skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, but when Groklaw is held as THE site to go to, what happens? I don't have a problem with what Groklaw is doing, I have a problem with the fact that every single piece of substantial reporting on copyrights and patents from a certain perspective seems to come from Groklaw.

This site has a monopoly on a perspective that a lot of hackers hold, I don't think that should be ignored.
I know that you're not suggesting that people should reuse one password across multiple services. In your model:

1) I have to lose my wallet and

2) Not change my password and

3) You have to know my login email address and

4) You have to find which service the email and password work for

...and all of these have to happen in the time between setting a new strong password and learning that strong password. Because when you've learnt the pass you stop carrying it around.

If you lose your wallet there's a bunch of stuff you need to do. You need to cancel your cards, for example. Keeping a single password in there (for the short time it takes you to remember it) means that there is one more step added - you need to change that password.

You're also failing to do a sensible risk analysis. The threat model for passwords is "hackers, anywhere in the world". The venn diagram of that very big set has a teeny tiny intersection with the much smaller set of "people who have access to my wallet if I happen to lose it".

Writing down a good password means that you get to use a good password. You get to choose a properly strong password, with many characters of mixed case including numbers and specials; or a 6 word passphrase.
Dedicating time for creative pursuits
While it's hard to make a fake ID, it's trivial to make a fake image of ID.

Checking a physical ID would be a somewhat effective barrier. Checking an emailed or faxed image of an ID? Useless.
Journalist blames Apple tech for allowing iCloud hack and for more details you can go here: http://goo.gl/Gi4B1
The point of this article is great: have a clear reason of the benefits of using kickstarter, which aren't creating buzz and interest in your product.
$10k bet that bitcoin will outperform gold/silver/stock by 100x over two years
Building Curiosity’s nuclear power source
Writing a simple custom lookup table in Sass
First, I didn't say you're a dumbass. I said, assume that the person is a dumbass. In real life, yes I would assume that you're a dumbass if you had given this kind of argument.

I also would have ignored you and moved on if I had heard you giving this kind of opinion. If pressed to give a response, I would have said it's not a serious argument. And the point is that people don't have to respond to everything that is said, and additionally, it's preferable that they don't as that leads to wasted efforts and irrelevant discussion. I was responding to the effort dedicated to your argument.

Personally, how I determine whether or not an argument is dumb is if the first formulation of the argument does not consider and respond to the most obvious challenge. Yours does not consider for example, that a nobody would be making a radar dish if it weren't for politics, not does it consider that the whole history of technology has been driven largely by military (and thus, political) needs. That seems to be a very obvious hurdle to your argument, which as I understand it is basically a semantic game where the term "technology" is confined to "a technician and the breadboard or terminal in front of him/her."

That you kicked off a semantic exchange with a flat out "nope" just seems smug, making it all the more amazing that the subsequent argument was so naive.
Gladwell says himself, in his own books, that he writes not to change the minds of his readers, but to make his readers think.

The stories he presents alongside the ideas he presents are just illustrations. Every situation, whether it's Bill Gates' success, the problem of choosing NFL Quarterbacks, or the rise of Hush Puppies has an incredible amount of variables that can never be fully grasped.

The common theme of Gladwell bashers seems to be that they take every idea presented as if he were presenting it as unilateral truth. I mean, just take a look at this Quora page: http://www.quora.com/Malcolm-Gladwell-author/What-are-some-c...

If you look at the top answer there, the writer is clearly missing the point of Gladwell's writing on a number of issues. The one complaint about his writing I've seen the most often is about the 10,000 hour rule. The writer of the Quora answer puts it this way: "[Gladwell is wrong in saying] That 10,000 hours of practice will turn you into a genius on the order of Mozart or Michael Jordan".

He never says anything like that in Outliers! The main arguments that I got out of the 10,000 hour rule is that the most successful people of any area tend to follow a similar trend: born into an exceptional situation to lead to greatness in that area, dedicated practice for thousands of hours, above average IQ (but IQ past ~120 is not too important). Saying that dedicated practice alone will turn anyone into the top 0.001% of a given profession is absurd, and Gladwell doesn't say that at all.

Maybe if Gladwell bashers stopped taking everything he writes as if he were prescribing ideas of thought, they could enjoy his compelling writing and thought-provoking ideas.
Information cannot travel faster than the speed of light: it's the theoretical upper-bound. If in one clock cycle information can only travel 350 micrometers, that puts serious limitations on the engineers designing this device.
Crystals are actually a major portion of the study of solid-state physics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_physics#Crystal_str...
> Jab at him all you want for the superficiality of the ideas he's trafficking in, or for being beholden to corporate sponsors. I'm not sticking up for what he writes. But what he writes isn't the key to his success. Gladwell could write the phone book and it'd be more convincing than this post was.

Maybe this will seem snobby, but isn't such success a problem itself? That is, I wouldn't be particularly proud of writing something that succeeded almost entirely because of its style and despite its subject matter (or truth or information, however you want to put that).

Being a great writer is a tremendous skill. No question. But don't you find it weird to be defending someone while saying his ideas are "superficial" and he's "beholden to corporate sponsors"?
"Fairly characterize the evidence for your position" shouldn't apply only in Nature.

If Gladwell came up with an hypothesis and gave anecdotes both supporting and disproving his hypothesis, that would be "exposing ideas." Instead, he (sometimes implicitly, but usually explicitly) suggests that his hypothesis is a universal law.

Of course, Gladwell writes well. But the OP is exactly right that Gladwell's bread-and-butter is inappropriate extrapolation from a few anecdotes to some pithy "theory of everything."
What else is there besides Groklaw? Where do you go for a secondary opinion?

Let's say, hypothetically, Company A started using patents/copyrights in a certain way and also happened to back Groklaw. Would you want to know? How would you check that?

Also, you do not mention any sources. You do not seem to try to connect with my opinion. You claim that the evidence is obvious and that any perceived flaws are simply of my imagination. That isn't exactly an intelligent response, and it's one you shouldn't be proud to share.
Mars Curiosity Landing & Exploration Mission main page
You have to be careful when adding some random characters, because most cracking software includes dictionary mangling options.

Thus, option 0ption opt1on etc all get mangled into a wordlist, while )*&HD@IHU don't. Yes, it still increases difficulty, and they are much easier to remember, but people need to be careful.
I think you're right about Gladwell, but wrong in general. I can criticize the awful music of Linkin Park without subjecting myself to the claim that I'd be doing it myself if it were really that easy.
I wonder what your friends would think about you if there were a website exposing inconsistencies between your public and private persona.
By conceptually separating synchronization from mutual exclusion and abstracting concurrency into separate models (atoms, agents, refs) that correspond to separate use cases (synchronous and independent mutable access across threads, asynchronous and independent access, and synchronous and coordinated access). It's higher level than using message passing for all types of concurrency and, therefore, more expressive.

When the goal of concurrency is parallelization, I'd want the most abstract and powerful tool for the job, which for me means Clojure over Erlang. When the goal of concurrency is reliability, I imagine I'd want separate lightweight processes for fault tolerance, which is where Erlang seems to excel.
"(how the heck it's supposed to be pronounced?)"

Ignore the e and pronounce it "lows" as in "highs and lows".

Source: Lowe's radio commercials I've heard.
10k GBP Bootstrap Challenge Update, 4k Left
I had my own hypothesis of a Gladwell recipe: he takes a well-executed research paper, and expands on the references, and their references, and then adds links to other pop-science books. The original idea could be told more precisely within 15 pages, as exemplified by the journal article, and his 300 page books give little glimpses of that clarity when they are verbatim from the original, and mud the water elsewhere.
Lump circuits are defined to be circuits whose size is smaller than the wavelength of their highest frequency. In lay terms that means that every signal can get to any part of the circuit in less than one 'cycle.' That makes the math a whole lot easier and it means you can safely ignore 'transmission line' effects.

When your circuit is larger than the wavelength of your highest frequency, your propagation delays make it more like a distributed system than a single circuit.

Digital circuits like microprocessors work in part by creating 'synchronization points' with global clocks. Synchronous circuits avoid the issues of wave front propagation by pausing until the signal has reached all over the circuit.
It's also a big increase in the bandwidth-delay product, the amount of data you have an opportunity to send down the pipeline before any responses could arrive.
Pi in a box
One problem with this scheme is that areas where sheep are raised would probably have pretty sparse cellular coverage.
Actually, let me just say this: I'm sorry I called you a dumbass. That was out of line, regardless of what I think about your argument or the way you presented it.

I'm sorry.
How do I land on Mars?: Animated description of Curiosity's descent
Prepaid Cellphones Are Cheaper. Why Aren't They Popular?
Upz. Yeah I heard. http://goo.gl/63FCA
Learn hubot the hard way
> Gladwell might be a compelling - albeit extremely formulaic - writer, but how does he fare as a journalist?

In fairness, we probably shouldn't judge him as a journalist. He's a storyteller and a popularizer instead: someone who reads scholarly works and whips them into a shape that larger audiences can and will read.

Case in point: in 1985, Timothy Wilson published an amazing article called "Strangers to Ourselves". Years later, he turned it into a book (of the same title). But most people haven't heard of Wilson or that book, certainly nowhere near as many people as have heard of or read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. By Gladwell's own admission, most of the ideas in Blink start from Wilson's work.[1]

[1] http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/tp_reading.html
For every single of these questions, my wife, mother and sister would know the answer as well. Ergo, they are not acceptable as a "secret" that can be used to grant access to my account; Apple should provide reasonable privacy also from my in-laws. The whole concept of "security questions" is stupid and useless, and shouldn't be used ever and anywhere.
I think late-night CalTrain (or late-night BART on the peninsula) would be more useful than 24-hour BART.

First, the city has buses running at night and there are 8xx buses that run along BART lines after BART is closed. While one's experience on BART is much better than on a bus, current options don't require that much more time.

Second, the last north-bound CalTrain leaves Palo Alto a little before 11 pm making it really difficult for people living in the city/East Bay without a car to do evening activities there. If one wants to get back, the best options are spending two hours on a SamTrans bus into the city or taking an expensive cab.
Managing Email Realistically
The problem with both the new model and the old model is they combine two concepts: storing your work so it isn't lost by act of God or stupidity and permanently committing those changes to a specific named file and version.

I want my work continually saved so that I never lose anything but that doesn't necessary mean I want it committed every minute. What I really want to do is commit my current work to a new name leaving the original document unchanged. Duplicating then reverting achieves the same result but feels much more like I'm doing something to please the machine instead of the machine fitting to what is a common work style.
I'm having trouble seeing how Gladwell could reasonably compared to Daisey, a disgraced fabulist.
cherry-picking is amazing for the "oops I did that fix on master instead of the 2.x branch". git cherry-pick <hash>. done.
The principles are not meant to be strict, unbreakable rules.

As for the website, I really like it. I don't find the grid confusing at all. The pricing should be simpler but the designer is not responsible for that.
Everybody just watch this. It's Tom Rivellini, one of the lead mechanical designers of the landing mechanism, explaining how it works and how it evolved and what was considered and what was rejected. It's not a pithy over-produced 4 minute video, it's the real stuff for the technically interested. It answers all your questions.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures_archive.cfm?year=200...

> I haven't heard the reason's why some of the more conventional mechanisms weren't used.

What's a conventional mechanism when you're landing on another planet?
Vague indeed. There are so many examples of what NOT to do out there, it would've been easy to highlight some. Like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/forensicpics/7257657796/in/set-...

And here's one that precisely illustrates what he was saying about a control's appearance reflecting the way it'll work: http://www.flickr.com/photos/forensicpics/4361736097/in/set-...

The article also fails to call out one of the worst trends in UI today: the Peek-a-Boo UI that hides things until AFTER you've accidentally rolled over them:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/forensicpics/7252519646/in/set-...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/forensicpics/5817845518/in/set-...

Then there's the mistake of hard-coding colors in your UI, and failing to test it with different color schemes:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/forensicpics/5889365199/in/phot...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/forensicpics/528235915/in/set-7...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/forensicpics/528235913/in/set-7...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/forensicpics/6890158811/in/set-...

How about idiotic menu organization?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/forensicpics/6322822823/in/set-...

Putting stuff under the wrong menu:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/forensicpics/5630390118/in/phot...

Or failure to indicate that ANY controls are present?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/forensicpics/6645852949/in/phot...
Light Table won't ultimately be in the "browser" - it will be in a wrapped webview. The experience on mac right now is that you have a standalone app just like you would with sublime et. al. Once we get some time, the same will be true for linux and windows :)
Link to the JPL site http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/
The judge in this case writes computer programs, and has already made statements that indicate that this line of argument is going to be a loser. I don't know why Oracle is persisting.

> Judge: I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?

Then:

> Judge: rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it--

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/193-android/4224-oracle-v-...
That's just the market converging on current reality, which changed gradually over the course of weeks. A company can't change its fundamentals (the goods and services it offers) continually in fractions of a second, so any such price fluctuations are noise rather than signal, and we shouldn't be using a system which amplifies and reacts to that.
I recommend Java the language and base platform running on Apache Tomcat frontended _not_ with mod_jk but with mod_proxy.

See my post here for specifics:
http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?t=9230&p=53085#p53...

For the Web UI I recommend GWT by using Eclipse and the GWT Designer GUI web designer they bought from the excellent folks at Instantiations back in 2010.

https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/tools/gwtdesigner/
https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/tools/gwtdesigner/...

If you have customers that demand a platform GUI application which accesses your web backend, Google donated WindowBuilder to Eclipse.

http://www.eclipse.org/windowbuilder/
Solar Bag concept purifies water as you walk
It does not, but in order to foreclose you state, under risk of perjury, that the details are right.

I've been following foreclosure stories for a while. The DAs are willfully asleep - hundreds of thousands of perjuries have been committed and documented, tens of thousands have been confirmed by the perjuring entity (as in this case), but the legal system is not interested in pursuing justice. Read Deninger's "The Market Ticker" or ZeroHedge for (almost daily) specific details.
The article calls this “successful failures” which I think is a brilliant term.
Seems like a lot of the R&D that HFT funds are interested in could have great side-effects for society. Nutrino messaging through the centre of the Earth; fleets of drone relays over the Atlantic; super fast internet infrastructure; research into trends of vast historical datasets; cross country wireless networks...
Boxing  Manny Steward suggests Chavez Jr. and Pacquiao are taking Steroids:
If true, this is despicable. I can barely fathom what kind of messed-up corporate culture and labyrinthine decision-making process would lead a company to charge authors for making their articles 'open access' only to turn around and put those exact same articles behind a pay-wall.

Edit: Yes, it appears to be true.
It means that the geometry of your device has an increasingly bigger impact on your delay times. It's also going to cause more geometry features of your device to behave like antennae, sapping power (and if you're the NSA, leaking information).

This turns a digital logic problem into a digital logic problem AND a antenna design problem. This is part of the reason why we've been stuck at 3 ghz for so long. We can go faster, it just takes more power; something we've been moving away from.
> I was thinking of something like a simple guided arrow, perhaps some fins that are extended on a telescopic shaft

It's one thing to say it, it's another to design it such it has a chance of working. Telescoping mechanisms with deployable aerodynamic structures sounds very complicated to me, compared to the thrusters they're using.

> You could possibly then put a tractor rocket at the end of this shaft to slow descent and keep the rocket plumes away from the main body and the ground.

The sky crane already does this.

> Regarding parachutes, is it not the case that if you need more performance, that you simply increase their size?

'Performance' is lots of things, presumably you mean drag. Increasing the diameter does increase the drag, but it also increases the opening forces, which requires a stronger structure, which means more mass. You don't have the luxury of much margin when every gram in your landing system has cost the us taxpayer thousands of dollars and is a gram that you can't use for science.
> ...I refuse to support Groklaw... will not start trusting anonymous reporting and support of Groklaw

> I have supported everything Groklaw has done to this point.

Kindly do two things for us: stop talking out of both sides of your mouth, and, instead of ineffectually waving your hands, point to specifically what Groklaw got wrong on this issue.
I suspect there are a LOT of places in the United States that are a few hours' drive from the closest Apple store.
The "axiomatic" approach to design (and art) is usually backward. Even if you arrive at some sort of basic principles after a while, someone else cannot read them and know what it means to apply them until they have tried to design many things. There is a rich context to what everyone says about design, and you cannot learn it without repeatedly trying to design and improve things.
SWIG seems like a glaring omission. It's not great, but it's a lot more fun than using the python C API directly.
This seems rather sensationalist. Where, exactly, am I supposed to find these open access articles that Elsevier is charging people to read? Besides that unsubstantiated claim, the rest of the blog post seems to be nitpicking about how Elsevier makes shitty websites that are confusing.
So, when i have one I will take it with me for trips I made. No problem with Pure Water scarcity.
Honan no longer works at Gizmodo. It says so right in the OP, along with the name of his new employer. So... ??

You say that post "got you thinking." Got you thinking what?
principles of being a good ui designer: stop trying to make a name for yourself

these sorts of lists drive me nuts because they merely serve to direct attention to the author instead of allowing the audience to find much more reputable and proven information (e.g., the raskin rules mentioned below)

i am happy to see the comments here indicating others agree.
I don't know much Python but as far as I k now it is capable of extension via mixins and Java can do similarly through AoP and inheritance. Erlang can do neither of these out of the box.

What I'm really referring to is how dry a set of modules is capable of being, avoiding repeated boiler plate code being employed each and every time.
No need to wonder, in Mozilla's case:

http://arewefastyet.com/?a=b&view=regress

Graphs are arranged such that lower is always better. The red line is current Firefox performance. Purple is Firefox's new in-development engine, called IonMonkey. Green is Chrome.
really cool project! thanks for the tip!
اولمبياد لندن 2012: رمي الرمح
You just need to google for 'psx isos' or 'n64 ROMs' or 'ps2 isos'. For info on emulation - Zophar.net is probably the best option.
Just thought I would mention that "South" (http://south.aeracode.org/) is a database schema migration plugin for Django. It generates files containing the operations required to 'migrate' (alter and update) your schema and it's data from one version to another. These files sit nicely in the repository and can be run all at once or one at a time to bring a database up to snuff.

I've found it's really excellent once my db schema has settled into something relatively stable when future changes become more disruptive.
QActiveResource is pretty cool. It looks like it might leak in the presence of Ruby exceptions, though.

When I do this sort of thing, I wrap ruby.h function calls with rb_protect, check the return code, and then throw a C++ exception to unwind the stack. There is an allocation cost to doing that.