skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is that all you need to know? Is the intent behind an action - and that action's outcome - irrelevant to your ethics system?
Groupon Class-action settlement moving ahead
Create WordPress sites like a professional without code.
7 Scorching-Hot Social Media Trends Happening Right Now
The second reason sounds much more compelling.
A good idea for another post (or series). I'll be drafting one soon and will post on HN.
Their is no excuse for not using two-factor authentication with all Google products.
Is there a reason he shouldn't have stock in Oracle?
I thought this was going to be about Mashable. :(
To be fair, the OP shouldn't be able to expect a 100% working email service. But to expect that the provider not be actively causing it to fail seems reasonable.
This snippet is ugly anyway. The case-bodies are not indented, the one-liner if-bodies are missing their brackets, asking for more trouble.
Jeremy Bird introduces Dashboard on BarackObama.com
Philip, thanks for sharing the link to those slides. I didn't think it made sense to go that deep on my article, but it's a nice reference for anyone who wants to really dig in.
Well, there's no ambiguity in this case, because "int" is a keyword, known to the compiler, and will always be interpreted as a type. But if you had something like "x*y,z", then the meaning of this would depend on whether x is a type or not.
> but I'm not above thinking that groklaw is controlled/funded by a much larger power.

Proof? Anything? This line has been used since the early days of SCO. I've never seen anything resembling proof.

Indeed, Groklaw has earned the trust I give them. Do not mistake ignorance for insightfulness.
Oracle v. Google: no patent infringement found
Nope. At work we have a similar setup.exe file. The setup.exe is a bootstrapper that installs prerequisites first, then runs the ClickOnce installer which is separate.
From the Valley to the Mountains
The contract isn't a problem for you unless you sign it without making amendments so that it is acceptable to you.
I don't. Kind of.

Had an account which I disabled end 2010 and deleted end 2011. I'm addicted to mindlessly clicking away on the internet and, unfortunately, I wound up doing that with FB too. I do have another account which is required to admin a company page, but it has no friends in it, near-zero discoverability and I rarely login there.

For a while even I raged against Facebook and people on Facebook, but the fact was that the problem was with me that I could not use it without bringing out some of my worst qualities.
Love it! I still have a 16mm projector in my lab store room.
It's a closed campus. Best of luck with that. In fact, why don't you do a trial run and let us know how it goes?
Someone should redo the Onion "Area man doesn't own a TV" article to target people like us.
This particular one? Not much. But its good news to hear that a jury isn't to be fooled by mispresenting facts.

Oracle literally tried to present dexopt as a dynamic optimizer, because it optimizes for the hardware/software configuration on your smartphone. Thats coming from the makers of the HotSpot VM.
What was it like to be a user of TheFacebook.com in 2004?
Yes, I know, all startups these days care about users/eyeballs

The joke is that, as I understand it, this kind of business model was a large part of what drove the crash in the 90's.
How is it a flame? The guy asked how things were going to change to prevent this from happening. That's a legitimate question that EVERY user should be demanding an answer to.
Don't go there for XMPP (Jabber). They clearly don't care about making it stable. It will disconnect you regularly.
It amazes me that people rely upon a free Email service for critical personal infrastructure.
The "user programs" you want to run are determined by the operating system. And the operating system is determined by blobs, controllers, BIOS and similar gunk.

If for example the Pi blob is such that Linux kernel 3.7 can't run then you are SOL. Or if on a device like this their blob only works with Android 2.3 then you can't run a different version. Or maybe you can't run one of the BSDs.

The video/GPU is especially relevant in the Pi case because it controls what the CPU can do.
Pay to Play: Uncovering Online Payola
Just say "references available upon request" and try to find other people you've done programming projects with who would be comfortable being a reference.

Focus on what you want out of a new position, and what you could bring to the company. There's no need to mention anything about your previous company except the successes you've had there (projects, assignments, etc).
It's also come up multiple times that this approach is not unique to Google's free services. Quite often their paying customers -- especially for the ad-related services, which are Google's bread and butter -- are also unable to get in touch with anything other than an algorithm. In other words, this is not Google just saying "well, free users don't get support", it's a symptom of a very broad systemic issue.

And while it may not be "evil" to provide no support for a free service, it does raise question marks for anyone who looks at a free service to get some idea of who they'd be interacting with on upgrading to paying.
Yes, the pauses were essential to the patent. As I recall they had to be a specific length and a couple of knock offs worked around the patent by making them slightly shorter.
Maybe so, maybe so. I do agree that numeric implicit conversion is not as simple as it first seemed to me, and would have knock-on effects elsewhere.

Edit: For the record, here are the rules we've discovered so far:

1. Numeric casts: A -> B happens automatically if every value of A can be represented exactly in B. Both must be base types.

2. Aliased casts: A -> B happens automatically if A is an alias of B.

3. Automatic casts only happen if a single automatic cast is required, not more. In other words, x + y should not cause x and y to both be cast to a common type.

Is that it? That doesn't seem to bad actually.
Its a billion dollar company that historically done well.
As he already pointed out: IT'S NOT FREE.

Google (read their terms) reserves the right to mine your communications for information that they then sell to advertisers. You're doing THEM at least as much a service.
I know it is not a perfect solution but there is an Authenticator app that you can use on Android. I believe that iOS might have one too but I am not sure.

This solution does not require you to give them your phone number :).
Isoblocks : JS library to create isometric text
"Reduce your life down to the essentials" is a hell of a rabbit hole as well.
That doesn't actually contradict what the guy I responded to said though; you'd want to try signing up for gmail with a few variations of your own login that have a few random extra '.'s. My assumption is that these would all be rejected due to the fact that the canonicalized version (all lowercase and with all periods removed) matches the canonicalized version of a currently registered login, but this guy was saying that's not the case.

But anyway, paul responded so it's a moot point.
Silicon Valley MUST DISRUPT Wall Street for the Sake of Our Country
This has almost always been true; the few consumerish things that sometimes (but not very often) hold value or appreciate include:
- Artwork, folk art, decorative items
- Handmade furniture
- Musical instruments
- Firearms
- Limited-production autos
Who is going to go after the biggest prize of them all??
Mixins (well, as they're supposed to be used) do provide encapsulation; specifically, they enforce the boundary between instance scope (e.g. access to instance vars) and method interface. I view them as a part of a coupling continuum:

[instance methods] --- [composed subclasses] --- [mixins] --- [the outside world]

But Modules provide more than that. module_function allows for unattached namespaced functions which can be referenced by full name, relative name, or imported into the local scope. Great way to express functions which are decoupled from instance state--much like the services and policies you're advocating for. It's an under-appreciated aspect of the language, I think.
To me, the first reason sounds more compelling. Honestly, I'd rather use a core2 era macbook pro that was top of the line then than a $350 corei3 dell laptop that is bottom of the line now.
FTA plus amen: "Patents and software need to get a divorce before somebody gets hurt. The damage is astounding, and the IP is so puny. There is an imbalance in the legal universe, and it needs fixing."
Let's hope that Mr. Zuckerberg does something for the greater good. Opportunities are limitless.
From what I recall (and this could very well be apocryphal), the pauses were what was patented. Non-Hayes modems still reacted to +++ but didn't need the pause. So if you could trick their software into sending "+++ATH;ATDT911" you would make them call 911.

I'd love confirmation or denial of that patent thing.
Maybe next time someone hassles us with why we don't "lifehack", we can respond with the following:

"I don't want to clean my room to avoid writing a paper for my entire life"
That is the R-pentomino which has a life span of 1103 generations, but they were running it on a non infinite grid, so the boundaries probably caused it to die off much sooner.

I don't understand why they are using finite grids (probably efficiency reasons, but with the right data structures you could still implement it fast, see hash life).
What do you mean by top-down? I'd say it encourages bottom-up programming since scoped functions are so light weight. Scoped functions can easily be made global when it makes sense to share the logic.
Paired with the recent free online Model Thinking class, this could help introduce complexity concepts to beginners possibly ... $35 is nice for a semester license. I wonder if you could really expose a "swiss cheese" model of a problem situation? Anyway... complexity is of course complex, but not necessarily insurmountable or unknowable, so it is really wonderful that we're ever pushing the bar higher to educate about normal accidents and such (this has been the bane of my existence in stupid enterprise software sometimes :P)
Why there will never be a model of a cell
Even as computing power and data increase exponentially, systems biologists now say an in silico model of the cell isn't possible
Ask HN: Cost of living in Silicon Valley - 2012
I'm interested in moving in Sillicon Valley, in the startups sector (software engineer).

The older HN discussions were very helpful but are over 1 year old (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1824445 or http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128872 ).

What are the costs today?
I'm interested in:

- rent (1br - furnished, not shared)

- other utilities

- food

- transportation (public / private including insurance)

- Internet & mobile

- the ocasional weekend relax & fun

Please add anything I missed.

Thanks in advance!
THE HEAD AND FACE
Self driving cars well have to be specially equipped- it's not unreasonable to add LIDAR as the standard fare for these cars. After all, it's extremely well suited for the task
How one company found a niche business porting board games to mobile
The only TV I have is about 12 years old.
It is definitely possible to buy poorly listed items on Craigslist and relist them at a markup. IMHO, simply adding a picture probably adds 20%.

But then of course you would have to deal with all those deals that look sketchy because they actually are sketchy.
IIRC, though you write in a managed language, it's jitted at install time so it doesn't run under a managed runtime.
Very interesting program, if I was still a student, I would have love to participate!
True, it was hard enough explaining those concepts in person ;)
Magazine Gadgets » Acer is preparing the Olympic Tablet
Maybe "astoundingly bad" is a bit strong, but I was about to post about it too.

It tricks you into believing that the discount on TVs is about 25% of the discount on headphones, when it is actually 14/32 = 44%...
CBSE Results 2012
The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It
A response from a recent MBA graduate: http://joshgoldstein.me/post/23607867900/mbas-are-not-all-wo...
Quick bug report: some of the links at the top don't include a protocol, so browsers will interpret them as being relative. (e.g. http://skattertech.com/2012/05/how-to-build-a-dream-team/www...)
I think javascript's main "problem" is the combination of duck typing with prototypal inheritance. People coming from a classical strictly typed OO language are very put off by that.

Ofcourse, my problem is I'm so used to javascript's duck typing that I now feel horribly constrained by a strictly typed environment.
I think one of the implications of ebooks and digital publishing, is that Sci-Fi can afford to greatly decrease its engineering safety-margins. How about more risk taking in the speculation department? Instead of cosmically huge ideas in the far-flung future, how about merely big (but society-changing) ideas in the near future or sideways into an alternate present? (Neal Stephenson's steel launch tower?)

A book never had to stand the test of all-time to be respected and to be profitable, but there are authors who wrote with a goal like this in mind. The price of publishing is going down, and electronic media give us more flexibility and reduced risk with smaller chunks of text combined with rapid feedback from audiences. So how about more frequent writing with more risk taking speculating with greater specificity on the nearer-term future? The cost of getting it wrong isn't so high anymore, and even the best authors do so anyhow.
Nozickian demoktesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia#Dem...
Seems neat. It's really hard to know whether Wolfram is a visionary or a lunatic (and by extension, whether the suite of Wolfram products are ahead of their time or just shiny recapitulations of existing tech).

For example, in his "A New Kind of Science", he basically takes credit for the entire field of complex systems theory and presents lots of previously known information (very verbosely) as though it were original research.
ThreadWatch: Tracking and Visualizing the Use of Software Applications
i wouldn't count on that, google's study of hard drive lifetime/durability indicated that "enterprise" hard drives had almost identical lifetimes and performance characteristics to consumer gear (baring of course stuff like 15k RPM drives).

In other words, "enterprise" is more or less exactly the same stuff, but at a premium. Price discrimination strikes again.
Imagine living with an Internet cap of 250MB a month. These people do
I was specifically referring to gmail, and mostly to make the point that I honestly feel those that respond through unofficial channels (like HN) are doing Goog a disservice by skewing customer expectations. You of course have a very valid point for their paid services, though as they've obviously done very well for themselves despite limited support offerings, it isn't that big a deal.

As usual, if you don't like the service, vote with your dollars. If the service is so indispensable that you need them despite their failing you in some way (like not having support) then well, that's the discriminator. You can 'pay' for support by going elsewhere to a service that won't perform as well, which may cost you money.

Also, for what it's worth, I agree that they probably could provide support, and that Google in general is bad at it. It is easily their weakest area in my opinion. I only responded as sternly as I did to combat the 'evil' allegation, which seems to be bandied about any time Google does even the slightest of negative things.
I have a prejudicial assumption that if you don't know the problem Objectify solves, you haven't worked with a Rails app which has A) a large code base B) a large, active user base and C) a bunch of different features.

The vast majority of people who scale Rails sites (as far as I can tell) do so by breaking their apps into services. ActiveRecord god-objects do not make that step in an app's life cycle easy, and separating persistence from business models is likely to be your first important step when refactoring for scalability. Fragmenting a User model bloated beyond all hope of sanity is almost a rite of passage at this point.

I often think the only Rails developer who hasn't found ActiveRecord bloat to be an irritation and an obstacle to scaling is DHH, and although that makes his opinion on the subject even more valuable than it would normally be, he doesn't talk about it enough in my opinion. Pretty much everyone else, as far as I can tell, responds to Rails scaling issues by creating services in Sinatra and/or divorcing business modeling from persistence logic.

I want someone to challenge my prejudicial assumption here, most of all because I appear to be saying "Rails can't scale," which is BS, but also because I'm very tempted not to take this discussion seriously at all if it doesn't address this point. It's just the crucial point in my opinion. I like the whole OOP thing but to me the decision to use something like Objectify is all about scalability. That doesn't just mean performance; it also means retaining readability when you have a lot of code. Single Responsibility Principle makes code readable.
Glad to see this is available for Chrome. Thanks for posting it!
Right on, Elise.

What users demand is what programmers will deliver.

This is why it is so important for users to become educated about computers and networking. You cannot ask for what you do not know exists.

There are other ways to achieve "social networking" besides using only Zuckerberg's website and submitting to his warped ideas about human civilisation.

Collect the email addresses and contact info of all your Facebook friends now. You will need them in time when you will have your own "social network". A return to decentralisation is coming. It is inevitable. Everything goes in cycles. What's going to get us ethere is that centralisation has been abused to an unacceptable extent, by a sociopathic kid who is still maturing. Unfortunately he's maturing a little too slowly. I'm not sure users will have the patience to wait. They want an alternative.

FB's only value is your personal data.

They will likely end up having to give it back to you.

The web is going to get better. This is exciting.
It's the Postgres Age
The judge is a programmer by the way: http://www.i-programmer.info/news/193-android/4224-oracle-v-...
No, it doesn't depend. And who said anything about fair? I'm talking about obligated and compelled.

> get a loan to pay the tax man

Yeah, so he pays the taxes with somebody else's money. Tax man gets paid, right? Tell me the scenario where a guy pays no taxes and isn't in trouble. This is empirically verifiable, but I don't recommend conducting the research.

Sorry for the tangent folks. I'm not commenting on Zuck's situation. The comment about not paying taxes all year is just plain wrong, and I would hate for someone to try it and get dinged. This is especially important for the newer startup people that don't have the usual single W-2 situation. That's all.
Gamifying mathematics (an interactive tutorial for sequent calculus)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57440235-93/jury-verdict-an...
Your rake analogy is not sound. Ok so Google gives Gmail for free - as in you don't need to pay for it.

But is it really "free"? No.

They parse your emails so they know what you are buying/selling, who you are talking to, what sites you have a membership on, etc. They also use Gmail to display ads (based off of the things they learned from your emails) to make money off of you. They probably do other things i'm not even thinking of right now. So is it really free? Not at all. Is it a great source of information about you (to then be used by them to target ads at you)? Absolutely.

They should be providing support for it. I don't know what that support should look like (be it a call center, forums, etc), but I definitely think that if I give Google permission to snoop through my personal email so they can build better ads for me (which is how they make the majority of their money) I expect some damn support.
I don't. I joined in June 2007, used it a lot for about 2 months, then mostly stopped, then stopped properly (I haven't logged in since October or November 2007).

It was amusing enough, but the amount of time I was wasting on it was out of all proportion to the actual value I was getting from it. I also didn't like the idea that I could be found by people that I didn't particularly want to resume contact with.
Depends what service you are talking about. I have a phone# to a helpdesk for Google Adwords. Real live human beings work there. But we pay a buttload of money for that service.

Also google apps for business promises 'Around-the-clock phone and priority email support.' I guess you're just getting what you paid for.
Does Safari have a WebAudio implementation? I'd understood that it's Chrome only.

And hasn't Mozilla had its own WebAudio implementation since FF4?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Introducing_the_Audio_API_Extension
Yes. My solution: keep growing the list but keep filtering it through a prioritization algorithm.
I read Maddox as Madoff, and thought this was written by Madoff about how SEO is like a pyramid scheme :(
You Make It You Sell It
i guess then in some respects - its funny how correct Adam was in his comments

http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/Why-does-Quora-use...
Quick Fix if Your Firefox Browser is Running Really Slow
I feel for the "look but don't touch" part. I did the same thing to my son, but in my defense, he's 4 and wasn't quite as into how things worked. He was more interested in anything that was his favorite color (red).

What I did learn about him though was that he has good geek potential, and that he could be entertained for about 2 hours there.

I can't wait to take him back next year.
I suspect it is because a lot of HN readers are arm chair economists. Economics is a fascinating system to study and analyze as that system is driven by people who are modeled as 'rational actors' but rarely act rationally on an individual basis. The Priceonomics guys bring data analysis to the mix and that pings the other thing HN readers like, facts and data.
A FUSE filesystem interface would be the best, so you can mount it
The tools are also really nice. "go build", "go run", "go get", etc. Building dependency management and build management built into the language - even if it is not super sophisticated yet - is a great idea.
I'd love to do this, but my Apps account gives me no such opportunity to setup 2FA, following those instructions: http://cl.ly/242v451j3g331U393u34
2001 Pitch: Why Web services make business sense
Rewritable digital data storage in live cells
SpaceX rockets ahead, but several companies jockeying behind it
Good eye, thanks for the notice
You're in the business of making people money. Charge more. Anchor pricing against top-line premium themes ($70~$200+) or hiring a pro to skin one (thousands).

Also, just based on the position on the page of your product offering and some language you used, I think you desperately need someone to give you permission to make money in return for the value you have created. I struggled with this six years ago. So, karmic balance: it is totally OK for you to make money. You can put a prominent buy link near the top and write sales copy that doesn't sound like you think you are cheating people. It's OK! Folks buy stuff all the time! We like buying stuff! Also, many of the folks buying this will be business users. Even the least sophisticated businesses are systems which turn money into money by buying things, most of which will not make money into money nearly as nicely as your software will.
I really like the blog and its my go to site for legal software news and I don't think there is some kind of higher power backing it but I'm still very careful with everything I read there. I haven't seen any evidence of corporate backing, but there is no attempt to hide bias. Its definitely far from an objective news source.