average altitude is getting smaller which could be read as "getting lower" if one really wanted to.
this is a risky territory for a whole set of reasons. those different things you're adding might change the way customers use your product, and more often than not, their opinion will differ on how useful the changes are. often times products lose features in such a rewrite. these features may seem insignificant to you, but may mean the world to existing users.
I don't know about compression (though there's allegedly some research using fractals in video compression, but I have no idea if and how that works), but there is image pattern recognition method that is very similar. It's called Local Binary Patterns and it cuts image into square blocks and uses a clever way to turn that blocks into binary string, for example 3x3 pixels block into 8 bits. You run this process across a texture, and get a histogram of features the texture has, like corners, black spots, white spots, gradients and similar. LBP is also inherently invariant to lightning (it uses "lighter than/darker than" instead of absolute values) and there are modifications that make it rotation invariant too (rotating the strings to biggest sequence of ones, for example).

It's pretty smart, really.
I wrote the original blog post about Teslas bricking. This IDC/IDG post is embarrassingly wrong about basically everything. The cars are most definitely not "just in need of servicing". Tesla's not even arguing that - I even have a written statement from them that it's $40k to fix.

This alleged "expert" can even get the number of cells right (6,831 by the way).

The article should be retracted.
"However the battery management system of the Roadster won't allow the car to reach that low level of charge."

I realize that you are quoting the article, but the owner's manual is simply not in agreement with this sentence.

From the Roadster 2/Roadster Sport owner's manual (italic emphasis is mine):

"Important! Caution: If the battery’s charge level falls to 0%, it must be plugged in immediately. Failure to do so can permanently damage the battery and this damage is not covered by the New Vehicle Limited Warranty. Also, if you allow the battery to fall to a critically low level it may not be possible to charge the vehicle. If you are unable to charge the vehicle, contact Tesla Motors."

[...]

"However, situations may arise in which you must leave the vehicle unplugged for an extended time (for example, at an airport when traveling for a couple of weeks). If this is the case, it is your responsibility to ensure that the battery does not become fully depleted."

[...]

"If for some reason, you are unable to keep the vehicle plugged in when it is not being used, it is up to you to preserve battery life by paying attention to the charge level and the temperature [...]"
Did Bad Memory Chips Down Russia’s Mars Probe?
Become a Volunteer in Latin America Visit Sacred Places | Online Travel Guide
Nature News Special : Alan Turing at 100
I'm experiencing this at the moment. I am picking up the local lingo at a relatively rapid rate compared to my peers, and I can see it is mostly down to having no sense of embarrassment. I went around saying 'Biscuit' to people for a month as a reply to 'Gruess Gott', thinking I was mimicking perfectly, and I'm okay with that.
The question becomes then, how much does that GDP growth increase federal revenues? If it doesn't increase it by $1 per $1.73 in GDP, it's still a net loss IMHO.

Why? Money is created by federal government and is therefore worthless to the federal government. It can just create more of it. It just makes no sense to look at the federal government (or any monetarily sovereign government for that matter) in terms of how much money they make.

On the other hand, if government revenues are increased by less than 1$, this means that someone, somewhere in the economy now has more net financial assets because of that.

Is that a bad thing? In some cases perhaps, but certainly not in general.

Is it valuable to have a high GDP and a high federal deficit? Or will that just end up in necessarily higher taxes down the road (so we don't end up like Greece) that will wipe out that GDP growth?

History tells us that, for monetarily sovereign governments, their debt is not paid back. Therefore, the answer to your second question seems to be a very clear "No, it will not lead to higher taxes, but it will lead to better economic development right now, which likely also improves the growth path in the long run."
Anybody who has used Linux at home, and Windows at work can tell you that. In fact, Windows has only recently caught up with Linux in OS reliability. X11 is still vastly more reliable than Win32.

Now, about the Windows performance issues...
I've had to suffer doing web dev work in a group in which sys admins didn't allow the devs to login on production servers. This policy was for the sake of "stability" and "uptime" when in fact the sys admins lack of understanding about the code and the stack they would in fact break shit all of the time. Least productive place I've ever worked for. Laughably the biz managers kept asking why we couldn't we be more "agile" and deploy new features everyday like Facebook, why can't we do that? It wasn't even worth answering.
One of the very difficult problems with anything political in the states is that all the terminology has been overloaded to the point where it's not really clear what people are saying.

What's a war? Does it involve a draft and killing large numbers of people somewhere? Nope. We have a war on poverty, a war on drugs, a war on obesity, and so on. How about "rights" what's a right? Is it some piece of property that the government is forbidden to take from you? Nope. We have an airline passenger's bill of rights, a right to contraceptives, now a privacy bill of rights, and so on.

I think people mean well when they re-use words like this. It certainly sounds more serious to say that such-and-such is a right. The problem is that when talking about the structure of the system overall, as opposed to just the change you are suggesting, you need to know what things are and where things fit together. I think this structural knowledge of the theory behind the way things are supposed to fit together -- the design pattern of the country if you like -- has been lost over time. now politicians just ask "what do people want", then spin it up to sound as dramatic as possible, then throw hundreds or thousands of pages of legislation at it until it looks as if it's been "fixed". If this were coding, it'd be obvious that they were just thrashing around, trying to hack their way through tons of cruft to try to get something to compile.

The lack of clean structure and terms makes talking about and resolving everything a lot more difficult than it should be.
By the way, the majority of the code that powers our platform is open-source: check out Ironfan at http://github.com/infochimps-labs/ironfan and the full suite at http://infochimps.com/labs

Would love any early feedback on the documentation and install experience -- hit me as @mrflip on github or flip at infochimps.com
There was a turning point for me, somewhere between the purchase of a 33.6 modem and upgrade from 30 monthly hours to unlimited dial-up, when the Web changed from a curiosity to the best thing ever.

The meme back then was that you could go to the Louvre from your home computer. But before those two upgrades it felt like it would be faster and cheeper to just take a plane. I had much more fun with CD-ROMs from computer magazines.

The other essential turning point was the discovery that the phone company would only charge you a single pulse from midnight to 6 am. So at 12:01, the horde of nerds would dispute the few available lines of the ISPs to try to get connected. No taximeter, no Moms inadvertently grabbing the phone and disconnecting you. That kind of shaped a whole generation's habits and schedules.

At about the same time there was also a change of culture. I remember having to call people to tell them I sent an email a few days ago. When people began answering me the same day, things started to get interesting. And then there was SPAM and we lost that forever :)

Or least until Gmail came along and rescued us with its magical bayesian filter and petabytes of data.
Finding the Write People
Form and Fortune
This looks like a great solution to a problem I run into fairly frequently!

I usually use something like Soulver to do the quick calculations but it quickly becomes difficult if everyone has ordered items at drastically different costs.
The one device I've been waiting eagerly for is the Basis band.

I tried fit bit but it was a glorified pedometer for the most part. For weight training, etc. it was just "plug in how long you exercised and we estimate the calories".
Rethinking your Mobile First strategy
I find this kind of funny, as both parties seem to have no problem with the US becoming an all seeing, all knowing, incredibly invasive surveillance state.
If food stamps are paid for out of taxes, money isn't created, just redistributed. To clarify, are you saying that because we're borrowing to pay for these, we're effectively printing money, thereby causing inflation?

Also: in terms of pure investment (not considering the moral good of helping the poor nor the moral evil of enabling freeloaders), even if the stated GDP growth is accurate, there is always the opportunity cost of not doing something else with that money. How much would it increase GDP to build more roads or fund more research?

I'm not arguing against food stamps here, I'm just trying to put this in perspective. And perhaps the answer to my questions is "nobody knows."
I could go without Adblock, but I absolutely could not use the web without Flashblock.

If you run advertisements that automatically play sounds, you ought to be shot and dumped in a river.
Understanding Computation: theoretical CS for working programmers
Quartzy (YC S11) Scores $1.2M To Help Life Scientists Stay Organized
I have seen programmers make the same avoidable mistakes over and over again without learning much from them. Sure, they learn from syntactical errors and perhaps how to avoid specific kinds of errors. But how many programmers will actually re-model their entire coding paradigm in order to improve?
Does that page do a horrible flickering at the top header when you scroll down (or up) fast?
It does for me in Safari (OSX Lion). Looks awful. Too bad.
I love all the different responses on this -- I used OWASP ZAP to do it.
Totally agreed.

There is simply no comparison between a internal combustion engine vehicle and a plug-in electric vehicle as the engines work very differently.

Also $40K service (reboot) is NOT a service, is a COMPLETE REPLACEMENT for the battery packs.
Anyone have any suggestions for preventing this on sandbox systems?
If that's not a one true scotsman, I don't know what is. Life happens. No matter how hard you try to roll with the punches, sometimes you get hit, and it's foolish to say that you really didn't want to dodge the punch that knocked you out.
You should however be careful with the test cases -- if you want to change the internal structure, unit tests can make you use the same interface, and unless your codebase if already well modularized, it will make architectural changes difficult.
Interesting. I cut-and-paste from the PDF report, which uses the word "companies". The language in the press release is slightly different.
Really, this kind of research points to the folly of the "everyone gets a trophy", "sheltering ego is most important in learning" school of thought. The every-day evidence of that folly litters the corpse of the American public education system.

Praise your kids when they do well. Point it out when they've made mistakes (in a graceful way). Teach them that doing better next time is always within their power if they apply themselves.

Most of all, let them know that you make mistakes but that you learn from your own mistakes and are willing to work hard to do better. Be a good example of coping with life and its difficulties, including the difficulties of parenting.
(~^sTrEaM^~) lIVe Scarlets v Benetton Treviso RaboDirect PRO12
Another interesting observation from that Table 1 of the article: every spending policy has a better impact than every tax cut policy.

The theoretical explanation for this is very simple: in the current economic climate, tax reduction tend to be used simply to pay down debts - what Richard Koo calls a balance sheet recession.

Still, it's nice to have that so clear from a source that is quite unsuspicious of overly left/liberal leanings.
A whole lot of recruiting material on the site (and this challenge)... and nowhere could I find Quixey's physical location. Perhaps this means they're enlightened enough to be hiring remote workers?
> a coalition of mining industry groups are legally entitled to review data from the study before publication

You can't blame the lobbyists' lawyers for trying to enforce a provision that their clients successfully negotiated. You should be ripshit that they were able to negotiate the provision in the first place.
I don't understand where this sysadmin is coming from. From a practical perspective, what's the point to drive the wedge between DevOps and 'traditional' sysadmin work. He's just critiquing the work of fellow administrators. They are BOTH sysadmins. Just as higher and higher level languages come out, higher and higher level abstractions of administration are required. With greater complexity of systems, more administration is necessary.

Deployment is so much more complicated today than it was just a few years ago. What we call 'DevOps' is really just a subset of systems administration work. Every developer (yes, sysadmins are developers) has specialties regardless of the term of the week.

Edit: Care for a reply with that downvote?
I've done some work for a research team dealing with air exposure to known and suspected carcinogens and (I think) I can appreciate both sides of this. In order to do the research my team signed various agreements related to data and any publication is dependent on approval from the data sources. Science is about free publication but we don't own the data so we have to play by their rules to access it. The primary reason in our case was an earlier publication of preliminary data that had been sent to media and caused a big stir with damning headlines. Unfortunately the legitimately scientific practice of publishing whatever you have and letting the scientific community build on it becomes quite problematic when the media broadcasts interim results as findings (and then land values plummet, or political pressure halts a multimillion dollar project). So there might be a legitimate reason for the legal threats (Though the article implies otherwise)

On the other hand, pinning down environmental causes of cancer is shockingly difficult and even partial results are very useful for the research because we simply can't put a test subject in a box and pump it full of a chemical to see if they get cancer. Most known carcinogens (by the IARC definition) are known through studies on workplace exposure.

It would be a serious blow if the study had concrete evidence but the legal threats managed to delay publication until after IARC finishes its review.
The title should be updated with a [satire] tag.

As to its content, I would say that server administration as a craft has moved up a level. It is now developing programs like Chef, designing 'clouds', choosing hardware and so on.
Squeak is really interesting, thanks for turning me on to it.
I'm against drug prohibition. I'm also against telling people they have a medical disorder and need to take a recreational drug for it.

And damn right Adderall is a recreational drug, it makes stuff that is boring fun. I've also watched people working while using it, they are easily distracted and then focus 100% of their attention on the distraction. Makes for a good illusion of productivity.