skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your right and we're doing that at the heart of what we're building. Obviously the article was a spin on the market of social games but Trivi.al is about building a great game for the millions of people that actually like trivia and play in any bar across the country. We hope you download the app and check it out I think you'll enjoy and have lots of fun. Cheers
Anti-climate science group "experiments" with billboard trolling
I hope to see something that is is more successful than Flattr.

At 25 cents plus 5% per transaction, Gumroad isn't really addressing micropayments at all.
It would be nice if you could get them to ship it preinstalled.
Interview with Frédéric Mazzella, Founder and CEO of BlaBlaCar
This has been discussed on and off over the years. Even if APIs are not copyrightable, it has been argued that using an API whose only implementation is GPL creates a derivative work. Clean-room shim header files sound like an admission of bad faith but they may be legally defensible.
OS X plain text password flaw has been around for 3 months and counting
I wonder if Teddy Wayne could have requested that this article be posted without all of the Tweet/Like/etc at the top. The inclusion of these buttons both hurts the point that he's making while ironically explaining why online media has become such a vacuous echo chamber.
Here's the real meta/synecdoche subtext:

>oh, Jesus, I once had dreams of being a Pulitzer-winning series about Congo. How did I end up on the bullshit-tech-story beat?
The topic at hand today is copyright, not patents.
> If some law/issue can't be understood by 12 random people and multi-million dollar legal teams [...]

Let me rephrase that.

> If some issue cannot be understood by 12 random people heavily influenced by two multi-million dollar legal teams [...]

And now imagine "issue" being anything you're not intimately familiar with. There are many things in this world that I fail to understand, and probably never will. Law on this level is just as complicated as any other advanced topic, and the effect of a judgement on society can be profound.

I totally don't get the whole jury thing in cases as technical/complex as this (and by that I don't mean the computer science aspect, but the law aspect).
But it's MIT so anything and everything they do has to be awesome.
This is extremely awesome, and I'll be using it in several businesses pretty much immediately.

As a tool for bringing communities together to listen to people with things to say, this is going to be a game-changer, IMO.
This is actually a pretty great Idea. I wouldn't mind paying a support fee instead of the ridiculous Windows License fee that I have to pay every time I buy a laptop (only to erase and install Ubuntu the moment it arrives). If only Dell had the courage to stand up to Microsoft...
List of Hand-Picked and Recommended Data Visualization Tools
Setting up a KVM-LVM based virtual machine host
Technical is rather broad. Can you make it more concise?
The 32 startups that will present at Start-Up Chile Demo Day
Also: the galaxy song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk
Very true, you tend to often hear the same sort of thing from recent Mac converts too.

People who will argue that all PCs suck because their old $300 netbook compares unfavorably with their new $1000 Macbook Air.
The Kickstarter for Solar Will Make You Money Starting This Summer
That is very nicely readable!
It should be said that the older books have never been very good. I have read probably all of them, none come close to the documentation on the website.
Measuring effectiveness of online activism. Please help.
Others can quibble over definitions, but yes, it's effectively a fudge factor in favor of whatever we believe ought to be so, and against whatever we believe ought not be so.

So on one hand, given the nature of statistics, it is necessary to cut down on the noise. On the other hand, it puts the model before reality, and necessarily obscures anything unexpected or contradictory.
Ohhh. Thanks for the pointer to Collapsible comment. Trez useful.
Cohesive and Isolated Development with Branches (OSS projects' use of branches)
Hey: I"m trying it out, and its not entirely clear if its properly incremental. To whit, if I halt it mid backup and start it up again, it seems to start from scratch all over again.

am I miss interpreting how its working?
Actually, the things that we are asking for are not that difficult for a hardware vendor to implement. Besides, we usually tend to buy the higher end models rather than the entry level ones, so the profit margins are higher for each developer
This sort of thing is a little scary. We can't know for certain whether he wrote the same code the same way twice, or if he copied and pasted it, but I can certainly imagine doing the former.
While not epub specific, this question on SO might be useful to you:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-ava...
LISTEN and NOTIFY are a great feature. We used them heavily in one system I worked on. As the project evolved though, we decided the best way to use them was to have clients to both our main message brokers and the postgres server, and translate between them. Largely this was to avoid overloading the pg server as a message broker also -- particularly because for our uses dbus was a much better alternative for local system message passing. Now that NOTIFYs officially have payload support, YMMV.
Maybe, but even the compensation structures behind that 2/20 are wildly different between the two groups. Hedge funds have two things I've never heard of in a VC fund: benchmarks against market returns, and high-water marks. So while the headline of how they are compensated seems similar, the reality of how they get compensated isn't. Also, what a hedge fund does (assuming it's investing in traded securities) is generally far more scalable than what a VC fund does - doubling the size of a hedge fund may just mean doubling the average trade, whereas for a VC it means you have to either double the number of deals per partner or chase deals in a much later stage where round sizes are larger.
MMOSCOUT | Die Klingen des Moguls (Tera Gilde)
Didn't Morgan Freeman create this circa 2008?
they make this seem like a huge deal, anyone know why? is this going to like put HD content on an iPhone? I don't expect that the signal processing hardware is the bottleneck here.
Thinkpad already has both problems solved. Getting 12-14 hours on my thinkpad T420 with a 9 cell and a power script written to make all the items found "bad" by powertop2 turn to "good". Switched from x220 (which was getting roughly the same battery life) because its 1366x768 screen wasn't quite enough for on-the-go work.

As for the lid opening and closing doing what it's supposed to, it does. Coincidentally, the ACPI also works flawlessly on my wife's 5 year old Japanese Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Edit: here's a link to a thread in which I described the steps I took to get great battery life out of my thinkpad T420. May need tweaking for different thinkpad models, but I used it on my x220 as well with only minimal changes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3562267
Volunteer to design geek T-Shirt
Hi,

we are looking for a volunteer to help us to design our open source project t-shirt, if anyone is interested into contribute please reply.

cheers!

--
Eduardo Silva
http://monkey-project.com
That is the initial reaction of most people. But it is not the case actually. If you disable congestion control, you will be the fastest for a little bit (maybe a hundred miliseconds) and then you will get drowned in dropped packets. In other words, you will be sending data fast but packets will start dropping on the way, so the data will not be received fast.

When we say we are the fastest, I mean we are the fastest at sending packets all the way through. This is not easy at all, and it is not as simple as sending packets as fast as possible.

We are very good at modulating our speed in order to have full speed while avoiding dropped packets. Thus, in many situations, we send data slower than other TCP versions but the other versions get into trouble and start dropping packets.

There is one universal rule for TCP congestion avoidance algorithms and that is that as soon as you notice a dropped packet, you have to stop and wait for the congestion to clear up. If you do not do that, you will break the internet. But we do follow that rule; furthermore, we avoid large numbers of dropped packets in the first place.

We have tested our software with other standard connections and it does play well with others.

As someone else noted, Fastsoft are respected by the industry and it is well established that they do not break the internet. We are about 30% faster than fastsoft.
If you read the 'Portability' portion on the bottom, you can run a test server with just uWSGI. For actually deploying with Mac, that would be entirely different.
Could you please provide a little more detail; specifically the "blink gestures"? What libraries, any papers and/or online tutorials? A quick DDG search turned up only one paper from Princeton dating back to Fall '08. Thank you.
To be fair, the headline itself is not particularly objective.
A great clarification as well. And a customer certainly is not going to be aware of the decisions made around trade-offs, direction, etc.
Not sure if I'd classify it as crapware.. they're going to be legitimate and useful tools, not "CLICK HERE TO INSTALL OFFICE 2012!!"
Track 8 Is a Beautiful, Metro-Inspired Music Player for the iPad
Algorithms and mathematical methods are not supposed to be patentable in the US.
Why is GSoC selection process flawed?
- I'm participating in the venture-lab.org internet class and helping people learn to apply the Business Model Canvas along with lean startup methodologies,

Hi Mike - Thanks for the generous offer. Appears like you have a lot of knowledge to share.

Could you share your experiences in applying the Business Model Canvas and Lean Startup methodologies? What are some common pitfalls startups fall into when trying to apply these concepts?

When do you start using the canvas? ie Could you use the canvas with no potential ideas, only perceived customer problems?

The context to the questions is: Curious to know how you conduct a brainstorming session (ie session to generate ideas) and then knowing where to go next. When do you start using the canvas?
Isn't it a bit premature to put your cards on the table and specify what kind of money you're looking for?
Kickstarter to map and explore public art
CliqFlip releases Bookmarklet Tool
How to use it and also check us out at cliqflip.com/beta for exclusive access
Dell introduces a laptop targeted at developers
This is kind of sad. XPS 13 is not exactly good -- the display resolution is terrible, there's no ethernet port, and for ultrabook it is not very thin, feels real cheap in hands, and the keyboard is not very good. It's almost like someone tool everything bad from the ultrabook trend and nothing good from it.

And when people won't care because the hardware is not worth it (especially when it's not that much cheaper than MBA), it will be interpreted as "no one wants linux".
This is a bit of a UX Dark Pattern [1], isn't it? The percentage is not strictly lying, it just means something else than you'd expect.

[1] http://darkpatterns.org
I kind of hate this "tl;dr" culture. I can explain the reason why this is never going to change (though it may get better with index scans) but I expect you'll just see a wall of text and decide not to read it. But if you never read long answers, you have no right to expect solutions to your problems or to understand anything. So I hope you'll read this, it may help.

PostgreSQL and most modern, ACID-compliant RDBMSes use MVCC instead of locks. MVCC has a lot of upsides, namely, you almost never need table-level locking for writes, but it ensures you need to look at the whole table to do COUNT. That's because MVCC is basically multiple parallel universes for data. What you see depends critically on which transaction you're in when you look.

For example, suppose you have a process that needs to know the number of users in some user table. You start your transaction, and then another process starts a transaction that goes through and deletes certain users. While this is happening, you need the count. In MVCC, deletion doesn't delete, it just marks rows with the transaction ID range in which they're visible. The rows that are being deleted by the other process are just being marked dead as of that process's transaction ID, but your transaction ID is below that one, so they're not dead to you. Later on, when the youngest transaction alive is older than the oldest transaction that can see these rows, PostgreSQL will actually expunge the data (VACUUM does this).

Because of MVCC, there is more than one legitimate answer the question of COUNT; potentially, one for each transaction in progress. The answer is changing constantly. People tend not to think in these terms; we tend to think, well the table has so many rows in it, right? Why don't you just increment the count when you write one? It's not true, because with ACID compliance, uncommitted transactions should not have visible effects until they commit and transactions in progress should not see anything vary during their operation. So there really are multiple right answers at any given moment. The expectation that SELECT COUNT(*) will be fast is built on the assumption that the database has some sort of master count of what rows are in the table it can just glance at. But it doesn't, and to have one would require removing MVCC altogether and using locks instead.
I own nothing from Dell beside my 23" Ultra Sharp monitor and I will tell you that I will never ever buy anything from Dell again.

The monitor is really awesome at its price point and I don't want to miss it but the service Dell is doing is the worst I have ever seen.

Let me tell you why.
When I bought the monitor I was really happy to get a 3 year ultra warranty service from Dell for free. So the monitor gets shipped and I plug into my MacBook Air. The monitor works but the colors are really bad like a 16 bit color scheme. I call the Dell "ultra service" and tell them just what happened. After changing three different employees the guy on the other hand asks me what happens and tell him that the screen looks broken when I plug it into my MacBook and his answer is "oh we don't Mac's cause Apple doesn't conform standard graphical ports. I really don't know about Mac's so I can't help you. Don't you have a "normal PC" to plug it in?". At this point it was clear to me that I would never buy something again from Dell!

It turned out that the monitor was broken and my next monitor worked just fine with my MacBook. the monitor was not replaced by Dell but by the shop I bought from cause they swear that the fault was my Mac.

Next time I will pay the extra money and buy something from Apple again. They don't do shit like that...
i agree, a developer ultrabook must be more modular, and more equipped.
What do you expect when half the VCs say they invest using "their gut"? as if "feeling" a company is going to be successful is a valid metric. In any case if you fail more than once it's obvious your gut isn't very precise and you should use other methods.

Anyway, that the system is broken is hardly something new, have you all forgotten "The canary is dead" slides from TheFunded? and it was 4 years ago!

What I'm asking is: does it matters? When those slides were released it was all doom and gloom, wantrepreneurs were going to disappear, nobody was going to be able to raise funding, etc...

And nothing happened, which is not me saying it doesn't matters, just that it seems no-one cares.
Note, for those that don't know, that this will appear in the print edition of the magazine that is on its way to mailboxes and newsstands everywhere, so maybe the point would be hurt less in print. Maybe it would be funnier in print too, although I kind of doubt that. Shouts & Murmurs is very rarely funny.
Third headline: People buy iPhones to play games, only company that really cares is Nintendo
this is awesome!
Great work!
The CoffeeScript syntax is nicely readable, but IMO the C-like syntax is far more easily 'scannable'.

Quickly scanning over the C-like syntax I can more easily notice the ! and the && than I can make out the 'not' and the 'and' while scanning the more natural-language-like CoffeeScript because of the clear separation between ! and && and the alphanumerics commonly used in variable names. IMO the 'and' and 'not' keywords kind of get lost in the noise of all the other characters.

YMMV here. I've been programming in C-like languages for quite a long time so maybe that's rewired my brain in a way that doesn't hold for people who don't program in C-like languages.
uhh...peopleware?

Every single interaction save for one I've had with dell has been an absolute joy. Our rep remembers me by voice, and even when I've had servers with expired support, I've had techs following up with me to make sure issues have been resolved.

I don't know who you've been dealing with, but Dell has been a complete dream to deal with for me; more companies should be like them.
Not as small as you may think. Do you really believe that Google can't connect the dots (or the IP addresses) and figure out that both accounts are associated with the same person?
"Some law enforcement" actually it's one of the most heavily-regulated industries, after stock trading and telecommunications probably. Also we don't have quangos.

How would an insurance company get customers, if their services aren't good for customers?
I don't know the backstory on this....does Dell pay much less than the full price? How much less?
Great advice. I know better now, but I often wonder how much time we would have saved our first few years if I auto-deleted anything that included the text "jump on a call."
Because DC is made up of the bullies/popular kids that teased those computer nerds in school.
How SURF Incubator Was Started And Why You Should Go To Meetups
Thanks :) left that important bit out. This is opposed to O(n log n) for what's been around.
Right now, the jury is watching a video about patents and patent lawsuits produced by the Federal Judicial Center, which is commonly shown to patent juries.

Is this said video? http://archive.org/details/gov.ntis.ava21157vnb1
Excellent! I've been looking for a good cat-picture website. (j/k)

Very interesting variety of start-ups.
Because DC rewards you for being a deceptive asshole, and Silicon Vally rewards you for being a clever asshole? =)
Whats the best bay area art school to recruit UI designers?
I'm looking for Jr. Designers (Mobile UI) -- any suggestions on the best place to look for designers who are starting out and willing to learn? Anyone willing to share any Art schools which have turned out good candidates for them?
Okay, anecdotes with anecdotes. The dell laptops that I've had (from the latitude series. That ugly gray one) have been sturdier than most bricks. I've dropped them on my wood floor, they've been tossed around in my backpack, had things spilled on them, and been abused in every way you can imagine.

They still keep chugging.

*When I'm talking about multiple laptops, I'm talking about multiple laptops within my company. Not my personal laptop [although I have had one]
I'm a bit curious what profits Oracle expects to take. Google isn't profiting off of Android (that I know of) except in the sense that it makes for more people who are willing to use their search engines. That's pretty difficult to quantify. How do you determine whether a search from Android wouldn't have been made from some other platform (say an iPhone) had Android not existed?
Are there any reasons not to use postgres, as a replacement for mysql?
Probably a lot of information about the state of the universe just after the Big Bang.
He copied and pasted:

Q. The rangecheck function: Did you copy the Sun code while working on Android?

A. I did that while working on Timsort, and it was during the period I was employed at Google, but not for Google. It was something I wrote on my own for OpenJDK.

[I had not heard of Timsort before; it's (apparently) a very efficient sort written by Tim Peters for Python (see Wikipedia), and ported by Bloch to Java.]

[Timsort will come up again later. I'm somewhat appalled by how much fuss is being made over the trivial "rangecheck" function.]

Q. Why did you copy the rangecheck function for Timsort?

A. It's good engineering to reuse the same function if possible [The context here was that he expected to fold Timsort into a public version of Java, and at that point it would make sense to call the existing rangecheck function from the new code rather than writing a different one.]
I completely agree with you. I'd add that I wish there was an option to store my data in my legal juridiction and not in the U.S. (or better yet privately).
> I don't expect that the signal processing hardware is the bottleneck here.

Computational resources is always the bottleneck in bioinformatics, quantum chemistry, or any sort of high data volume analysis or simulation, and the FFT is a fundamental and commonly used transform in all fields.

At least for people who still use computers to, well, compute things, a faster FFT is a huge deal.
> (macbook still at 4+ hrs on full charge and it is 1.5 yrs old)

My MacBook Pro, mid-2009, original battery:

Temperature = 2982
CycleCount = 591
DesignCycleCount9C = 1000
DesignCapacity = 5450
MaxCapacity = 4814
WearRatio = 88%
CurrentCapacity = 1514
ChargeRatio = 31%
Voltage = 11077
Amperage = -694
InstantAmperage = -661
InstantTimeToEmpty = 2:17
TimeRemaining = 2:11
AvgTimeToEmpty = 2:11
FullToEmptyTime = 6:56

(this is from a python script of mine [0])

Close to three years of daily, heavy use. The thing just doesn't want to die (crossing fingers).

[0] https://gist.github.com/2630561
>People will hate me for saying this...

Here comes the first pitchfork-bearer! Are there ready examples of what makes the usage of Perl a security liability?

By grouping PHP and Perl together, it seems like the security issue you're highlighting is websites made by inexperienced programmers. Perl is much worse than PHP in this regard owing to the fact that Perl's history of being used by people building their first website goes back further than PHP's does.

The last time that I recall Perl being in the news for security was in the first quarter of this year when they were patching up the DDoS vulnerability in Ruby and Python [1] whereas Perl and CRuby had addressed the vulnerability in question in 2004.

I would argue that at least since 2007 or 2008, that the Perl programming demographics have shifted significantly and that most restauranteurs and florists who are trying their hand at making a page for their SMB are using PHP. At this point I would venture that the fat part of the bell curve of the Perl web programming population would be systems administrators who venture outside the bounds of their automation scripting domain.

Given the stereotypical sysadmin, I would posit that they might tend to spend extra time and energy on security (in building some script-y spaghetti monstrosity).

1. http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/12/huge-portions-o...
I hardly want to defend Dell support (knock on wood but I've never, ever had to directly deal with them), however what you experienced is hardly unique -- they see a usage outside of the norm and assume the usage is to blame. Honestly if I were you I would have said "Oh yeah, plugged it into my `normal' PC and it still looks terrible" and they would have replaced it. Unfortunate that it demands a lie or two, but such is the nature of tech support.

And I would hardly give Apple a free pass. They are the ones who are quite eager to blame any issue on a water sensor that is well known to indicate false positives.