skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FBI pushing for surveillance backdoors on websites
Strange that this article doesn't really mention the MacBook Air 11" and 13", which seem to be the direction the MacBooks are going.
It's interesting that you mention the Japanese, because when I looked into it awhile ago, I could find no evidence of any increase in birth defects following the bombing. I could swear that we had pictures of deformed children in a textbook as a kid, so I started Googling it, but the only things I turned up said "no statistically significant increase".
50% off No Starch ebooks for Day Against DRM
PrelaunchX Invitation
>Given that the majority of web surfing is done on mobile these days

Based on what? I can't find a single article that would back that up.

Although I do agree that doing anything with Flash is just shooting yourself in the foot.
Yes to both please. It frustrates me when people don't put screenshots in their github repos. I tend to skip over them for inclusion in cocoa controls.
I think it is a cute problem which turns a "can you program" question into a can you think question, but I don't see why it has to have a such a long introduction.
I think this is a great idea. This could be an excellent way for more weekend projects and crazy ideas to develop into real products.
I too have the most unusual of degrees for a software engineer and UI designer. I majored in Psychology and Textile Technology (with a focus in fashion and apparel management). I'm also a few credits short of a math minor and a physics minor.

It's a very unusual combination of coursework and the depth and breadth of that experience coupled with the unique perspectives I earned as result are more of an asset than a liability, especially when many people I encounter have similar backgrounds in computer science. Intellectual contrast provides value, because it highlights things that are often overlooked.

Take Steve Jobs and Apple for example. Steve enrolled in a liberal arts college, dropped out and then dropped-in on creative writing and calligraphy classes. He later said of the experience, "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

People should own up to things like what they majored in in college. On the other hand, I don't think majoring in accounting is really the kind of person that Yahoo needs right now since it's the bean counters and pencil pushers that completely did that company in. Hopefully this guy has some other relevant experience that Yahoo could use, but something tells me that's unlikely.

That being said, it's still inexcusable for any company and any executive to push such egregious lies into corporate filings that are used by others to make investment decisions. If a company wants to lie about the background of their executives on the About Us page that is one thing, but to knowingly misrepresent information in legal documents is beyond the realm of megalomania and into the realm of legally fraudulent.
You're not seriously asserting that "nobody is ever going to care, or probably know, that you don't have a degree", are you? Literally nobody? Because the "FUD" I'm spreading is simply stating that somebody, somewhere, will both know and care.

Your sample size of one doesn't change anything. Without looking it up directly, I'm very sure that if you compared the earning power, net wealth, or pretty much any financial metric you care to name of "people with a 4-year degree" to "people that dropped out of a 4-year degree program and never earned a degree" you'll find that _on_average_, dropping out negatively impacts your earning potential.

That's not to say that that outcome is driven by an actual difference in ability or intelligence or drive or merit or what have you, nor that the outcome for people that drop out of college with the intention of creating a web startup is necessarily the same as the outcome for everyone else.

Like any statistic, that doesn't predict the outcome for any particular individual. You can drop out of college and become Steve Jobs or you can drop out of college and become an actor waiting tables in a NYC restaurant still waiting to be "discovered" at the age of 40. But in aggregate, those that earn a college degree do better (by some measures of "better") than those that do not. To state that it simply doesn't matter whether or not you have a college degree contradicts the data.
Reminds me of Dillon Edwards Investments (google it and you'll get the joke).

Coming up with a non-word name sounds like your task here. The word "event" doesn't portmanteau up well with anything and it doesn't contain comfort phonology the way, say, "blackberry" does.
Sharing prototypes in Javascript
Dell Latitudes have the trackpoint as well.
Yeah, it would def need to be easy and cheap to retrofit. Almost like Segways built into the seat or something? Probably makes more sense to go after carry-on luggage. Getting 200 people to sit in assigned seats doesn't take that long, it's all the crap they bring with them.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Sugar - A Sweet Addiction
I use to work in a retail setting selling cell phones. I can tell you that there are sales people that will boycott some brands. However, at the end of the day these sales people just want to make their commission. Usually sales associates will sell the brands that offer the best bonus for selling their phones.

If RIM is offering double commission for their phones then the sales person will sell anything with the name RIM on it. It's really easy as that.
HyperDex adds rich datastructures similar to Redis
See also AQGridView, which is similar in nature but more mature.
Um, except that's "Everything you need to be evil*". The asterisk clearly references this: "for self reference only. Don't break the law!"

(EDIT: removed snark)
> astronomers in the Renaissance would have been equally justified in rejecting the heliocentric system on account of it being at odds with what they saw around them

False. Sights observed through a telescope were also part of "what they saw around them." A true theory accounts for all the evidence (and if it's not ultimately reducible to or based on something you can get from the five senses, it's not evidence).
I think we are saying similar things, but I'm getting the sense that you don't think there is a single unified theory to be found (not simply that humans are incapable of understanding it). Do you have a particular reason for thinking this?

I (and Penrose, I believe) like to think that there is a unified theory out there waiting to be found, because the alternative is that reality arbitrarily behaves in different ways in different situations. If that is the case, then fine, but we've made so much progress in science already by assuming that physical laws are universally applicable and not arbitrarily varying.

To put it another way, I reversed the premise and conclusion, Penrose think there is a unified theory, therefore there is a connection between consciousness and QM phenomenon that we don't understand. But you claim that Penrose doesn't understand A&B, therefore thinks there is a connecting universal theory.

Maybe it's a minor nitpick, but it caused me to question why I think there's a unified theory out there, which was good mental exercise.
I haven't gotten far enough to give a good review, but you do know they have the whole thing online for free as an "Open Feedback Publishing System" project, right? http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781449398583/
"k is the expected number of future users who will be exposed to a result"

Does this mean that this approach does not make much sense if your estimate of k is totally wrong?

How do you estimate k?
Digital photography is not rocket science. It just seems that way. (2010)
Three here :-) Machine Learning, Git, and Haskell
Due to the inconsistency between quantum and relativity, I'm more inclined to believe that the problem is with relativity. The idea that physics is fundamentally non-deterministic satisfies me philosophically. If physics were deterministic, than I should be able to theoretically build a computer, input the state of the universe, and then be able to know what will happen in your life (assuming I don't tell anyone the computer output, because that would perturb the dynamics). I find that prospect far more unsettling than having to account for a superposition of states until I obtain more information in the future.
20 years ago the TSA would have been a strong enough shock to the American public that they would have revolted. Now they accept that level of abuse. So the bar has clearly been raised to a very high level, and it keeps going higher. They're passing so many dangerous laws it's all but impossible to keep up with (and the taxes and regulations to go with them).

The monster in DC expends a lot of effort and money trying to keep the people asleep. It's the story about the frog and the boiling pot of water.

To roll it back would take a two term President dedicated to absolutely nothing else but that effort, and a Congress willing to go along. Scenarios like that only become possible during particularly extreme situations, either war or depression.
I'm not really disagreeing with you. I'm not particularly bullish on the Nokia+MS partnership, etc.

What I'm objecting to is more the framing and context of the criticism. I think it's a hard case to make that Nokia was doing gangbusters and that since Elop came in that it's suddenly unexpectedly not doing well.
The Largest Pharmaceutical Drug Heist in History Was Ruined By a Water Bottle
Create your own theme for Google chrome...
Noel Welsh at untyped has been working on a cool implementation of this adaptive design.

Check it out http://untyped.com/untyping/2011/02/11/stop-ab-testing-and-m...

And the HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867380
If you are going to make claims that don't agree with what most people believe, you should try to at least provide reasoning behind your theories, if not proof. As it is you are just posting speculation as fact. I think you could make a compelling argument for what you are saying, but you just... aren't.
I started reading Road to Reality very casually– bought the book one day, next day I was in a Starbucks enjoying it and my tea. 10 minutes later one of the employees takes a break and the only table open is next to mine near the back. After a few minutes of sighing, stretching, and looking at the door to see if any new customers were coming in he turned to ask what I was reading. The next 30 minutes was the first and only time I have ever had a discussion about particle physics with a barista.
How to receive text messages using ASP.Net/Twilio Video
USA QuickFacts from the US Census Bureau
This is the follow up video to this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3913736
One of the things Dr. Parsons mentions here is how functional programming makes it easier to reason about programming because of the lack of side-effects. That makes sense to me, and I heard it frequently whenever someone is giving the FP sales pitch.

I wonder, though, whether there is a tradeoff that is going unmentioned, and I suspect that it is that it makes it more difficult to reason about costs. I feel trapped when I'm writing in a language like Java, but at least the cost model is obvious to me. Am I off base here? Is there some way to develop a similar intuition about costs in an FP language?
Part 2: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3929542
Even in your example you were consistent, so was I. Inconsistency would be

To me, consistency is important
. All of my codebase is traditional comma postfix
, so I'll keep using that; however
, maybe [...]

Which is more confusing than either of our consistent examples. Unless I misunderstood your point.
No, pretty soon we'll see WWSD t-shirts and wrist bands. I think this is a net win for HN!
Optionally typed Ruby would be interesting indeed.

Kind of wondering how that would work in practice though...
Seems most of the talk is actually about Lisps.

In my mind, functional languages and Lisp are two separate things.

Lisps can be functional, but most of them are not.
Possibly because rugby is a good way to get rid of excess energy and constructively channel some aggression as well as the team building and discipline aspects.

I remember reading that it had been suggested that all schools do 1 hour of physical education/excersize before school officially starts, this would help children concentrate.
I think with WebKit there’s remote debugging built in already.
I've been to two conferences in my life. One was, I think, a Bluetooth conference back in 2001 or so. I learned nothing. The other was a Flash conference in 2004ish. I learned nothing and was appalled at the low quality of presentations (one 'rockstar' developer spent several minutes showing us Homestar Runner while he flexed his guns at the podium - weird).

I guess the point of conferences is really just the networking. But I never really got the idea of wanting to network with a bunch of other people who also don't know what they're doing.

I just don't see conferences being aligned with developers' interests at all (unless, of course, you're a speaker). Training sessions? Yeah. Conferences? No. Send the sales team or CEO instead.
3M is not the revenue, how much they raised in total. His point is that they lasted 4 years with just raising 3M (+ whatever revenue they generated)
"How do you think they got in to it then? Trying not to sound snarky - I'm genuinely interested in what other route you see people taking into drug dealing." -, asked HN user djacksonkf in his dead comment.

I think he is Duane Jackson, the author. He seems to be banned for some reason.

Duane, you can create a new account in no time.
RubyMotion Review
Newspapers portal
The publication weakens the whole movement. "See, they don't really care about those things they say they do...and neither should you. Look at how weak they are for cooperating with us!"

It supports law enforcement's narrative that Anonymous is a group of criminals with no honor or allegiance to one another.
Bruno Sorrentino was briefly Telstra's head of Research (a very prestigious position in the day) but claimed a PhD in physics. However, his staff wanted to read his thesis, and couldn't find it. That's the problem with faking a PhD, I guess.

http://www.coxhill.com/trlhistory/history/sorrentino.htm
DRM-FREE is happening in many ways and it's a great thing. But in the music and movie industry they are leveraging streaming technologies like Netflix and Spotify to create solutions that still have DRM that just feel less intrusive then others. For E-books I think companies like O'Reilly are not only making users who are aware of DRM happy, they are taking a competitive advantage of a segmented DRM market(Nook vs Amazon vs Kobo vs whoever else) by going DRM-FREE.
It depends on the airport and airline. Southwest arranges by row groups, and I had the same experience in the Hong Kong airport (flying on Cathay, I think).
Companies in the valley willing to contract overseas developers?
We are two developers in Spain and the economy is going down the drain. What is a good place to find companies in the valley willing to contract us?
It's an interesting question. If a library buys all of the DRM-free Tor Books, then puts them up on their website as downloadable files for their community members, is that OK?
I think the best way is to have a good taste when choosing how to solve the problem.

Going purely functional (Haskell) has its own benefits but also a lot of drawbacks.

If you don't go purely functional, it doesn't make sense to avoid imperative or OO features where they make sense.

In that sense, I think languages which fuse and unify functional and OO approaches are a good strategy. There is a bit of negativity towards them, because they manage to piss off both OO evangelists as well as functional preachers, but that doesn't detract from the technical benefits of such an approach.
and if you have less time on your hands, spend an evening with The Little Schemer.
I did not know that, thanks!!
OK, so I've looked at a few of the code samples and my biggest recommendation is that you include some higher level functions which can be customized. Compare the very simple histogram on the front page and the code used to make it with the code to make a histogram in R. Graphics is something R does right. The equivalent code in R:

>> vals = read.csv('somedata.csv')

>> hist(vals)
but I also never got any of my stuff back

Well, did you ask? And by ask, I mean have a lawyer ask for you.
Open letter to people of Brevard who were laid off from Shuttle Program
To do that for 300 people is pretty impressive but you do need to consider that scale matters.

Think about it, a small WordPress blog on Dreamhost only costs $9/month, but Amazon needs giant datacenters to host EC2 and S3.

For your event you have about 12 presentations, so you don't need to do a huge amount of pre-planning or working with speakers. That makes a big difference.

From the schedule it looks like you are using one mid-sized plenary room plus maybe 1 or 2 side rooms. You are actually doing the hotel a favour by filling up a small block of rooms, they often have empty spaces when bigger events are going on, so everything they charge you is profit as far as they are concerned.

If the hotel has their own builtin projection equipment and you're bringing in your own computers, that seriously cuts the AV costs.

Big conferences tend to suffer from diseconomies of scale. The more you need to do, the bigger the per unit costs become. The hotel isn't likely to provide you with free projectors and screens when you need dozens at a time. That is magnified through every aspect of the conference.

Usually a small conference solves it's problems with work. You spend a lot of hours making sure everything works, but for big conferences, the staffing levels don't tend to increase proportionally with the number of attendees. For big conferences only some problems can be solved with time and effort.
Yahoo CEO degree lie found by fueding hedge funder
I agree, when I enrolled on CS I expected there would be plenty of people who had been doing interesting stuff with tech for years.
While there were a few like this , the majority were just bright kids who would have otherwise done Law or Accountancy.
SEEKING WORK - Remote or occasional travel around Europe fine. Native British developer based in Warsaw, Poland.

Back-end jack-of-all-trades, concentrating on PHP/C#/MySQL, experienced with Apache/nginx/IIS, and general Linux admin.

A few sample projects I work on in my spare time, using PHP/Kohana/MySQL/jQuery:

http://tweetingmachine.com

http://campaignbar.com

http://interactwive.com

I'm very good at finding solutions to complex problems, enjoy rescuing projects in trouble, and like working with technology in general. I always chatting about requirements, feel free to drop me a line at tom@tbbuck.com
I have access to Safari Books through my university, so this hasn't yet been a problem, but it's a fair point.

However, when I'm searching for something precise, a google search / help documentation usually suffices. When I'm reading a book, it's generally in search of more deep understanding or just the process of learning in general - i.e. more long-form learning. For the latter I would still prefer printed.
The first Apple II word processing software was written by John Draper while in prison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper#Software_developer
Yes, there are various options including using Weinre locally.

By hosting Weinre we've tried to make it simpler than making sense of these instructions for example:
http://www.webkit.org/blog/1875/announcing-remote-debugging-...
OP only wants credit, so the GPL is a bad choice. In my opinion, the GPL is awful. It is among other things:

1. Programmer hostile. For the most part, the people who can make money off GPL licensed software are system administrators, people selling support and training, and so forth. If you are a developer and try to use the software, you better be careful with how you use it.

2. Riddled with nonsensical legal fiction. The limits regarding linking are arbitrary. What about "linking" with the software by using its output with pipes, speaking to it over sockets, and so on?

3. A poor choice for people who love open source. Are you an author who creates open source software, and you want to link your software with a library written in GPL? Careful, or the GPL monster will eat you and make your code GPL too.

My own hate of the GPL aside, the main thing to take away is that it doesn't fit OP. People who create software can pick whatever license they wish, and I respect that. I just reserve the right to despise the GPL.

OP, perhaps the ISC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license)? It is BSD style and keeps it to a minimum.
Factor Tree - New York, NY

We're an e-Learning startup that targets a very specific problem and demographic: teaching math to kids preK - 6th grade. There's a huge problem with the way kids in the US learn math: lack of basic arithmetic fundamentals. We want to fix this problem using an alternative East meets West adaptive curriculum, and we could use your help.

We're a NYC startup, a bit different from the Silicon Valley boys, more results oriented, less fluff and you can bet that everyone on your team is as talented and driven as you. We have awesome proprietary technology and architecture that's going to make a huge impact on math e-Learning and are already working with several schools, organizations, and private consumers. They agree what we have works.

This is your chance to "do good by doing good"-- get competitive compensation, cash + equity, and make a real difference in the world.

Like everyone and their grandmothers, we're looking for talented engineers, Javascript/PHP/AJAX/MySQL. Bonus points if you're UX oriented and have a keen eye for cool design or hopped on the iOS SDK early and are a guru at objective C.

You gotta be laid back, we're all going to be spending long hours together and don't want to work with anyone too high strung. After all, most of the times you'll need to see problems from a child's perspective.

If this sounds like something you're interested in, tell us why and send your resume/portfolio to recruiting@thefactortree.com with HN in the subject title.

www.thefactortree.com
Now they accept that level of abuse.

That's unfair. The TSA was established by people hiding behind 9/11.
This is why Unity3D is so much more of a pleasure to work with than Unreal. Playing a new animation on a skinned mesh really can be as simple as Animation.Crossfade(). With a little creative thinking, power and simplicity don't have to be playing tug-of-war, they can actually complement each other.
Confirmed: iPhone5 Will Longer, Thinner, Smaller Dock Connector
"In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned."

That's a feature not a bug.
Which Git book did you get?
Ask HN: How Do You Determine Founders' Salaries?
Assuming of course that you have some level of revenue or investment (or both).
Hmm. Isnt the world aware that these sites already provide the government with all the info they could possibly want?

You cant get privacy if you use any american company. This should be well known by now. Just for reference, here is a nice list of 800+ massive companies who support CISPA:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/cispa-supporters-list-800-c...

We are experiencing the last days of freedom on the Internet. Our generation is the last one. Enjoy while it lasts.
Bacon Bits: dispatches from BlackBerry World
Redwood Robotics wants to do for robot arms what Apple did for PCs
Yeah I ended up getting it too.