skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a bill that could do this - FRPAA = Federal Research Public Access Act:

http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/issues/frpaa/index.shtml
Review and Feedback for Skrittle.com
I was hoping to get some reviews and feedback on Skrittle.com. Good or bad, I would like to hear it. You can contact me at ben@skrittle.com. Thanks

Ben Hall
This is true on its own, but seems like a bad standard to hold science to. With normal experiments, it's not enough to say "we ran an experiment that tested the pliability of different materials and found X is most pliable", then say, "you should be able to find that X is most pliable without reusing our method."

The point of publishing a method is so it can be critiqued; I think the same should hold with source code. This should not at all excuse people from trying to reproduce simulations with separate code.

Also, source code lies kind of halfway between experimental measures and mathematical proofs. Again, you are usually expected to give proofs of non-obvious mathematical results, at least in the supplementary section. Similarly, saying "there exists code which produces this result" shouldn't be sufficient unless it's very obvious.
I just downloaded my entire Google Web History (300k). 
I've always used the search history as a power user tool since it allowed me to search within my searches and locate information that way. I'm a heavy Google user, my search history has over 300k searches. But I don't want Google to access this information for advertising. I'm already annoyed enough because it's constantly bothering me with Costa Rica vacation information since I did a bit of research on that country several weeks ago. So I decided I'd stop using the web history. I still want to access the accumulated data though. I found this script which automatically downloads the Google History as a CSV file.

http://geeklad.com/updated-script-to-download-google-history

However, this code is somehow executed on the developers server, so there're some privacy issues here (god knows whether your history is being saved there). So I set out to code a ruby script to download my web history.

https://github.com/terhechte/Google-Web-History-Downloader

This works only for around 4k of entries though. It would be more work in order to support downloading the entire history, for that either fork the script or use the script mentioned above

I used the geeklad script above instead of my Ruby script, but I figured I'd share my ruby approach nontheless so somebody can improve on it.

Cheers.
Can you tell us more about the book? Would you recommend it? Is it easily accessible?
I theory you are right. But can you say of a king that he understands his people? Or of a president that he fully understands the country he is ruling? There is a difference between knowing, and understanding/acknowledging. And sometimes, people don't get it, even though it would be in their best interest to understand things.

In this case, I think the people at the top are in an "ivory tower" of righteousness. They know what's going on (you're right on that point), but they don't understand it, that's why they can't act pragmatically on it.
This is pretty awesome - I only now wish Gmail would have native support for GPG signatures (I know they will never support GPG encryption). As it is, when people read emails I send in Gmail, the signature appears as a 'noname' 0B attachment, which is irritating.
Technically I wouldn't call it a 'Photo quality algorithm' in that case
Wow thank you. This is very very useful. This has plagued me in a number of websites recently.
Brought to you by the company that spied on peoples phone calls for years. Facebook may or may not be doing what News actually got caught red handed doing.

See these piratey Internet companies are evil; buy more gossip sheets now. Find out which celebrities may or may not be doing it and why global warming is a lefty conspiracy. Read all about it!
I wrote a quick Python version for use on the command line: https://gist.github.com/1653544
I'm assuming that by "smartphone" this article is only referring to Android devices? As far as I know, it's not possible (without jailbreaking the user's device) to get read access to SMS on iPhone.
500 Words before 8am
I just looked at the forums and it doesn't use inotify, it just polls every minutes :/ That's pretty sucky, I have code and repos I need to sync and they have thousands of files. Polling that every minute would be hell.
... having no job is better than a low-paying job, in your analysis?

Perhaps yes.

A price is a signal. As with any restriction on free speech, outlawing certain prices (low wages) should show a clear and easily demonstrated social benefit.

In this case, private free enterprise is clearly harmed, but the benefit returned to society is an intangible, a void: society receives only the absence or reduction of sweatshop working conditions.

I think we are actually in violent agreement on most of these issues.

The major exception, I think, is that I am deeply skeptical of a society's ability to check the worst behaviors of private corporations. I believe that certain entire business models are better legislated against and rendered completely illegal, to prevent regulatory capture [0].

EDIT: This view seems to be controversial. May I suggest a little light reading? [1]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
We're talking past each other. I'm stipulating that DRM is "broken theoretically" and arguing that it doesn't matter.

I'm also pointing out that MD5, though "broken" is actually cryptographically viable in some constructions --- in other words, there are cryptographic applications of MD5 that have no known viable attacks, even though MD5 is itself a weak hash. It's a tangent, but I thought a telling one: even though the nerdy vantage point is "MD5 is broken, avoid at all costs!", the reality is that it still works in some settings. Just like DRM.

Finally, if you want to reason through the legalities of DRM laws, start thinking in terms of contract law instead of technology. The reason content owners would like it to be unlawful to break DRM is that they shouldn't need to incur an arms race merely to enforce otherwise binding contracts. The fact is that it is entirely lawful to make access to an entertainment title conditioned on acceptance of a contract not to distribute the title. Violating that contract is unlawful. DRM exists in order to make it harder to violate binding contracts. In fact, the laws regarding DRM even anticipate the hardships DRM creates for normal users, and creates exceptions for breaking DRM in cases of interoperability and security research.

It is no case a "crime" to express mathematical concepts, except under exceedingly silly definitions of the term "mathematical concept" (any piece of content can of course be described mathematically; that doesn't make it lawful for me to steal and publish your credit card number).
Oh - I saw this posted the other day. Prefacing my answer - I don't understand the goal of your site, so I'm not sure how much I can help. I'd recommend that if you want people filling out your survey on your website, you'll need a much better interface. The site just doesn't look too professional or trustworthy. Sites like surveymonkey and wufoo can get you some nicer looking forms.

There's enough on linkedin to give you most of the information you'd need to graphically show hiring trends - many profiles are public, you'd get more than enough info to see what people are doing (profiles typically have college, grad year, and positions they've held).
I always find something a little ridiculous in these articles that blame the textbook for errors (or a statewide test), when the textbook has been through more review than an exercise that an individual teacher designs. That said, math textbooks are becoming an anachronism. Adaptive individualized content is already available up to high school level.
Wuala seems much better than SpiderOak, but I have a suspicion that they encrypt each file separately. I can live with that, though, if it makes the client better, and Wuala is almost perfect, apart from the fact that it doesn't use inotify :/

I'll probably still switch to it, just not use it for everything.
Yes but I doubt the first, second, or even 100th typewriter was less applicable to most situations than pen and paper. Same goes with computers. And same goes with new innovations/theories within education.

Maybe the issue isn't with the "frivolous" theories but rather with the treatment of them. As in depend on empirical evidence through studies prior to applying them to a wide student base. The first +-10000 light bulbs weren't released to the public. Why are new educational methods?
Apples vs. Oranges: discuss!

(I'm quite happy with my RESTful API that allows subscription to resources via Websockets. This works very nicely when your resource representations include their own href)
Why? They're not searching it because it's randomly in the street, they're searching it because you are presumably interesting. If you're that interesting then there should be no problem getting a warrant.

The privacy issue here is whether you have the right to avoid specific scrutiny by the government. I think the government should either have to make their case, or GTFO. That's the myth we learned in Civics class anyway.

We don't let the government do things merely because they can.
Observations on Errors, Corrections, & Trust of Dependent Systems
Biological systems are chaotic (in the mathematical definition). The more we want to manipulate the more we're going to have to know, to higher precision at the very least for the safety of any patients. It's not unreasonable to think that this will be a significant barrier for some time. We sequenced the human genome over a decade ago and, quote honestly, have gotten very little out of it. We can draw some neat graphs and hand wave a whole bunch but the reality is we haven't produced much from information. There are still, what, only a handful of fully sequenced genomes? And alleles are munged together. We can do some SNP correlation studies but that doesn't really tell you much. There is a lot of BioTech search to come, just in genomics, and it's going to take some big steps before it becomes accessible to someone in their garage, IMO.
You can look up the debate via the Wikipedia article and other sources. The case for reduced jobs in most situations is very strong, the arguments about overall welfare more intense.

Often analytical (rather than emotional) minimum wage proponents admit a small decrease in total employment but think the benefits to those who make the cutoff helps offset that. That might even be true in a growing economy with generally low unemployment and short unemployment terms. In one with ~20% youth unemployment, and workers discouraged by multi-year stints of unemployment, any job – even a low-paying job – is better than prolonged idleness. Employers are understandably loathe to take a chance on those who have gone years without a reliable work history, or never started a work history at all.

When he wasn't quite as partisan, even Krugman could make an eloquent case that bad jobs at low wages were better than no jobs at all at wishful-thinking wages. See for example:

In Praise of Cheap Labor: Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...

Even today, while Krugman is against any sort of lowering-nominal-wages or lowering-minimum-wages for macroeconomic adjustment, he'd like to achieve the same thing through massive fiscal and monetary stimulus, essentially lowering wages through inflation.

In the funhouse mirror world of politics, the 1-2 punch of higher minimum wages but also inflation is a perennial winning strategy. Give people a superficially popular, though actually harmful, boost in minimum wages: an easy focal point on which to campaign. But prevent its full damage with harder-to-assess, noticeable-only-after-the-election inflation. Or at least keep the celebrated raises below other growth/income indicators, so that it's mostly a symbolic measure. (Any raise large enough to make a 'big difference' for minimum-wage earners would also make a 'big difference' in boosting unemployment.) Via the only-slightly-harmful symbolism, everyone (who is a politician) wins!
How I Made Information Consumption Into A Conscious Choice
3079 Developer on Roguelikes and Breaking the Minecraft Mold
Ah yes the conferences... When will the RMM (REST Maturity Model) certification, books and classes be available? It will be the CMMI + SWEBOK conferences all over again gangbusters! j/k. All good stuff it is just a good portion of it is to sell books/conferences and sometimes the good engineering parts are lost on the idea that in the end engineering is making things more simple not more complex.

It is a good presentation and hits on many good points but also makes the REST model a little too narrow for most client/consumer usage today easily.
You can't possibly compare biotech to the computing industry in terms of where accessibility to the former is headed. Equipment costs may go down and education may become more accessible in biotech, but the risks to humans and property associated with running an entire lab will ensure access to non-trivial equipment and materials is granted only to those who are capable.
Sorry, I didn't mean to propose that all of this data would be included when you download the document. A downloaded document could be as simple as a hash or a document identification # (or a magnet link :)). You open this document in a program like Papers and, after downloading the main text, presentation style sheet and main figures, could then selectively download whatever you'd like. So, if you want to zoom in on those fly eyes, you right on the image and get a context menu that allows you to see the original image.

These are implementation issues. The document format does not have to contain any supplementary or additional whatsoever. It could contain references to where the ancillary content is found. It is then up to the interpreting program to decide how it wants to allow you to download that additional content (e.g. automatically, selectively, based on heuristics, etc).

The practical upshot of this is that you get to keep all the data related to the paper in one place with one organizational tool, with relational information intact.
I've had a lot of success keeping my hands and wrists in shape by doing a couple of fingertip pushups every day. If you can't support your bodyweight on your fingers, do them against a wall or put your weight on your knees instead of your feet.
> Well on the other hand, one could also argue that when you put the trash on curb you give away any rights to it - which means that the trash becomes a public property that Feds have access to.

You could make that argument, but I'd disagree. Law enforcement can (should) only do what we the people allow.
Robotics is not as cheap as you think. I've brought systems in to factories to do seemingly simple things that cost easily $250k without batting an eye. You can pay someone more than minimum wage for many years for that kind of money.

What would robots capable of stocking shelves cost? $500k? It's just not worth it. McDonalds has how many thousands of stores - and they don't bother automating that much. Amazon.com still uses people to pick their orders (for the most part). The companies aren't stupid, someone has run the numbers and figured out that robots are too expensive.

It's not even Moore's law thing. Computer are plenty powerful. You can make a robot do these things. But by the time you buy good quality motors, batteries, and sensors, it gets expensive no matter how cheap the computer is.
The Two Most Important Startups in the World
A few points:

1) Spring Roo is not necessarily a more modern approach. It's more similar to Rails.

2) JAX-RS is more like Sinatra than Rails.
Generating JSON api is already simple in JAX-RS.

3) Not everybody wants ActiveRecord

http://www.braintreepayments.com/devblog/untangle-domain-and...

https://github.com/braintree/curator#readme

4) JAX-RS comes with standard Java EE (moot point)

5) You can re-use your Servlet knowledge with JAX-RS to some extend (Filter, setting up web.xml, etc)

Not to take anything away from Spring Roo which is a wonderful project.
The question is what are you both going to find interesting? Smalltalk is what you're doing while you try to find something that you're both interested in.
http://getfiregpg.org/s/home

There was some effort in just such a project, though it seems to have died out.
Kickstarter's Million Dollar UX | How Kickstarter Makes Me Pull Out My Wallet
What a substantive blog you got there! Thumbs up!
Thanks for this great tip. I've been looking for a simple Windows-based DNS resolver for a while now.
I wondered why you were ignoring the switching power supplies in consumer televisions in 1976, but then I discovered that I'd posted an older version of my article without that section. Oops. It's there now.
To say "it's all in your head" to everyone suffering from RSI, anywhere, ever, is a dangerous overstatement.

RSI is a description of an injury, not a diagnosis. Problems causing RSI can include:

- Genuine tendonitis.
- Carpal tunnel syndrome.
- Many and various shoulder problems including thorassic output syndrome.
- Neck posture problems often feeding into things like brachial plexus problems.
- Posture problems elsewhere.
- Muscle strength issues.
- Tension Mytosis Syndrome (as referenced in your article).

I've read quite a lot about TMS. It's an interesting potential diagnosis and I'd certainly advise anyone suffering chronic pain to look into it - AS WELL AS other more conventional routes.

Even Dr Sarno, the author of "The Mind Body Prescription", as referenced in the article, advises that you only consider TMS as a cause after conventional medical problems have been ruled out.

Ignoring all physical causes in favour of a single psychosomatic diagnosis, with no evidence, is extremely unwise. Advising people to do so is extremely irresponsible.
I might have misunderstood you. Do you mean that if they don't want you to share the content then they shouldn't sell it to you, because you will share it regardless of what the terms of the sale dictate?
In the end it is about trust. Sometimes i just wish ISP would provide better DNS services.
dmils4,
Thanks for the website design advice and the links.

>There's enough on linkedin to give you most of the information you'd need to graphically show hiring trends -

I will look at Linkedin again. I will still need to fill in some missing information somehow.

Okay...
The biology revolution is coming, both sooner and later than you think. As one indicator, the price per base pair of DNA synthesis is following a Moore's Law, (http://singularity.com/charts/page73.html), but Fredster is right in that there are other factors at play. However, you could say the same with computers, with bandwidth, cpu, and storage all improving simultaneously.

A story that our TA in EE40 (Signals in Systems) at Berkeley really stuck with me: in the early days of personal computing, when you would go to Radio Shack to buy a set of transistors, you had to individually test each one, because they had a 50% chance of not performing to spec. Biology currently is in that stage, though multiplied by another order of magnitude.
Well, that's kind of why I threw in the "very generally" part.

It's good to know / have some confirmation (?), though, that Google's handling of DNS query data will not change as part of the ongoing Privacy Policy revision and user accounts data consolidation. (I commented / queried on this point a few weeks ago, in another thread.)
Egoscue's work is referenced in "Four Hour Body" by Tim Ferriss. I've not tried it myself, but it sounds like an interesting alternate therapy - definitely worth a look.
Coca Cola played an intricate role in race relations in 20th century America. The removal of cocaine from this popular beverage was not one of choice, but one required to help squelch concerns that the product lead to the degradation of society. Specifically increased violence from Blacks and miscegenation. I saw a documentary on it awhile back but can't remember the name. Here's a link that explains a little more http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/384/is-it-true-coca....
previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636287
Yeah, acupuncture seems to be short-term effective for many people but long-term not so much.

Better for you than NSAIDs, though :)
Visualizing Range Trees
Quick python validator, for those that would rather stay on the CLI and/or not have to copy/paste/submit to an external service: https://gist.github.com/1919460
I think both can coexist. WebSockets, common comet long poll, and even the "internal" AJAX APIs of web applications are one thing, addressable URIs to resources another.

E.g. Gmail has history navigation and bookmarkable URIs for emails, but no such thing for chat or other page state, which is totally fine.

REST with its addressable resources has clear advantages over RPC style apps for many applications, it won't go away. Bookmarks, navigation, the overall simplicity.
>The worst thing a brand can do is become ho-hum and boring. People either love or hate Apple

Just like Marmite. Marmite actually took that love-hate thing one step further and created an entire advertising campaign based on people who hate it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoRcU0Ul7tU), as well as a duplicated website themed around "I hate Marmite" (http://marmite.com/hate/).
I like the way the open letter says that Elsevier supports open access to public research when Elsevier is actually lobbying against open access to public research. (e.g.
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=807)
Combinator - A simple Hacker News client for Windows Phone
I've recently published my first Windows Phone application, Combinator. It's a very simple Hacker News client and it's completely free.

Download Combinator v1.0 (Marketplace):
http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=a5275a3f-6611-48f6-bd62-7382eda4c028

Download Combinator v1.1 (.xap file):
http://www.mediafire.com/?s8m1wch8dj8wpk9

Thank you for your feedback.
The article's headline seems misleading. In the article itself it seems like what they are really saying is that due to file permissions it is technically possible for applications to access this data, not that it is something these companies are actively doing. They "can" access private data, which is not surprising, but it is not established that they "do" access it.
PayPal As Moral Police? Forces E-Book Sellers To Remove Certain Erotica Content
You do realize that $20/hr over the course of a year is roughly $40,000. And $40,000 is more than what something like 40% of the people in the US make in a given year. That would be an unworkable change in the labor market. Most college graduates don't start out making that much right out of college, much less people without a college degree.
I dropped out of a PhD program because I was disillusioned and never found a path of value to my group's work. After reading this I really wonder if what was missing was context and world experience.

So much of what's wrong with a lot of academia is group think and insular publish/perish mind set. What would make me want to go back at some point in my future is putting research into a larger context and grounded in my own experiences of what is truly important and valuable.
Factorization and graphing aren't actual skills, though. They are mechanical computations that basically scream "please use a tool to do this".

We don't pine for the days when people had to hand-calculate logarithms, because we've come up with better ways of using that tool. CASes and graphing calculators are the same thing.