skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why Online Marketing has Become More Vital than Traditional Marketing
What Are Algorithms Up to Today? Fighting Off Fruit Flies
Actually, there were some fundamentally flaws in the particular version of a distributed social network that diaspora started with. They imagined a network of web servers that would each host a piece of diaspora and that each of these would provide secure sharing. That system pretty much requires trusting all the server-providers because the decryption happens on the servers.
>The Diaspora team were unresponsive to patch submissions and this meant that features which users wanted didn't get implemented.

So you've read pistos blog. Have you look at the contributions though? https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/graphs/contributors

No open source project accepts every pull request, but Diaspora has accepted quite a lot.
Remove all traces of original Gmail address from a 'send mail as' alias
This is fascinating and chilling. Thanks for posting.
Omair Farooqui is excellent patent attorney in the Bay Area. Check him out at http://www.eflawfirm.com/omf.html
Interesting, a crowd not as geeky as one would expect.
Twitter Appeals on Behalf of Occupy Wall Street Protester
lol yea. I think their site was so flooded it crashed
If I asked my wife today, I'm certain she's knows Jobs and Gates, maybe Bezos (and that's a big maybe) but no way would she know who Musk is. Lets not mistake our echo chamber for the world.
Call Them Maybe: LoanLook Simplifies Student Loan Payments With Live Advisors
Interesting that Sony was pretty takedown-happy a year ago and then seemingly went silent. Did something change? I can't imagine people stopped creating "infringing" content.

Also of note is the decompiled code with license info still intact, like 2012-07-16-microsoft.markdown. Seems like a dick move to put something like that on github, especially without even bothering to clean up the code or do something interesting with it.
> When is the last time you took on Facebook and won?

How is launching yet another failed social network and executing it so poorly that it ends up immediately abandoned "taking on Facebook"?

All they did was destroy what little confidence people had in the concept of a crowd-funded online service. That's not a positive, or something to be proud of. It actually sets everyone who is trying to do the same thing and execute it well back quite far.
Minimum viable team
Fascinating article. Well worth the read if you have an interest in diets and nutrition.

Why is it scientists can't get an accurate grasp on the calorie content of foods, and how our bodies process them?
"Perhaps more interesting will be the transition time, that point where half the cars are self driving and half are manually driven. Will manual drivers become more aggressive because they "know" the robo-cars will get out of their way?"

that would be quite interesting to see. i could certainly see myself becoming more aggressive if i knew others around me would adjust without incident; though that would depend on if self-driving cars are clearly labeled as such (i.e. with special plates)
The Startup Embargo, Revisited
There are some posted. Here are a couple:
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2011-02-03-sony-c...
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2012-03-26-deathw...
It seems like a modern parable

A geek tragedy.
>Good article on why counting calories precisely is pointless and misleading.

It's really not, you just need to eat healthy relatively unprocessed food for which it is reasonable to estimate calories and start with a baseline calorie target and adjust according to your goals as you go.

This subject happens to be uh...my job...so I can answer questions if anyone has any.
>However, I can't think of examples where a Canadian web service dominates the market in the face of global competition

lespac > kijiji > craigslist in Quebec.

You can not post on CL and be fine. Kijiji will give you some results, but you pretty much have to post on lespac.
It's immensely complicated.
This is a marketing stunt. Why not use Linux but Android?
VMware Lets a Thousand Clouds Contend
I'm intrigued, I tried to get Google Voice in Canada but was unsuccessful. Did you get a US phone number or you managed to get a Canadian area code?
Every program has bugs.
Show HN: Cardiio turns any camera into a biosensor that finds your pulse
No domain name! I love it! How often do we see this on HN? Fantastic.

As for the idea in the title, isn't this more or less what Viaweb did?

Create a DSL for generating HTML elements and structure that can itself be embedded in an HTML page. Then let users POST commands along with their data to your custom interpeter (that you built from Lisp/Scheme).
Space is a unique and unusual place. Usually the stuff that goes up there is also unique and unusual (hyperspectral radiometers, synthetic aperture radars, rovers). So it's expensive to engineer.

The cubesats (this is one) were developed as a way to prototype ideas and to get a larger segment of people involved in space activity. They are squeezed in to other launches. They're a very special case.

The phenomenon of cheaper, experimental missions is fractal. There are technology demonstration missions at many different price points (up to the 100s of millions of dollar range) that may have fairly modest science goals, but they're trying to show that some exotic bit(s) of tech (autonomous landing, laser communications) can work in space.
Thanks! Did he file a sw patent for you?
Gratings like this (or a CD) will work, but they introduce plenty of artifacts. Scratches and material nonuniformities can scatter light in a way you don't want, and reduce the (already limited) amount of light hitting the right spot on the sensor.
So you're saying that California is also too small to be relevant?
Just because the content wasn't available for purchase doesn't mean it wasn't copyrighted. I am not familiar with UK law and am open to correction, but it sounds like this was still illegal. Not that I think it's such a bad thing, but "Legality is no defense" is just linkbait.
Deutsche Bank to Claw Back Stock Bonuses From Former Jobs
Microsoft rejects Windows 8 SmartScreen privacy concerns
Which is, of course, just CGI.pm's html functions again.
In Canada, the Impact of America's New Patent Law Is Seen
r/askscience is one of the best moderated forums on the web when it comes to keeping things on topic -- I have asked several questions there that have received brilliantly scientific explanations by experts in their respective fields
Thanks for the writeup - while going through the levels, I was wondering how some of this stuff was set up from the game-master's perspective.

This was really fun to play, and I learned a thing or two (specifically the manner in which you solve #7 was totally new to me).

Thanks for putting the CTF together!
Absolutely. Counting calories is a fast feedback loop (count each day, compare to your target, increase or decrease your intake as appropriate); you need a slow feedback loop to set the intermediate target against your actual goal (in this case, say, scale weight). The accuracy of the fast feedback loop isn't critical since you have a pretty accurate slow feedback loop to correct it.

The general approach of partitioning problem solving into fast/inaccurate and slow/accurate is very useful, since it's generally hard to make something that's simultaneously fast and accurate.

Note one other interesting thing about this approach: you can do unit conversions! That is, I can measure something with different units than the thing I'm trying to control. Our reference is body weight, but what we measure is caloric intake: the function we use to slowly adjust the calorie target as a function of our weight has units of calories per body mass.
I don't see any patents made by him in the google patent search :/
Do you mean that community projects are by nature "dead" projects?

No, but they're not necessarily live projects, either. The key question is how much commit activity is coming from the people who are walking away from the project. If they were doing all the committing, and they're leaving, it's dead. If on the other hand there's an active community of committers outside the original developers, it's alive.
The title doesn't match the story. UKNova's policy may be morally good and "respectful" of copyright holders, but what it isn't is legal; just because the DVDs won't be out for another 15 days doesn't mean you have a license to distribute a copyrighted TV show.
LightArrow dramatically redesigns its personal productivity app
Nice link, thanks. Very detailed.
In and of itself, California is the 8th largest economy in the world. So I don't think having a population the size of California's is actually a downer. And Canada is one of the largest 10 economies in the world. That's not exactly insignificant.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16600877/ns/business-us_business...
Node.js: Style and structure
Just saying the idea itself is solid. I never really dove into Diaspora so I have no idea whether their approach was good.
B&W security cameras are inexpensive and lack Bayer masks. I've used one to make a spectrometer before. Pop the lens off the front and you're good to go.

Edit: some of them have ethernet or other fun connectivity options. Better for getting data out of a DIY instrument than screen capture.
You need people with whom you can spend a lot of time with. So ideally, culturally compatible. Get someone who can sell the product, he will know how to sell the idea to investors, sell the product to clients, and encourage the adoption of your service. Get someone disciplined who will not have a problem with telling you when you could be doing things one way or another. Someone who will push you towards your goals.
Ah, yes I remember (and forgot about) these devices. Had one myself. I also remember nearly everyone else had no idea what it was and really didn't care. They were cost prohibitive for the mass market.
Careful, that's not the same as (->).bind(somethingElse). => binds to the current value of this at execution-- in that function, @ will compile to `var _this = this`, not `somethingElse` as we'd expect.

I just tested and it looks like you can hack it by doing

_this = somethingElse =
render: => @renderMe # @ is somethingElse

but that is definitely a bug.
"Did they even make available a beta version? I don't think so."

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/diaspora-open-faceb...
Isn't the job of your Makefile to require recompilation of only those source files that have changed?

I just did a random google of "how long to compile linux kernel" and came across this: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+LinusTorvalds/posts/6BxnSisp8fU

One nice excerpt:

"Total build time after make clean is about 1min, give or take 10secs. `touch include/linux/version.h` is 6 seconds to rebuild. Just doing a rebuild without touching anything is 2.7secs.

For a defconfig, it does build a godawful amount of modules :^)

'allnoconfig; make' is 16 seconds...﻿"
If you enjoyed this, then you'll certainly enjoy the programming chapter of 'Hacking: The Art of Exploitation' by Jon Erickson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking:_The_Art_of_Exploitatio...). The first half of the book is a similar exploration of C programming using GDB to explain everything. Recommended.
" Kickstarter is going to feel a serious backlash the first time one of the high profile projects falls apart"

Well, this is one of their high profile projects, and it's fallen apart.

It will be very interesting to see what happens from here.
Three-quarters of TV ads viewed by 20 percent of viewers
I'd love to know what happened to the iTunes library of Steve Jobs when he died. He undoubtably will have had many purchases of music, books, movies etc. He was adamant that the physical medium was dead. I would assume that his library is now unused? Or perhaps he had a single account his whole family used - which, from my understanding, wouldn't be compliant with the licensing agreement.
No. The US Congress already passed a Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act in 2008 that makes it illegal for insurance companies to do this. They won't take your genetic data even if you offer it to them.
It seems like you're flagging the results of bad development. The question we need to ask ourselves is, what leads these to unfortunate results. The decision to use two-stage build process might not be bad when a project is in that kind of shape. What leads a project to get into that kind of shape? Well, that is the question.

At the same time, I remember the first code-release of diaspora was before G+, it just wasn't usable code. Any project that takes a long time to create is going to have "timing problems". If Diaspora had smoothly working code right now, timing probably wouldn't be an issue.
I think this is a fascinating site. The heuristics are fairly complex in their ratings, which is really quite impressive. What I'd like to see though is more anchoring--most news stories will be somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, and fairly moderate. The difference between a 42 and a 47 is pretty nominal to me.

Also, I think the "Volume" isn't a great second metric as a KPI. I don't really care--I want to know if the articles are well-researched and well written. Perhaps your combo of reading level and journalistic tone could be the other major axis that show up on the pages.

As a quick interface note, on Chrome in Win7, the stories in the "Spin" portion in the full story screen scroll on top of the header bar instead of under it.

Anyway, this is a fantastic site and I'm going to bookmark it, as I think it will be a fascinating way to read the news each morning.
Well in the US 'mandatory' insurance under the AHA removed the ability to turn someone down based on 'pre-existing' conditions.

"Starting in 2014, insurers can no longer carve out needed benefits, charge higher premiums, set lifetime limits on benefits, or deny coverage due to a person’s pre-existing condition."

http://www.healthcare.gov/law/resources/reports/preexisting....
If it were dead it would mean few people are using the software, and especially that few new people were adopting it. It would also mean few or no people are actively developing or maintaining the software. A project that has few users but a lot of development activity is definitely still alive because it is always possible for new features to eventually turn into adoption (Firefox).

Presently, commit activity is actually pretty decent (https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/commits/master). If the project is dead no one has told the people submitting PR nor the people merging the PR.

Most of that stuff is pretty small, but I think this announcement could actually be a step forward. Since February - it seems to me there has been a shadow hanging over this project with a promised over-haul of federation code. I do not know if that will happen now, but there is less risk that it will happen outside the view of those who want to participate in setting the direction. Most people of course, will just write articles and comments and mail list posts and never submit any code (like me!). They may continue to complain that they have a limited a voice in the direction of the project.

The project still has to have active committers who are a subset of the interested "stakeholders". It doesn't matter if they get a little paycheck from D* Inc or not - its still only going to include some people, which will be those people who have a record of submitting acceptable code. This is true of every single open source project I know of.
Reluctant to enable until I know how it will affect my desktop. Will I now get a prompt every time I restart?
The domain doesn't really suit other countries as well ;) But point very well taken; I've gotten many suggestions for services unavailable in other countries -- I'd encourage others to start a similar web site for their own country or perhaps we can have a single international archive.
The spatial resolution would depend on proximity to grating. The father away, the larger the pixels or scan integration areas (or, step size) could be. Most compact spectrometers fold the optical path using mirrors to increase the path length. Some also include a concave mirror to match the Rowland circle and project a more linear distribution of frequencies.
Even in LEO (say, ~200 miles), the South Atlantic Anomaly can cause significant SEUs to standard hardware. But as you say, once you get higher than this, it gets really bad.
When I do this with a Project STAR spectrometer and my cameras and point it to a candle I get two distinct dips in the spectral distribution. It should be even like a blackbody. I have made a parser for the RGB-picture to turn it to a B&W power distribution and I thought I'd might do a simple software filter to make it completely even, like a calibration of sorts. Like so: http://www.flickr.com/photos/defdac/7874867702/in/photostrea...
I use the power distributions coupled with lumen and wattage-specification as input for my home made spectrally based global illumination renderer to calculate PAR in aquariums.
Do you think this will work?
They're not an example of this because they don't "dominate the market in the face of global competition."
Disney and FOSS: Fun and FUD in the Magic Kingdom?
Dwolla, Stripe collaberate to build low-fee fundraising platform for nonprofits
Beyond the Knowledge Graph
This is very interesting. "Calories in, calories out" has long been an established principle and topic of debate & discussion among those who follow nutrition, and while it largely still applies, this article points out the factors that bend it somewhat. I wonder about the compositional effects of diet on the way ingested calories are used, too: studies have shown that isocaloric high-protein diets result in increased lean/muscle mass and lower fat mass, compared to high-carb ones. It would be nice to have a survey article to read on recent studies in this area, if anyone would be so kind.

I liked this factoid in the article: "Back when it was the craze to measure such variety European scientists discovered that Russian intestines are about five feet longer than those of, say, Italians." Useful adaptation there (I wonder if it tends to make Russian guts any bigger?)
Looks like a good start buddy. Looks like this life game I shamefully only made use of for a few days; http://www.rexbox.co.uk/epicwin/

How are you going to stop people from just deleting tasks they couldn't do?

Keep it up!
looks like it's a wordpress site without caching enabled.
They failed before they started. They were a group of developers who thought they could solve and sell a non-technical problem to people who didn't realise they had a problem with a purely technical solution.

Privacy and data-retention issues are an education and engagement problem, not a technical one. There was no effort to engage anyone on any level with education of the problem they were trying to solve. I'm not sure I understood how they were solving it and I was following what they were doing.
Requiring users to have the resources, time and technical expertise to set up the server themselves is hardly making a beta version available.

Most "beta" web services are still hosted.
One Month After Grum Botnet Takedown - No Impact on Spam
What, 44,000 is near 39,000 ;)
Right, which is why the novel parts should get more attention and undergo code review, which is the goal of the Bioinformatics Testing Consortium.

To be clear, I'm all for open science and even open notebooks where it's a good fit for the project. I just don't think a pile of single-use scripts is a sufficient replacement for a clear English description of the analysis workflow and the reasons for each step. If I can't understand how an analysis was done from the article itself and the documentation for any associated software, I would not trust the article. Including more code, particularly the code further down the Pareto curve of relevance to the final article, does not make the article more correct -- most journal articles are wrong or flawed in some way, even if the code works as advertized.
Two Perspectives On API Product Design
This I agree with. But that comes a lot closer to honoring the semantics of the HTTP verbs, too. I do understand the need to be flexible sometimes, especially when some things aren't well-supported, but I cringe whenever I see GET requests changing application state.
Where did the Tweetbot for Mac Alpha go?
It's been many years since i've done hand-written assembly, so I can't say for sure, but it should be able to do instruction stepping on arbitrary programs.
Agreed. These problems (complex tooling, poor interop, non-human readable WSDL) were my motivation for writing Barrister RPC (a JSON-RPC implementation with a human readable IDL).

For those who find value in separating interface from implementation, you might take a gander.

http://barrister.bitmechanic.com/
How do you know what range of calories to target? Or that the labels are correct? How many calories are in the burger from that food truck? That the calories you are eating are healthy? I agree with you that it's good to know roughly how many calories are in your food, but literally counting calories during a diet can be counterproductive. Most people won't count calories in the longterm, so it ends up being a bandaid solution that doesn't encourage lifestyle changes. Ultimately listening to your body (for me this includes semi-regularly weighing myself and checking my body fat %) gives a better idea of how much you should be eating and leads to a stable, longterm solution.
I keep hearing about the death of supersymmetry. Are there new developments keeping it "alive"?
You're getting at the heart of the matter as far as the complexity, but just to put an even finer point on the it:

A single gene sequence can code for many different alternate versions of the same protein. These different variations can have pretty wildly different biochemical properties. Furthermore, the protein products of a given gene varies by environment, ethnicity, organ, tissue, cell type, and stage of life (development, infancy, puberty, etc...).

If that weren't daunting enough, many proteins have a secondary function of regulating their own production and the production of other (somehow related) proteins. This means that there are these highly complex interdependent feedback loops governing the activity and concentration of proteins.

The closest programming analogy might be spaghetti of LISP-like macros that are themselves spaghetti code that writes LISP-like macros.

But all that covers the basic research question of "how is this gene connected to human disease?". Even when you get past that, it's not so easy to know what results to supply back to patients. Do you tell the parents of an 8 year old who has had her genome sequenced that their daughter has a very high predisposition of getting cancer in her 40's? The daughter is too young to consent to hear that info. Now you're forcing the parents to make the choice for her. Not only that, even though the child is the one in for the test, the parents now (possibly without fully thinking it through) are recipients of information about themselves. All that because they wanted a genetic test to see why she's shorter than average.
> requires you to photograph a standard light source

How about a black body? Tungsten lamp perhaps?
Show HN: Top HN Growth Hackers
Folks please don't misinterpret the data. It's just an attempt to list all the growth hackers on HN.
I am sure the big names are missing here. Kindly drop in your details below.
No answers yet so I'll give you my limited knowledge: Easy enough to setup a UPS account and start shipping. Moving big things around via freight is cheap. Amazon has a fulfillment service that will work in some scenarios. </experience>
This is one of the possible incarnations of future social networks. Like with blogging, we will probably see the shift to open source-based, hosted-anywhere social networks. If i were facebook i d be worried.