skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This forum is not one of predominantly libertarian hackers. I have been here a long time and have not found any predominant political leaning of this forum other than on specific issues related to technology law, intellectual property and privacy. So that statement is presumptive and wrong.

Regarding the rest of your post, it will take me all day to point out all the various misconceptions and racisms there.

But I should say that in my old country we had a 50 year experiment called communism forced upon us by a more powerful foreign country and it was no fun at all. That experiment also came highly recommended from the best minds in academia.

That's why the whole idea of powerful countries doing experiments on weaker ones seems incredibly wrong and offensive to me.

And no this is not "importing institutions from succesful countries." There is not a single successful country that has anything similar to this -- i.e., an autonomous region that is ruled by some economics professor and is not subject to the country's laws or democratic institutions. In fact if any politician even suggests this for America, their career is doomed.

How about we don't experiment on poorer nations. How about we let them decide for themselves. This way if they do something wrong it will be their own fault. And if they want to pass laws that favor foreign investment they can pass those laws using their lawfully elected parliament and they can take their own responsibility for them.

The current president of Honduras is the result of a military coup and very dodgy elections held by that same military after many arrests and disappearances.

If this deal goes through it will not be considered by ordinary people in Honduras as something they chose. It will be considered as something dictated from the U.S. I am not sure how much that is true, but it is obvious that this is what the Hondurans will believe. The coup is already being blamed on the US.
The Spanish crisis is a crisis of understanding of how wealth is created
The actual title of the article is: "Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need to Succeed".
I have students that have been programming (in Java) for two years and have coded simple arcade games from scratch. These same students will spend more than five minutes unsuccessfully trying to get a single CodeCademy exercise to work. (I don't mean lesson or section: I mean a single page.) Some of the "tutorials" are so poorly written that it's just completely unclear what the author wants the student to do. I can't imagine that a student with no programming experience and no mentor is having a fun experience.
Cocovas visualization master's thesis
Does anybody have any insights into how this was developed? Does the author care to chime in?
Thank you for the bug report. I've fixed the issues you mentioned.
> Mail on my Mac is represented by a postage stamp. I never realized that until I just analyzed it. Good icons are subconscious like that.

Honestly? I don't believe you. The postage stamp is in no way subtle - in fact, it couldn't be more obvious.
> It never ceases to amaze me how quickly people jump to defend CSS as if any criticisms imply that the author thinks we'd be better off back in the days of deeply nested tables.

Could not agree more. Tech people are weird sometimes.

The same thing repeats itself in other contexts; for example people hate to hear criticism of git, because to many people it is the be-all-end-all of version control. But just because it's better than what came before doesn't mean there's not room to improve it even further.
Hi there, thanks for your input. I've made a follow up post about the fix. Here's the link in case you're interested: http://abernardes.github.com/2012/05/09/tdding-with-backbone...

Cheers,
Andre
iOS devices mostly does away with both concepts, and I hear they've sold a few.
Yes. I think some of the other publishers are more egregious than Elsevier. Everything is bundled together as you say and access is monopolised that way.

But things have to start somewhere. Maybe it's only with Elsevier and maybe it with Maths faculty and only with the journals they publish in. But the whole system is so despicable in light of today's technology and publishing costs that once it's brought to light how much better things could be, I think change will come fairly quick.

Didn't at least one library try threatening a publisher that the univerity's faculty would no longer publish in that publisher's journals if fees were not made reasonable?

Is that a viable strategy?
Facebook's IPO Roadshow Video
JobsArabia.com
Scrape webpages with node.js
If there's any negligence I don't see how it goes to the browser vendors and not the website.
Is this real? I swear the "description" is just generated by a Markov chain generator pointed at some pop culture internet sites.
> As an async environment it doesn't offer anything either new or too compelling

That isn't strictly true.

If you focus on the traditional scripting languages as your competition: Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl: Then you start to realise that Node.js does offer a similar language structure (dynamic, no compilation, etc), with the benefits of thousands of concurrent connections (which those languages will do with certain modules) but while forcing all the libraries to also be async (which those languages DO NOT do).

At my last job I had to build an SMTP server capable of scaling to 50k concurrent connections. Building this in Perl was fine, except for any library I wanted to use - all of the libraries were synchronous. So now I wrote Haraka, which Craigslist are now using as their incoming SMTP server.

If you compare all that to Java you get slightly less performance but probably lower memory requirements. And that's OK. Different strokes for different folks.
An Interview with Kevin O'Leary
You bring up an interesting point about whether outcome-based education is effective in learning programming.

On the one hand, as apsurd points out, programming is probably not something that can be done without understanding what you're doing. It's one thing to program HTML, CSS, simple Javascript where you're getting instant visual feedback [1], another to write C, Python, Java, etc. where the feedback is not so instant or visual and requires you to keep a constantly updating mental model of what's going on.

On the other hand, learning something new involves doing it enough that your neural pathways rewire to become more proficient at it. As you pass the stages of constantly thinking about what you're doing to how and why, leaps or breakthroughs in understanding become more likely and frequent - jumping from plateau to plateau so to speak.

Question is, what's the best way, and can it be abstracted to web-based tutorials? I don't know what current state of the art Cogsci research says about this, though it's on the todo list [2].

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3948737

2. http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/search?q=education&restri...
Thanh lap cong ty
I generally presume that any project has all kinds of things on their agenda, and that they don't need to explicitly state all of them. I often find users e-mailing me asking me "do you intend to do X", and I find myself wanting to reply "do you really consider me so closed minded as to not want to do X? I just haven't done it yet". What really matters is what is already done and what can be relied on: even if they said "we intend to build an Android library" on their site, it doesn't necessarily mean that they will ever get around to it (or that they won't decide it is even a bad idea, not that I think that would happen in this case).
It's because "saving" is an activity that exists only to appease computer architecture choices. It's not a natural thing to do at all.

A more humanistic approach would be to save versioned history of everything you do and then "save" by marking points in time as versions you would like to share with other people or systems.
I missed the part about writing server side logic. How does this service allow you to write service side logic?
Or even better:

http://tog.acm.org/resources/RTNews/html/rtnv6n2.html#art11

Copy the postscript into a file and upload to:

http://www.ps2pdf.com/convert.htm
Innovative doesn't mean intuitive - why is pinch zoom?
Wouldn't it be more intuitive for pinch to close an app - after all you pinch things closed ?
Draw a triangle and put 4 shrunk copies of itself in the triangle (center one flipped)?

http://imgur.com/m0Okt see components on rhs.

Edit: Oh sorry, was confused about which one Sierpinski's was. Can fix it by omitting middle triangle: http://imgur.com/MVmPh
TaylorMade Rescue 11 Hybrid
Australia has its own cheap labour: working holidays and people (students) who want visa extensions.
By definition anything on their blog is PR for Exec. But it's also a fun, heartwarming story so I don't see the problem.
I work with the original author of CFDG, who described this exact idea to me just last week. My jaw about hit the floor when I saw this. Though, it's possible that he knows the author of this.
Wonder how Apple will treat FB apps purchased via the FB iOS app running on iOS device? iirc there's been some controversy in this area regarding Apple taking a cut of the sales.

Also wondering what Google will think of the FB Android app helping users side-step the Chrome store or whatever it's called.

Think it's time for FB to get a device of their own ;-)
> The author finishes his argument with a quote from a recent pop song

"Hey Ya!" was released in 2003, nine years ago, and the exact same year that Dell finally removed floppy drives from its computers.
Is documenting weight loss in time-lapse photography an interesting idea?
I was thinking there are a couple of ways to go with the app:
1) Sharing videos might enable an compelling social layer.
2) You could create better games around weight-loss, because if the contestants were strangers they might want to see who they are competing against throughout the game.
3) It could be an online version of 'Biggest Loser' with advantage of being able to interact with the contestants.
I think the idea is that you can't mine someone for skilled labour.
Do directors still say cut? Or do they now shout fclose() at the end of a scene?

If it's a really good take - do they say that's "a burn to disk" - instead of a print?
Go for it! I think it would be better for guys, I'm thinking most middle aged women folk would be less than willing to share fat pics
This incentive question is really a good one. I personally always viewed these rates as ridiculously low so that people would be fools to think about how to eliminate their own jobs.

It would be very interesting to analyze if indeed higher monetary incentives do rise the level of innovation within a company.
Although note that the knowledgeable will have different ideas about who's important. You often hear variations of the phrase "an X's X" (i.e. a poet's poet, a director's director), and the same is true for trumpeters. While Miles was a solid player, he couldn't pull amazing melodies out of thin air at breakneck speeds like Clifford Brown[1], didn't have the virtuoso skill of any number of other folks[2], and had kind of a crap tone to boot[3].

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2rGMGp6gYE

2. Sergei Nakariakov, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNT_eF9lCBY. Or Allen Vizzutti for straight up trumpet porn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr5SZrLk7Uw.

3. Neither warm like Brownie nor powerful, like, say, vintage Louis Prima: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46byB2YGePA (solo starts at 4:25 and continues after the break). At least I think that was Louis Prima. It's been a while since I've seen the liner notes for that one.
Yes, foldr/build is almost exactly reducibles, but not foldables.

Iterators do nothing for parallelism either.
You mean, except for the disk part of the floppy disk, of course.
The problem comes when you mix the two. Try it. Try scaling it (to a hundred thousand connections). I've done it and it doesn't mix.

Sure programming-wise it's nice to have sync. No argument there.
PS is basically Forth
Scientists identify neurotranmitters that lead to forgetting
We just added support for CORS on both /authorize/ and /create/, let us know if you have any issues
This is really cool, and playing with it made me smile. I wish it had two things:

1) A way to delete objects that you placed by accident. (perhaps there is a way to do this which I couldn't find). I keep going back a page and losing everything because I press the delete button.

2) A way to label layers, with generated descriptions of what the layer is. i.e. Here is a new layer called a "heart". A heart is two circles and one square. A "valentines day picture" is two hearts. Likewise, a "tree" is a rectangle, with another a rotated "tree" touching one end of the rectangle. I can imagine this being a great way to explain programming concepts in a visual way, and giving people the vocabulary to talk about them.

As for my artistic abilities... http://cl.ly/251m2k0z1Z0z142r3S42
The difference is that with no hinting you optimize for maintaining the shape of the characters, while with hinting you optimize for having the shapes falling on pixels.

“cool Apple friends” have often been graphic-oriented people, so they preferred seeing their fonts right. Windows and Linux people only saw blur because they were less trained to look at fonts.

(I know, this is a generalization, I disabled hinting myself on my Linux machine years ago, and I’m no graphic person at all)
Yep. I have been waiting for something like this for a UI doodle I have. Brilliant start.
Same here, I just learned why the radio buttons were called radio buttons with this article. I had never seen them, but never had a problem with them.

Also, as a non native english speaker, I learned several words in english by programming. I remember seeing the word "if" out of a programming context for the first time, and I knew what it meant because I remembered of c++. :)

So yes, convention is more important. People will learn the convention and won't know why. Just like we don't know the exact etymology of every word, but we still can communicate fine. And when we do find how each word or icon was originated, it's interesting, but we honestly could live without it.
Thought it would be relevant here, I quickly hacked up a Ruby client: http://pheuter.github.com/Simperuby/
Pfft. I can Build An Animated Chart In 1 Line Of Code With DoesEverythingForYou.js
Nike シューズ 価格
Right clicking on a shape brings up a Delete Shape option.
I wouldn't dismiss the node.js stack quite so easily. Those "proven" technologies you mention had to go through their own lifecycle of continued improvement.

I remember a time when my colleagues who were steeped in C++ had a good laugh at my expense because I was building server-side web applications with a new framework and a hot, new language. It woefully under-performed similar C++ applications in benchmark tests.

It was 1998, and the language was Java. I could write my applications much faster and in a more maintainable way than they could, but they didn't care. Their technology was proven, and Java was simply a fad.
Right click on the shape, and you can choose to delete it.
It's a 2TB drive doing a full fsck each time, though I don't know why.
I'm Curious: what's the incentive for Apple not to ship the FB app w/ iOS like they do w/ Twitter? Seems like Apple would benefit from all the consumption of Facebook on the iOS devices.
sweet, will do
This is what I used to do for a living:

1) Go to offices and learn their goals and systems
2) Automate them with software
3) Get paid lots of money for selling them the software

While one result of automation is lost jobs, the other is that businesses have more operating capital to grow, expand, hire more, etc.

He's not a scumbag, but he's missing the opportunity. Why isn't this guy selling the software/process to the company he works for, and making far more money in the process than he gets from his bonuses?
Will they not see the referer header if their own sites (as indexed by Google) are https?

If they don't switch, puts some sort of upper bound on how much they value the referer data.

(User agents aren't supposed to send referer http->https but scratch above if practice is for them not to send https->https across domains as well.)
The menu is nice, but I'm wondering why no one has implemented the scrolling clock indicator in javascript/CSS. That is actually genuinely useful in some cases. The same goes for an alphabet indicator.

The closest I've seen is sausage.js.
http://christophercliff.github.com/sausage/
Judge rejects Oracle bid to shut out 'fair use' defence
How do people in the Netherlands feel about the notion of "common carrier"?

http://www.columbia.edu/dlc/wp/citi/citinoam11.html

Is common carrier a useful concept for society?

What do you think?
ShareJS is a good example. However I don't think this is the right approach necessarily. The FireBase API is a lot simpler and in casual tests it's much faster too.
A Millionaire At 15 - Dominic McVey. How Did He Do It?
backing this up. We like the Parse pricing model so anything to improve that would be better :)
Its really great hearing the Australian accent in the "What have you heard?" audio! :)
> Microphones For speech recognition

Until someone trumps the performance of condensor microphones in the studio, this form will remain a current and accepted form for speech input.
Interesting idea, though if I were you, I'd make the sharing aspect optional (and make that extremely clear on your signup page).
It's not even really that archaic- concatenative languages just never hit mainstream among programmers. PostScript has built-in datatypes for dictionaries and lists, first-class procedures, closure-like mechanisms, clean, uniform syntax... refreshingly modern for something designed in 1982. I wrote a Forth compiler and VM in PostScript a while back: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Four.Ps/blob/master/four.ps
This wouldn't work nearly as well, given that trademark law generally only protects marks one actually uses in trade. So, given N and M synonyms for "app" and "store," respectively, your potential troll would actually need N*M storefronts, each sufficiently similar to one or more of the established app stores to cause confusion and sufficiently successful to be considered "use in trade".

In contrast, one can hold patents without making or doing anything (including licensing the patents).
"I would be furious"

Furious? Would you punish him then?
If it wasn't a fun, heartwarming story, would there be a problem? PR is PR, it is what it is. There's good PR and there's bad PR, naturally.
Very important note that tends to be overlooked:

"[Judge Alsup] has yet to decide on the overall copyrightability of the structure, sequence, and organization of the 37 Java APIs themselves. Ruling that the APIs are not covered would render today's decision entirely meaningless, essentially throwing away the jury's earlier finding of infringement on the SSO issue."

The judge instructed the jury to assume the API is copyrightable when they determined whether Google violated that (assumed) copyright. The actual ruling whether the API is copyrightable will be decided by the judge as a matter of law.
These infamous lines are certain to get copied quite a bit more. In case you haven't seen them:

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
if (fromIndex < 0)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
if (toIndex > arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}
In my mind this shows that crowdsourced funding + low cost prototyping (eg arduino) and manufacturing (eg 3d printing) could really disrupt consumer electronics. It'd be really cool to see the next must have smartphone/tablet built by a few guys in their basement and sold to millions of consumers.
wow .. pretty awesome :) is it possible to download the drawings ?
To be even more pedantic, python already runs on multiple cores. They poll the GIL until they can run. I believe some version of Python 3 fixes this behavior so they don't have to poll the GIL.
Seriously? Hot water was all it took? You'd think someone would have figured out to just boil the beans before trying some other chemical extraction process.

Though I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. These days even the majority of the cooking oil we use is extracted via a chemical process.
Yeah I don't even think we'll do fb connect because of privacy fears. And well make it so no one can look you up unless you want them to. I imagine that if people want to share, they could do it with just one or a couple people, like their trainer and a work out buddy.
Do yourself a favor, and watch Toby Schachman (the author) explaining his ITP thesis. This is just one expression of a larger vision for alternative programming which he describes very succinctly.
These two videos include him and the slides:
http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/spring2012_archives/thesis-Heching...
http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/spring2012_archives/thesis-Heching...

More angles and other great videos available at http://itp.nyu.edu/shows/thesis2012/archives/
Alternatives for mobile app analytics
Does anyone have good suggestions for mobile application analytics (Android and iOS)? The product I am working on is a library that gets integrated into existing applications. As such our usage of analytics must coexist with separate unrelated analytics use in the app.

Google Analytics works well and the reporting interface is fairly easy to navigate and find out the information you want. Some parts of the interface are bizarre though. They have two problems. On Android the library only supports one tracker instance and reporting so we can't report our events at the same time as the rest of the app reports its events. The second is that for numerical values (custom variables) the only thing they report is the average value which is spectacularly useless. I need to see the distribution of values. Talking to their support would appear to require forking out $150,000 a year before they will take the call.

I've also tried Mixpanel but had numerous issues with their Android library and server side. It has no builtin reports so you have to compose queries yourself, and even simple slicing and dicing data is a pain. I've had to write code to import all our data locally and then do analysis there to get reports like the pre-existing ones in Google Analytics. (I've been unable to get any issue addressed by their support.)

There is a conflict of interest with Flurry (in particular all the stuff they do other than analytics).

A solution hosted by someone else is preferable rather than self hosting due to the expected ramp up in volume of traffic. Searches turn up numerous analytics providers, but they all have web sites as their primary focus using a chunk of Javascript as the library. While there isn't that much difference in the events generated from a mobile app compared to a web site, there is a need for a robust Android and iOS library and for additional values to be tacked onto events, plus being able to use those values in reports and analysis. We also need to be able to partition data so that third parties can look at a subset of it that belongs to their app.
Freehand Interaction on a Projected Augmented Reality Tabletop
Isn't IE usually the only browser worth creating seperate stylesheets not to mention the browser who gives the most difficulty with your javascript?

If Microsoft truly cared about the web, they would adhere to strict standards support and compliance, force updates for IE9 and below, and begin auto update cycles for their browsers.

That may seem like a lot to ask, but it's the only things to me as a web developer I can see that could remedy their horrible reputation in the browser community. No one game app on their latest browser will change that.
fuckin awesome!!