skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is the value of static type checking worth giving up the power of pure polymorphism at runtime?

> Polymorphism is the ability to send a message to an object without knowing what its type is.

This reads like it was written by a person who's only ever used Java and Ruby.
You can package a Chrome app/extension and let users install it from your own website. No need to go through the store.
I don't think 3D printing is going to replace injection molding any time soon, even for relatively small runs. The cycle time is just so much longer - an injection molding machine can make most parts, even quite large ones (think big plastic trashcans) in on the order of less than a minute, sometimes much less depending on the machine. That's also ignoring that the plastics you can injection mold have better mechanical properties and surface finishes, too.

Of course, true small run stuff isn't usually injection molded anyway, due to the amount of time and effort and high grade tool steel it takes to make the mold.

Where 3D printing really IS changing things is prototyping and the occasional one-off part, but we're quite far off production usage.
Ugh, a dyed-in-the-wool corporate whitehat bitching about a real hacker wearing an ironic black t-shirt while posing for a magazine interview.

It's 2012. Your argument is twenty years late to the discussion. Deal with it.
More Traffic, Stable Prices, More Products, Profits - Not So Much
What I'm saying is that it wasn't ideal and we'll try to do it better next time around.
It seems to me that Wired missed a more important aspect of all this. Yes, having started the APM program at Google means she has lots of useful relationships. But more importantly, it means she's solved this problem before.
Declarative command line option parsing for Haskell: CmdTheLine
Hacking your way to the best seat in Economy class
That's a good point. You want the signed url to be one-use only. last_changed_password_at is a good solution, and a useful field to keep anyway.
> but the white-hat thing to do is give them notice

That's why you _shouldn't_ do it that way.

> Please consider doing this the proper way

"whitehat" != "proper".
I noticed a reference to .htaccess in the Get Stared Guide. Can this be configured to run on nginx?
Now the device used to break into the rooms costs $57 instead of $50.

Cool story, bro.
Question: Why is the data for machine learning split into a training dataset and a test dataset? Wouldn't using the entire dataset to build the model result in greater accuracy of the predictions?
IPhone Application Portraits
re: "d. One could argue the US can't afford what Norway can afford," also perhaps in the literal sense as Norway has one of the highest per-capita GDPs in the world (along with a government budget surplus instead of a deficit).
I agree that sucks, but there's lots of apps out there with bugs that should be fixed and won't ever be, even though their makers weren't bought by anyone. If someone sells you software with bugs that make it unusable, you should get your money back.
Svgger - Convert img tagged SVG to inline SVG
160k miles isn't too much to sneeze at, and it's not unheard of for ICE cars to have 30% loss of power over that mileage. It still does hurt a bit thinking that you're buying a car with an expiration date built in, though.
Suffering will eventually wake them up, but by then the opportunities to do something about it will be considerably less.
43rd International Physics Olympiad's  electrical experiment kit
I used mailcatch.com, but I always ran into problems like sites that block temporary accounts. So I decided to make a Google account for all my, ahem, "NSFW needs". Which would also give me the ability to like/dislike videos on YouTube, and see the comments on the ones that have been "flagged as NSFW".

So what is my surprise when I see "You have to enter your phone number to continue". After trying to bypass it a few times I just gave up and got a Lavabit account. I don't want to give you my phone number and I most certainly don't want to give you my real name, Google. What the hell.
Forgive me if I'm just naive but I don't get the 'scary' part. Locks have always been 'advisory' and people who have wanted to circumvent them for both good and evil rate them by their 'time to disable'.

Hotel locks with hard keys had their issues as well, and were pretty trivially picked with simple tools. But the key is always that you need to bring the 'simple tools' which is to say that they aren't vulnerable in a way that someone who decides on the spur of the moment to enter the room can easily duplicate. They need the plug that fits the power cord, they need the software which does the JTAG wiggler etc etc.

So if it is 'scary' that people who are not affiliated with the hotel either as guests or as staff can, with pre-meditation, open a hotel room door without damage. Then you need to re-define scary. This has always been true, and will probably always be true by the nature of hotels and motels.
"The ideal applicants must have technical talent, but not be total programming geeks — APMs had to have social finesse and business sense."

I would just like to note I met some of said APMs in a gathering in Tel Aviv and they were all cordial, knowledgeable in their topics of work and helpful. After speaking in passing with one of them I was contacted in less than a week by the VP responsible for the topic in EMEA - I don't know if it's typical for a Google employee, but my casual impression was all that article said and more.
Why would you ignore IE in this context? There are four engines in use, each with millions of users. WebKit is only way ahead in mobile, but it's only going to lose share from now on.
Ask HN: Need an Epipen? I could use your feedback
If you carry an Epipen, or have a family member who does, I'd really appreciate your feedback. If you're interested in helping, please leave feedback in the comments section.

My previous company, Hipster, was recently acquired by AOL, and I'm now in the first steps of starting something new. I'm in the earliest stages of starting a company that will apply "modern technology" to common medical devices.

The first product we're working is a variation on the Epipen. Essentially, we'd be adding GPS / 911 / emergency contact capability directly into the Epipen. Minutes matter when people are going into anaphylactic shock, so the goal of this product would be to reduce the amount of time that it takes for emergency services (paramedics, first responders, emergency room doctors, etc.) to respond to a life-threatening allergic reaction.

Here's how it would work. Once the Epipen is used (injected) by the user, the following would happen:

1) A GPS device on the Epipen is activated.

2) 911 is automatically notified of the user's location, and allergy history / profile.

3) Paramedics / EMTs would be able to track any changes to the user's location (using the GPS), as well as be able to prep the proper medication for the user's condition.

4) The user's parents / emergency contacts would receive a text message / automated call, letting them know that the Epipen has been activated. In addition, they would be able to track the users location using a mobile application on their iPhone / Android phone.

Now, for a few questions:

1) Do you think that this type of function would be useful / necessary for someone who needs to carry an Epipen? Or is this just an extraneous feature?

2) Would this give you peace of mind, knowing that you (or your family member) has this backup on the Epipen?

3) Would you pay anything extra for this service? If so, how much?

Thanks - every piece of feedback will be greatly appreciated!
I guess they just aren't yet capitalizing on the value of all of that tracking data. The most prominent thing promoted to me today was infant formula from Wal-Mart.

There are at least six things wrong with that ad: I don't shop at Walmart. I don't live anywhere near a Walmart. I don't have an infant. When I did have an infant, I didn't usually use formula. The rare times I had to use infant formula, I wouldn't use a discount retailer's house brand.

I can't imagine, long term, that Walmart will continue to pay Facebook more to keep showing me junk like that than I would just to make it go away.
It's unauthorized/unofficial. We could possibly make that clear in the /about page, though I think people are probably used to it from the many HN* projects around.

The show is certainly aiming to be based around HN though, not just a general tech show riding on HN's name. Guests are HN regulars and stories are those popular on HN.
I suppose the analogs would be breaking&entering and fraud? I can't imagine this crime in the physical world would land someone with six felony charges though. That's pretty intense.
True, but I think Qworg was instead suggesting that humans are good where the confidence/accuracy of robots drops off. Machine learning tasks usually get to 70% good enough pretty quickly, but after that each percent gain costs more and more. There's a point where humans can complement robots when the robots are not yet good enough to solve the problem.
For those who aren't well read (grin) a very good read looking at a dystopian future where 3d printers have displaced manufacturing is Cory Doctorow's "Makers". The Creative Commons licensed book can be downloaded from his website, craphound.com, or purchased elsewhere.

I suspect it may be one of those near-prophetic works of science fiction that will amaze future generations - "How'd he see that coming?"
I think you may have misunderstood.

I pay for twitter by giving money to software companies monthly that better let me access twitter.
Judging by the about section, I'd go with they aren't authorised.
With the typography weighted the way it is, I read "Dodo" before I read "Doko".
(disclaimer: I work for Google, and dislike the Google+ names policy)

In this case, it's not a demand; the user has already entered a Google+ name, and Google is offering to show that name on the user's YouTube account.

> Supose I film my cat in my living room showing also the nice
> HiFi installation behind it. If it is published under my
> name, it would be like publishing my address on the HiFi.

That's ridiculous. Unless you're also posting your address in the video description, it's practically impossible for a viewer to match a name (even your legal name) to your physical location.

The concern here is about privacy, not physical security. Thinking up unrealistic danger scenarios is not productive.

> If as a teenager I film and publish a party where I wouldn't
> be at my advantage, I don't want that my name is associate
> to it forever.
>
> I must be able to reset my Internet image and reputation.
> Especially for young people. Google is already very
> reluctant to remove references on demand.

Currently, the idea of interacting with the web through multiple disposable identities is constrained to nerds. I believe that as time goes on, and the privacy implications of a single identity become widely apparent, the majority of users (especially younger users) will learn to use multiple identities.

You ask for the ability to "reset" an identity, but this is impossible. You can't un-break an egg. Everything posted to the internet is public and potentially eternal.

In twenty years, the idea of posting something risqué under one's legal name will be considered as foolish as stapling bank statements and tax returns to a telephone pole.

> We need a place where we can create a virtual identity we
> can throw away. An identity that we can use as signature
> for publishing comments, articles and videos.

You mean, like a Google account? There's no restriction on the number of accounts a single person can create, and the censors won't blink twice as long as the name sounds caucasian (citation: http://infotrope.net/2011/08/04/google-plus-names-policy-exp... ). Accounts at any major internet site, including Google, are inherently ephemeral and disposable.
matlab and python + numpy + scipy + matplotlib give the same kind of performance for the same level of features and ability to do quick exploratory prototyping with high level, vector based datastructures.

However one is free (beer and freedom) and multipurpose (you can preprocess string data and expose your model with a HTTP API) while the other is much less so.

In python + numpy you should always profile and if the bottleneck is in python interpreted code (rather than a low level numpy call) you can always rewrite the offending python loop in cython.
To be fair, making the average daily newspaper is a different kind of project than how most software is made. Print is mostly a fixed process with few creative unknowns. You know how long it takes for something to get through editorial or advertising, how long it takes to lay it out or drop in a replacement, what time the printer needs the layouts to be able to get the final papers to distribution, and what price and time are involved in special features or changes, like spot color or losing some number of copy inches at the last minute. But much of software is something new, the automation of some process or creation of efficiency. Software projects, almost by definition, have some of the players doing something they've never done before. Parts of the processes are similar, but software and daily print projects aren't really comparable for most of the cycle.
Maybe he meant 6, 6-hour days?
I wasn't disagreeing with what you said here. What I was suggesting is that you got 50/50 balance by a technique you didn't mention in your blog post: limiting male enrollment as a percentage of the whole. I don't think there is anything wrong with that, but it is unlikely that someone doing only the things you mentioned in your post would achieve the same gender balance you got by doing something else all together.
Does flash photography really damage art? The persistence of a myth.
I think the primary threat in this situation is burglary of an unoccupied hotel room.

Security chains are fairly easy to defeat; a bent clothes hanger will do. Deadbolts are probably pretty hard if there's no external key hole. Someone intending harm to the occupants of a hotel room might just break a window.
Holy fucking shit, this could make JS Crypto useful again. This might actually be what I'm looking for to resurrect the Wire project.
February, 2012, she was accused of changing her son’s 98
to a 99

That's like robbing a bank for a single dollar.
Adidas Factory Closing and China’s FDI Flight
Ok, that one made me laugh.
A while back (seems like it's been about a year) Radio Shack solicited ideas to make their stores more relevant. I suggested they install 3d printers in every store to bring hobbyists back in.

Crickets.
Financial reports are typically in 1000s of dollars - UTX's net reported in 03/2012 were $330 million USD.

edit: source is http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=UTX ('All numbers in thousands' in upper right of the statement). Easy mistake! I just happened to be passingly familiar with United Technologies, which is a large diversified industrial conglomerate that includes Carrier (A/C systems), Sikorsky (helicopters), and Pratt & Whitney (aircraft engines) among other subsidiaries.
This isn't as much about "lowering the bar" affirmative-action-style as much as removing the "no girlz allowed!" sign from the clubhouse.
Antarctica, Arctic and the Galapagos: Cruises vs. Expeditions?
Animating Colored Ajax Comments with jQuery
For this I actually had sufficient data available that adding more didn't do much.

You need a testing dataset in order to validate the performance of the model. If you validate against the training set really what you're doing is measuring the model's ability to fit the training data - which it will be able to do with high accuracy. That will, however, result in a much diminished ability to predict any new games - as it isn't "learning" the features of college basketball as much as it is memorizing the contents of the training set.

As others pointed out, it'd probably even be better to add a third grouping which is tested against only after the algorithm has finished - as an objective validation against as of yet unseen data.
Can you point me to an American with more than $265.911 billion?
To prevent overfitting. A common technique is to use cross-validation, where you train some percentage of the data (90%) and test on the remaining (10%), and cycle through which 10% you use as test (each train/test split is called a "fold"). Once you've identified a model that resists overfitting, you can train on all of the data.

edit: As noted in the other reply, having a truly blind validation set is still ideal.
Tiled Shadow Maps
Should Facebook Acquire Kickstarter?
Cypherpunk culture is pretty deeply intertwined with programmer culture in the US, it's easy to forget that it's not true everywhere.

It's also easy to forget that the situation we have here, where even the biggest criminal organizations are pretty weak (and deeply local), and the State is the scariest actor around, is neither natural nor normal.
Fun fact: Opera has had "widgets", which are basically the same thing as this, since version 9 (2006). They could run without having the main browser open, and when I looked inside their folders, I was surprised to see that, indeed, each one had an actual ".exe" file. I doubt you'd be able to distribute them though. They are deprecated now for some reason.
Scikit-learn for Python, great tutorials/user guide covering various ML techniques, makes prototyping very easy: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/
One of the things that struck me while reading Jobs' biography was how frequently he cried. Numerous times throughout he's described as weeping, sometimes at momentous occasions, like getting fired from Apple, and sometimes over relatively trivial matters. Think about it. When was the last time you saw a grown person cry about something at work? Ever?

I think one of the things that made Steve Steve, and made him capable of doing the things he did, was how deeply he felt things. When a design wasn't right it actually seemed to cause him great emotional pain. People in emotional pain tend to lash out angrily. Just like you might forgive your spouse for saying something awful in the heat of an argument (I honestly believe it affected him on that deep of an emotional level), I think people forgave Steve because they knew that even when he was being vicious, it wasn't because he literally hated them. He was just deeply, personally wounded that his expectations weren't being met.

Now, it's not normal for anyone to care that deeply about what most people consider minor details, like the angle a corner is beveled at or something like that, but he did. And that level of caring about the details is what made Apple's products great.

Think about the last time anyone has done any work for you. Was there anything that was off? Probably there was. Most people weigh the benefit of fixing whatever minor problem there might be against the hassle of explaining what's wrong and waiting for it to be redone and the possibility of insulting the person who did the work and decide it's not worth it. You probably do this without even thinking about it. Obviously, for Steve it was always worth it, and that probably had a lot do with how emotionally sensitive he was.

It's easy to look back and say that you could have achieved the same results while being a nicer person, but I think it's easier said than done. I'm not saying it's impossible in general, but I think the deeply emotional place that Steve's sense of design came from made it nearly impossible for him. The important thing to take away was how much he was able to achieve because he cared so deeply, not the tyrannical aspect. That was a side effect. If you seek to emulate his tyranny (because you like being a tyrant, maybe) assuming that you'll get the same results, you're bound to be disappointed.
Some argue that dedicated IPs aren't all that important:
http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/14127210172/the-false-promi...
Probably more revolutions and wars in Bulgaria
Breivik used violence in an attempt to cause political change (to try and force the government to stop promoting multiculturalism). That clearly fits within the definition of terrorism.

You are correct in saying that McVeigh's actions may not fit that definition, as he claimed that his motive was revenge for the government's actions on Waco and Ruby Ridge, rather than trying to force political change, but terrorism also refers to the state of fear that an act can cause, so you can still call him a terrorist.

The problem in the United States is that people are always willing to call Muslim extremists terrorists, but for some reason other individuals or groups that commit terrorist acts are simply labeled nuts, extremists, or the fringe element.
Fetise Coupon-25% Discount Promo Offer 2012
Honestly, it is not the packaging, it is the people...
I can't speak for the app, but I've yet to discover a .htaccess config that couldn't be converted to nginx.
How to Get Customers to Write Reviews of Your Business - Just ask.
So once your channel is banned, you are then pursued legally. Business model of the 2010s.
> At least this now gives something competitors can differentiate with.

I never thought of it this way. This makes me a lot less annoyed, now.
Yeah, I wasn't saying that's always the case, but there's something about "45" that says "you can have 50 and feel like you drove a hard bargain".
That's precisely the point, though. If you could only use debit cards as debit cards and credit cards as credit cards, they wouldn't need to ask which way I would prefer they run it.
I shudder at the thought that some people's motivation for working is to enable aristocratic ideals.
In my experience "the rules of social engagement" are as often used to entangle and obstruct as they are to create civility. Think of "foot-in-the-door" phenomenon.

Sometimes rudeness is respect, especially if it's an honest communication.

Jobs needed an on-time supplier, and it was arguably worth the cost of a legal battle in order to get one.

As others have said, though, it spawns imitators that think "Steve berated his employees, so I can too."
The monopoly is not entirely created by the government. It would be more accurate to say, "the major cable companies have divided the country amongst themselves and agreed not to step on each other's turf." The FCC and the local governments have various levels of complicity in this arrangement.

A municipality would not likely visit any violence upon a competitor, but that's largely because the only way to become a competitor (you can't just start digging holes and dropping cable in them) is through the approval of the municipality. This is where the "government-sponsored monopoly" idea comes into play, because there is often a revolving door between the government agency nominally charged with regulating cable service and the cable company that administers it.

Also, no, libertarians in general do not "believe in the concept of natural monopolies". Many libertarians hold that monopolies are short-lived and are prolonged only through the complicity of governments--or other actors which may play the same role in context, like the mafia, or even the corporation itself, should it become a de facto government. Of course, with that last point, you start begging the question...
While I agree with the first 3 paragraphs of your opinion, I don't understand why Yahoo HAS to acquire Google to make your argument count? NeXT was not on its way to become the next-big-one. It was mostly Steve Jobs who changed things at Apple with other people's help and contribution.

If Marissa Mayer is as good as the general consensus is and has built connections with all these other smart people, I don't see why it would be a surprise if she turns Yahoo around as a genuine competitor. I don't think that she has to achieve this via some 'coupe'. After all, Yahoo has paid her massive amounts. I am sure they believe in her and respect her decisions rather than be upset with it.