skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It's complicated"

For some reason, I'm very comforted when other people reach that conclusion about big questions. I think it's because I was much more certain about what was right when I was younger. The more I learn, the more I'm able to definitively say ideas I used to hold are wrong (or incomplete), but I've got nothing to replace them with. What's wrong has become clearer, but what's right has become foggier, nebulous, a many headed beast with a whole bunch of curves and caveats.

My increasing lack of certainty is more than a little unsettling sometimes. I think it's reassuring to hear that other people are going through it as well.
I think the parent means that religions are created with outlandish claims (resurrection, xenu, miracles, immaculate conception etc) in an effort to weed out critical thinkers (trouble makers).
Sure, fragmentation is bad, when you compare it to a monoculture like iOS. However, PCs managed to thrive just fine for decades, and I'm sure Android will do just fine as well.

TVs and washing machines and refrigerators and watches are starting to run their own operating systems. Which OS do you see your TV running? Because I'm pretty sure they'll all be running Android soon.
That's what I was wondering -- I've heard of the accredited investor barrier to entry, but it does seem like rule 506 would allow for investment from anyone.
I hated IoC containers as well as writing all
that boilerplate code for Attributes

C# and Java are only representative for static languages because they are mainstream.

My static language of choice is currently Scala. It is less verbose than both C# and Java (for example you never have to generate setters/getters). Also, whenever I work with Java I always work with projects such as Lombok / Guava.

And I have no need for "IoC containers". This is partly because of Scala, but also because of the libraries I'm using. Currently I'm using DropWizard for the development of web services, which is just a thin wrapper around Jetty + JAX-RS. Because the resources (commonly known as controllers in MVC frameworks) are configured as instances (not classes specified in web.xml), then IoC is easy because you are free to do the bindings yourself.

IMHO, the necessity for IoC containers in C# / Java has risen from poorly designed frameworks. So you may not have a choice in the matter, however using something like Google Guice in combination with Scala is much nicer, because of Scala's mixins in combination with structural typing.
It's also hilarious given the actual break-down of the market.

Not so hilarious when you look at the break-down of profit in the market.
ComScore study says Facebook ads are effective
Armadillo, Blue Origin, and Masten (and the DC-XA before them) have all been working on rocket powered VTVL flights and have done sub-scale test flights. It's a technology that just plain makes sense, especially now that computers are so cheap and so fast. Perhaps in 20 or 30 years it will be so common and routine that a lot of people will think it's a natural part of spaceflight and wonder how it could possibly be done any other way.
"a CLI that is almost an insult to the user"

In my opinion Windows PowerShell is superior to bash or tcsh.

(I know PS is not installed by default, and I agree that the default windows cli is awful.)
Reconcile, not rectify.
It is counter initiative! I done lots of these analyses and I've learned to just run the numbers, because intuition is often wrong ( though you can usually understand it in retrospect )

On control and ownership, if you tell me one shareholders percentage ownership, I still know nothing about thier control(unless they own more than 50%). So in this sense, a single shareholder's ownership is undelated to thier control. Now if you tell me all the shareholders ownership, then we know about control.

Your right control over an LLC works generally the same way as C Corp. This measure works regardless of corporate structure. We've even used it to measure control on a board of directors. The things that require accounting for are how the voting system works. For example is the criteria to win a vote 50% or 66%. Is it 50% of all shares, or of shares that bother to vote?
For the last few years, at least, the 'kickoff' overview videos include the presenters, while most (all?) of the session videos are just the slides and audio.
I had a reply written out yesterday about what's generational decay vs. the evolution of learning (complete with everyone's second-favorite Einstein quote) but at the end of the day, how someone wants to learn is going to resonate with them more than how someone else thinks they should learn. We have a public school system that is dealing with the repercussions of teaching students the same way they did 20, 30, 40 years ago. We can't blame the kids when the results are all the same.

I'm not looking for a one-size-fits-all solution. Web development motivates the hell out of me but that passion alone doesn't help me get over pre-existing barriers and how my brain comprehends things. I assume once I have my first ah-ha! moment the pieces will start falling into place, but I'm just looking for a peg on the wall to grasp onto at this point.

I'm surprised this post got as many upvotes as it did because admittedly I feel out of place here in a sea full of people who are naturally inclined, incredibly determined and/or had some great teachers, so I wasn't sure if my problems would translate.

Learning this stuff isn't as essential to my job as it would be just incredibly useful to me personally, otherwise I wouldn't be so flexible in using these services and would probably be hitting the books instead of making multiple monthly payments. I know if I find a site that I can learn from that any of my friends can learn from it too. There are hundreds and thousands of those people out there who want to learn this stuff in a way that is easy to swallow, which will in turn spur the rate at which we see new services and tools. It's a cash cow if someone does it right, and I want to see them succeed and help them in the process.

Additionally, it also doesn't help me feel better about the quality of the research I'm doing when the top result for any web development question is still W3Schools.
Thanks so much for this link. I had no idea this was even possible.
I do this too and I feel like such a badass doing it. Especially when other people see it. "See that guy over there? He doesn't fuck with the zero button on his microwave. He's got no time for that."
To have the compiler trap accidents for you? How would you do this if a query and a string were the same thing?
Just like Abu Ghraib is ust another side to the general corruption and outright gangsterism that often characterises the modern US, right?

Bingo. Not for the country as a whole, or the people within it, but definitely for the executive branch.

I don't know how much you can read into things.

I don't think there is any real need to look for a subtle subtext here. The UN certainly isn't bothering to be particularly subtle.

In war, you usually have the bad guys and the worse guys.

In that case you accept no possibility of a defensive or peacekeeping force working on behalf of ordinary people and think that soldiers are mindless thugs who will just loot anyone they are sent to protect. I don't accept that and think that it is possible to have a culture of respect on the ground, but only if that permeates the entire organisation and only if infractions by those people that you are imposing on a situation are publicly investigated and properly dealt with as a matter of absolute policy.

If you put a good person in a war zone he or she will do bad things.

If I take that statement at face value, then I'd have to say that history contains plenty of examples to the contrary.
This is not complexity born of strict typing, this is complexity born of object oriented programming. This is what we do in OOP. We take a complex problem and attempt to map it to an even more complex hierarchy of objects and interfaces.
Tooling and performance are two largest advantages. Disadvantage is more verbosity, but it's a trade-off.

With dynamically typed languages I find that you still need to worry about types, but you have to trace through the code to figure out what type a particular variable is (esp. if you're not the only one working on a project). In a statically typed language that information is readily available.
An interesting question - that was my first thought on seeing the headline too - "Why categorize everyone who's expressed dislike a 'hater'?"

I can offer no better explanation than Man's tribal nature - his tendency to form In- and Out-groups (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups). Before we had tech we did it about red vs blue football/etc teams (and of course still do), which is equally if not more arbitrary.

I'd like to think we'll grow out of it, but that's probably a vain hope, and even if we do it'll be a loooooooong way in the future.
FYI, Microryza is a pun on mycorrhiza, "a symbiotic association between a fungus and the roots of a vascular plant":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza

http://mycorrhizas.info/
Argentina launches program aimed at fostering IT vocations
Thanks Android Police

http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/02/15/new-game-meowch-help...
It's not unreasonable, it only seems unreasonable because of the context. I've seen several really good programmers (and overall bright people) mix the implementation of the two up.
I don't think page counts of specs or feature lists really tell you that much. I didn't find it that hard too get up to speed in Scala but it seems to scare away too many Java people.

My main criticism is that it allows too much syntactic flexibility.
Apple's fine with such things… provided you don't let arbitrary code run in your system. If all your VM/runtime runs is what is in the application, it's fine.
It's because the US version of conservatism in most of the world is called liberalism.
Badass Java Video
Microsoft Surface price puzzle polarizes pundits
- The email field not clearing itself of 'Enter email address' when I click in it - is a turn off.
- After entering the email address....nothing happened. No click-here-to-activate email, nothing.
Here is the original article with video, excluding the airport security camera footage, but with actual description (starting at 0:58):

http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/1b-of-nude-...

And then here is the post about the TSA wanting blogs and media to takedown coverage of that post:

http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/breaking-ts...
A case study in Responsive Web Design
Ask HN - How do I get started with big data?
What specific skillsets are needed? Any pointers on courses, books and tools?
Its funny that this topic came about. I remember the olden days as a kid where I would browse around looking for DBZ info. Almost every site seemed to be a Geocities or Angelfire blog.

Recently, I've been thinking about signing up for Angelfire to run the production blog for my website. You know, just as a gag. I'll have it look just like a site pre-2000s. This will be my nod to those sites that came before me.
Telling someone to "improve or else" is a completely different animal. If you want that employee to focus on doing their job (and improving their performance) they have to not be wasting energy looking for another job. From their perspective, moving to another job before they're fired is much better for their career (and ego) than sticking around and possibly getting fired.

I'm not sure why you'd immediately jump to the conclusion that employees would be looking for another job. That's something which may be completely out of your control (whether they're bad, good, happy, or disgruntled at their job) so why worry about it?

You're also making this hypothetical "improve or else" conversation more negative than I see it happening. Like I said, in grad school, when I failed my quals the first time the committee gave me constructive feedback. Sure, I could have been like "fuck this" and went to a different school, but then again, I knew the rules when I signed up and I chose to honor them. I also felt like their feedback was reasonable. It was nothing personal and when 5 people agree on something, its easy to see where you came up short. I also had a chance to rebuttal if I thought their grading was wrong.

Secondly, failing my quals gave them a chance to help me. Previously I thought I knew what to do on my own, so I never bothered them with questions. Afterwards, I clearly saw the mismatch in expectations, so I pestered them until I was sure the answer they were looking for was the one I was spending my time on figuring out.

If you're envisioning a one-way "improve or else" conversation taking place, then yeah, I agree with you. But this should be a dialog where both parties are willing to admit they were in the wrong.
PowerInbox - your emails, more useful
"For example, green traffic lights in Japan are referred to as blue"
That's because in Japan the traffic lights USE BLUE INSTEAD OF GREEN!
Sketchy Maps with Geometry Smoothing
What you want is available now in Android. For example, I currently have 3 office suites installed on my Transformer tablet to test which one would be best as a daily driver. So, when I open Dropbox and click on some Word doc, there will be a pop-up window asking me which one of the 3 word processors should open it. I can get the same sort of thing with any image files, text files, etc: options to open the file with whatever app can handle it.

Sending/sharing files works similarly. Go to send an image file and you'll get the option to attach it to an email, send it via twitter, put it in Facebook, send it via mms (if your device is a phone), put it in Dropbox, incorporate it into a note in Evernote, etc. Third party programs will add the options to send it to network shares or ftp.

Android lets you have access to your filesystem from the tablet / phone itself, so you can have that level of control if you want it. Most tablets / phones come with a very basic file manager and more advanced ones are a quick download away. If you would prefer to do everything from a command line shell, this is also available.

Android doesn't lock down the user the way an iPad does.
What are the actual problems Microsoft is ostensibly trying to fix with a secured bootloader? Something related to viruses/hacks or something else entirely?
This was on HN about a month ago and might be a great starting point:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3953886
Are you having fun because you switched to a statically typed language or are you having fun because you switched to a functional language? Would you be having less fun had you chosen Clojure?
Looks very nice! Congrats to the team on all their past and future success, job well done.
Gamification helps orphaned intellectual property find a home
Obama For America TV Ad: "Come And Go"
Very true. As someone who has considered using InTrade in election season and donating to WikiLeaks, it's incredible how linked government and banking are.

What I find interesting is the thought experiment "how would you act if you wanted to evade the surveillance?" Simply going "off grid" won't work b/c it provides nearly as reliable a signal to those doing the tracking.

I consider it likely that terrorist organizations have thought about this, and wonder what approaches they are using to try to thwart it.

Since it would seem fairly possible to create a convincing appearance of legitimacy via FB and Gmail and even banking, the value of the surveillance must lie in understanding human network topologies so that physical agents can be deployed strategically to do traditional humint.

Since most of the data is obtained w/o warrant it is unlikely to be admissible and used toward a conviction. This would be a problem if convicting the individual whose data was scanned was the goal. The goal is to aid the efforts of traditional law enforcement and intel by generating something like a "suspicion heatmap" over the social network as revealed by our financial, email, and social network transactions.

This helps efficiently deploy agents, but once deployed the agents still need to make friends and infiltrate their assigned network edges. Cover is not always necessary to do this, since many members of the network are upstanding citizens who are happy to help with something security related.

As I've speculated earlier, I would expect that honeypots (large and small) are the preferred way to actually perform experiments on the suspicion graph.

It's fascinating to think about what sort of honeypots probably exist.
The threads do not volunteer. They are pre-empted by an external authority - the runtime system. They have no choice in the matter.
They've significantly relaxed their restrictions on iOS languages. It's not any weirder than running C# binaries via Mono.
Up - a bash script that updates either a git or an svn repo
Why a disaster? It's in fact thriving, for example I've backed 'Pocket tv' project and that's a device for 40+ inches screens. I think that this diversity is good, not bad. I've also developed one android app for a period of time and fiddled with some other concepts/demos. And for me at least, the experience was quite nice. I like many concepts (intents, services/activites, application hooks for common actions, ...) -> hadn't found it tedious at all.
Undetectable root kits. Which is a pretty serious problem, admittedly. It's an open question whether or not secured boot is a good or effective way to go about solving it.
So, you're saying that it's complicated?
I think he's saying it won't be automatically checked for you without static typing. Since, you know, that's what type checking is.
Ask HN: Startup Movie
Hey,

I recently came across "Indie Game: The Movie" (more over here: indiegamethemovie.com). I really liked it and so I was wondering if there are any other movies out there which give an insight in how startups work?
terminology around this issue can be VERY confusing

You are not making it any simpler by redefining "control" in this theoretical way. You are making some very naive assumptions about independence: you'd be much better off treating the investors as a single voting bloc, which is what the usual sense of "control" assumes - and if there are multiple founders you should assume that serial investors are very sophisticated at splitting them.

A good followup would be to go out and actually measure the distribution of voting outcomes rather than making a strong claim based on the most tractable assumptions you can find.
Isn't Tumblr the modern Geocities?
Forgot the link to the other tips - here it is: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2516297
Why You Didn't Get the Job
Do you mean publicly acknowledged problems? Viruses, especially boot viruses, BIOS viruses, and rootkits.

Or do you mean mustache-twirling evil conspiracy "plausibly deniable" motives? I'm sure it's easy to ascribe malice to Microsoft's actions here.
Reminds me of Garbage's "Breaking Up The Girl":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFHmn22PkKU

and how it enjoys making the camera rig an active participant in the video.
It's very much like the predators who detect and hunt the weakest prey in a herd. Sects target the weakest people too. It's not just the email scammers.
I started a parallel implementation of a bunch of machine learning algorithms in Clojure and Scala. I figured the Clojure version would pull out ahead thanks to my previous lisp experience and lisp's history in that domain.

I was very surprised to discover that my Scala code was a lot easier to understand and maintain and had fewer bugs.
Isn't that the point of the Nigerian scams - the money is always illegal (some corrupt politician / foreign aid money) that needs to be got out of the country - so you feel you are "in" on the real scam?

It also discourages you from reporting it once you have sent off any money.
This usage of the word 'control' in this article seems very different from how it is typically used in the tech industry, even misleading.

Normally when we're talking about a minority shareholder having control, it is as a result of multiple share types with different voting rights (as in Facebook, Google, News Corp, etc.).

The assumptions also should be really clearly labelled, to also avoid misleading people. "there is an assumption that each shareholder is as likely to vote one way as another" is a huge assumption that is essentially based on zero information, whereas information is typically available for a particular company. It's worse than the assumptions behind options pricing models using Gaussian (so-called 'normal') distributions, imho.
Not really excited. There are not many new channels, and those are mainly for some additional devices. Some may find them useful though.
Back at you.
Just like the ritual cat described here: http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/zen.html
If you've got the right sensors, any unexpected resistance could be used as a trigger to stop motion faster than any human could do it.

The SawStop system does it with electrical conductivity, but feedback from servos will do as well.
Go look up an anatomical diagram. A good anatomy book is your best bet, but this is a decent start: http://www.dcfirst.com/muscle_anatomy_posters.html

Your spine is a stack of disks. It's got no inherent tendency to stay upright, other than the forces imposed on it by your muscles (and fascia, but that's a passive stabilization system). In particular the spinal erectors, iliocostalis lumborum, spinalis, longissimus thoracis, levatores costarum/breves, and cervical muscles.

With low bodyweight, you've got low muscle mass, particularly if you're not doing much in the way of strength training. As you age, you're losing this at the rate of about 0.5 - 1% per year (past age 30 or so). Which is where strength training comes into play.

Muscle tissue and strength are developed in direct response to imposed demand. It's called the "specificity" or "SAID" (specific adaptation to imposed demand) principle.

Full-body strength training routines -- squats, deadlifts, lunges, press, bench, and rowing / chin-up movements -- will develop that muscle.

At 6'2", last time I weighed 130# was some time in middle school. By high school, as a swimmer and just doing bodyweight strength training, I was 185-195#. These days I'm at about 260, cut weight would be closer to 235-245# with 8-10% bodyfat. I'm not saying that this should be your goal, but am pointing out that there's a huge variance in individual fit body mass. Your weight might be appropriate for a long-distance marathoner (Geoffrey Muttai, among the best in the world, is about 125# at 6' in competitive shape, but that's absolutely shredded with <6% bodyfat).

Here's my suggestion: try strength training for 6-12 months. See if it changes your perceived fitness and comfort. Like it? Keep it up. Don't? You've gained experience points and it's cost you little else. I'm a fan of The New Rules of Lifting (which describes much of the science and health/fitness benefits in much greater depth) and Starting Strength (a simpler and very brutally effective lifting program) myself.

Oh, and when you get into your 40s like me, you may appreciate that muscle mass.

Just sayin'.
They are indeed incredible. I can imagine a market selling these as decoys to third-world militaries.
Microsoft Surface tablet freezes during presentation
"Secure Boot is designed to address the potential for malware to insert itself between the firmware and the operating system on your computer. It accomplishes this by enforcing that only “approved” software is able to boot in your computer by way of a key that recognises pre-approved and signed software."

That's from the linked canonical article on the issue: http://blog.canonical.com/2011/10/28/white-paper-secure-boot...
We do the same.
It's a good idea to understand the value proposition of your competitors and try to position yourself even better.

Keep their marketing tricks on radars as well - what they say, where advertise, etc