skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
thanks for that, i only saw those links when they were fresh so didnt see the discussion.
At the risk of being a downer, this isn't that interesting from a computer science perspective. What happened here is that standard computational methods were applied to test a novel theory of stability for nanocrystalline metals[1]. While this is cool and all for metallurgists[2], even by materials science standards the computation is old (we're pretty slow to pick up on this whole computer thing).

There's some (in my opinion) more interesting work going on at MIT[3] in ceramics, where machine learning is being used to predict new material properties. Unfortunately, the group hasn't gotten published in Science or Nature yet, so I don't have much to link to. However, ceramics both are more variable than metals and less well known (one of my professors liked to call it the 'Wild West' of materials), so the big results are likely to be more exciting when they do arrive.

--

[1] All common metals are formed of arrays of tiny crystals, however the metals described here have much smaller crystals than usual (nanometers instead of microns). This strengthens the metals as the movement of crystal defects is the main source of weakness in metals. Defects can easily move within a single crystal, but not so much between them, so reducing the size of crystals significantly hampers defect movement and thus strengthens the metal. Unfortunately, crystals don't like being this small and so preventing them from growing is a serious concern and the focus of this research.

[2] The new theory is actually pretty exciting, and seem to expose significant flaws in the old theory. I don't understand it well enough to say much more though.

[3] http://ceder.mit.edu/
This sounds like a good way to start a heated, off-topic argument that goes nowhere. Please allow me to preempt this by pointing it out here.
> What does the 37Signals software do?

I guess you've not looked at http://37signals.com before posting this?

> So I have to install Ruby, Rails and a gazilion of their custom scripts to use their "product"?

No. You need a browser though, because it is web-based.
I am surprised why nobody has questioned the harsh language in the title. Read it again - Poor starve as politicians Steal - "Steal"?
If you liked that, you'll love this:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/31/business/20080...

Divided by age range, gender, ethnicity...
Those fit with exactly what I was looking for, thanks!
Smartphones still have some utilities I depend upon e.g. I'd be lost most of the time if I didn't have the maps application and I don't believe that forcing myself to not be reliant on it would be a productivity gain.
Computer science should only be offered as a minor. You can major in biology, minor in computer science. Major in art, minor in computer science. But you can't get a degree in CS.

The way university is structured, it would be nearly impossible to minor in CS and learn anything low-level or advanced like computer architecture or operating systems. Perhaps you can push out a desirable employee with a practical knowledge of programming, but could you really educate true "software engineers" via a minor?
Look, I get it. The President's time is extremely valuable, but 30 minutes? Seriously? I got the page to load 1 time, and by then it was over. I would have rather he didn't do it at all.

I did like that one of his answers referenced the Obama Not Bad meme, but I imagine that was pre-canned by one of his interns or something.
I think you overstate the potential for this to erode regulations. If a felon wants a weapon, how is buying it from a guy printing guns any different from buying it from a guy who imports weapons? There are plenty of those guys already around.

If this was simple to do in your own home, I'd say this might be a real issue, but it's ridiculously easy to get a black market weapon right now already; 3d printing isn't going to have a marked effect on that for a long time.
Enforcing complex passwords
I don't really think we can get anywhere with speculation: he might see her happy because people are pretty good at putting on a mask in professional situations. Or maybe she just really is happy.

However, in the aggregate, I'd be willing to bet on most cleaning people preferring the income, and freedom that 37 signals have. With that kind of money, you have a lot of options that someone making cleaning wages just doesn't have.
This is a big one. The change of bankruptcy laws to benefit huge financial institutions, that then got bailed out by the same tax payers against whom they lobbied to get these draconian changes to bankruptcy laws passed was... well not just shocking... not just a demonstration of how corrupt and off-track our political system has become... not sure what the word is but it goes beyond hypocrisy.

I remember growing up outside of the US learning quite explicitly that one of the geniuses of the American system, a key factor in its dramatic success compared to other countries, and a competitive advantage, was its bankruptcy system that allowed people to try things; put in best efforts; but in the worst case scenario get a fresh start.

Getting rid of that was insane and I worry about its long term consequences. US entrepreneurs already face additional risks versus their overseas counterparts - like lack of a healthcare system not tied to employers - and taking away a major structural advantage they had is almost certainly going to have a detrimental effect.
I grew up in rural Alaska. I routinely carried firearms for protection from wildlife from a fairly young age.
I believe it was a surprise AMA, so no heads up to Reddit team.
I'd be grateful for an invitation, too. My email is in my "about" section. Feel free to peruse my comments here to see if you think I'd add any useful perspective. (I say this without reviewing my recent comments first, but my impression is that I generally say relevant things...) Thanks.
The benefits of being a tech startup mentor. by GetViable |
wow, in all honesty... I am guessing 50% for language-specific syntax issues. But I usually know exactly what I am searching for. For issues where I am stuck, about 10-15%
Ask HN: What's the best programming language for a "business guy" to learn?
Ask HN: How did you choose/discover your startup idea?
Right but on a sample size of countries such regional differences will be ironed out. Neighborhood trends within a country are not the same as national trends being referred to. The larger point remains - a fifty percent higher level of self-employed with incorporated businesses (which is a fairly good marker for entrepreneurship unless you can suggest a better one) in the country with the safety net of health insurance.
You sir....get an award for "Mega Cojones".
I was referring to implementing this behavior on OS X specifically. To get this behavior, you have to deliberately avoid the usual way of throwing up a modal window in order to have that modal window stay visible and on top when the application is deactivated. I don't even have to dig up the source code to know that it reads like an ugly hack that messes with the raw values of an enumerated constant. Most likely, it's in the Quartz backend for GTK, and somebody only implemented half the abstraction for window management.
Google Chrome on Win 7, 64 bit - all pages report "not found". Also behind a companies squid proxy if that might have something to do with it.

Make it work please! It's cool idea, good for showing some design changes without having to change anything in the original page, not even a detection if someone wants to see the new preview etc.
Photoshop is hardly a beacon of software done right. In my experience (been using Photoshop pretty much everyday since 1991) it has got considerably more bloated and unstable with each release, the exception perhaps being 5.5.

The benefit that Photoshop has is familiarity and Adobe's pricing structure is that of an abusive monopoly - they know they can charge as much as they do because they have a monopoly. This monopoly was earned in large part because early on, Photoshop was the most accessible app.round about 5.0 Adobe started to get sloppy.

I've started using Pixelmator for about half the image work I do on the Mac and IMHO it represents excellent value for money. It works like Photoshop used to do. It's lacking some feature, mainly the ability to work in colour channels, but for the price, it's hard to beat.
Because digital screens are rectangles and the native DOM elements are rectangles. And raw photos are rectangles. And the books and posters and signs and paintings that web designers emulate are rectangles.
How did you get into it, and do you have any resources for this? I've always been amazed with firearms from an engineering standpoint for the same reason internal combustion engines amaze me: we're harnessing explosions in a powerful, consistent way; so damn neat.

I'd really like to try my hand at building -- or at least restoring -- guns. Could always use a new hobby.
It sounds like he may have made his exit in front of the other candidates. I can see the company being frustrated by that as it would naturally be likely to make the other candidates view their potential new employer less favorably.

If he was certain that leaving early was the right thing to do, it would have been better to choose a moment when he could tell one of the interviewers quietly, and exit without causing a noticeable scene.
In defense of MatSE, you only took the course for non-majors (I assume). I assure you that it gets a lot more legit after that, much in the same way MechE gets more interesting once you move past statics.

To answer your question though, the model doesn't scale, but that's because the problem doesn't scale. We're talking about a bulk sample of metal made up of crystals that are, according to the old theory, too small to be stable. Once the crystals become larger, the old theory adequately describes their stability.
Leave Your Legacy
An inspirational video I made at Stanford with a couple friends. I hope you enjoy!
Designing and implementing security & privacy controls
No, this was not the case. My name is in my profile. He is, however, the first person who made the mistake of thinking it would help his cause to use it.
I stopped reading TechCrunch about a year ago. There seemed to be an increasing.number of junky articles that just didn't interest me. I don't miss what it became, but I do miss the old TechCrunch.
Rack Params Magic Even Got Stripe CTF Creators
For those who want to experiment with a (free) iPhone email app which does not allow you to write, reply or forward emails can take a look at Pigeonal. (disclaimer: I'm one of the developers).

The app scans your inbox(es) for ~200 domain names from services such as Github, Basecamp etc and groups all emails in boxes (pigeonholes), depicted by the service's icon.

You can tap each pigeonhole, scan the subjects and decide to 'archive all' or tap individual emails and mark them for 'follow up'.

That's all you can do. I'm personally not much distracted by reading emails, it's the writing part which pulls me out of my concentration and Pigeonal just about offers enough functionality to create follow-up tasks. Moreover, since the app only shows emails from a small list of domains the number of emails I have to process is relatively low.

The app is an experiment, your mileage may vary. We've developed it to see whether there is an alternative to the email inbox archetype. So far it's working for us, but it's far from perfect and I'm not as brave as the OP to completely ditch email from my iPhone.
I'm 18 years old. I'd consider myself politically indifferent, in part because I did research at an organization investigating lobbying and money.

No matter how much of a publicity stunt this was, though, I registered to vote today. Obama was pretty persuasive.
I would actually doubt the usefulness of minors in nearly any subject (holding 2 myself).
Nice explanation, if it's to facilitate upgrades I'm all for it!
I haven't noticed much of a difference between apt and rpm, but the one thing that keeps me on Debian and Ubuntu (versus other distributions or OS X) is the huge and properly maintained Debian software repository that has no competition.
matplotlib got me through my physics undergrad degree.

I didn't know about this man until today but I still feel a loss.
See, I'd like to think of it a bit differently. If you look at the consumer market Sony does separately, none of it really has much growth potential, even worse, most of it is in a dwindling position.

The thing is, Sony is in a bit of a unique position because of their combination of home electronics, game electronics and media. The question they should ask themselves is: What advantage do we have over our contenders when we combine those assets.
The fact that someone else thinks an email is urgent does not mean that I'll think it is.

And if it really is urgent, they can call me. Unless you're the kind of person who both sends an email and then immediately calls me about it. If you're that kind of person you quickly will be informed of how much I dislike that. If you persist, I'll take advantage of my freedom as a contractor to choose my own projects, and you'll soon not be a person that has any reason to interact with me.
This isn't really a significant development. Building serviceable firearms isn't especially difficult and hasn't been for a long time. See http://improguns.blogspot.com/ for some examples.

Ammunition is also fairly easy to make. Anyone with enough knowledge of chemistry to manufacture methamphetamine could also manufacture viable propellants and priming compounds. Casting and machining brass for cartridge cases is fairly easy. Casting lead bullets is even easier.

There's no practical way to keep this stuff out of the hands of criminals if there's a demand for it.
Thankfully I have managed to reject the requests from upper management to set me up with a Blackberry at various positions.

It pains me to see friends receiving emails on their BB whilst at the pub after work and fretting over the email they've just been 'pushed'.
Back when reddit only had about 10 categories, I made a joke about how I wouldn't be surprised to see an xkcd category, because of how frequently the comics posted. When that actually happened, I rolled my eyes and wondered what these idiot admins had done, segregating the community into separate, yet very similar categories. In hindsight, it has shown itself to be a great idea, and by far reddit's greatest strength. I'm glad you guys have plans to highlight that to people.
Ask HN: Can app be downloadable while submitted to Mac store for review?
While an app is submitted to Mac Appstore for review (first version), is it okay to have it downloadable for testing?
Eh, pretty sure ICC is still being used on anything that could effect interstate commerce. See asinine backyard wheat ruling from just a few back.
In Defense of OAuth 2.0
>>hold down Ctrl+Alt keys and click-and-drag the selection. This makes the original place empty. A floating selection is created. The required key commands may differ on your system, look in the status bar to see if another combination is specified; for example, Shift+Ctrl+Alt.

This does not function on mac as far as i know. You cannot even manually do it in the selection options.
"You shouldn't be allowed to write a library for use by other people until you have ten years of programming under your belt. If you think you know better and ignore this rule, then one day you will come to realize the mental suffering that you have inflicted upon others, and you will have to live with that knowledge for the rest of your life."

stunning.
look up inbox zero and use mutt. i did try mail act-on for apple mail. but again you can always run mutt on a shell somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

A lot of the problems discussed in the article and the thread here were solved many many years ago.

But yes, as a friend of mine put it: "The interesting thing about email is that it gives us the impression that we're actually working, while we really are not."
I find the "cat foo | .." in the beginning and "| cat > bar" at the end form more regular.

While iterating on a command line, it keeps things uniform, rather than switching between "sort foo" and "tai64nlocal < foo" and "ffmpeg -i foo", by which I mean: different programs take their input in different ways. You can normalize by making each take standard input, and feed the chain with a "cat".
Yes, that is exactly the problem we want to solve. Thanks Niraj!
For 1, Reddit has a fuzzing algorithm on large vote counts, so voting bots don't know how much influence they're having. Refresh the page and you'd probably see a different number of up and down, but the same "net".
To be complete though, we also need a "what not to do" list. in many cases re. funding that is equally important, IMO.
I use it on commercial work sometimes, and I would agree that gimp is usability hell, but functionally very useful for a number of things.

I keep meaning to go and have a look at the source to see how easy it would be to reskin, because it could be a nice cross platform starting point for anyone wanting to make a really nice image editor, that doesn't ape photoshop, but goes for the less technical users while still having a mass of good functionality. Y'know, for the kids ;)
Valideer: Pythonic validation and adaptation
Steve Ballmer could offer some valuable advice to Dick on what's actually important.[1]

On a more serious note, am I the only one who suspects they're not satisfied with feed ads and want to drive more impressions on Twitter.com?

--

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE
Around here, the most common technique for biking in the rain is: use an umbrella.

Only takes one hand, after all... you still have your other hand free to use a cellphone or hold a cigarette.... :]
I understand quite well the idea of company that isn't focused simply on revenue growth. I've been running one for the past 7 years. And I'm interested in reading about others. But articles of that type are case studies, not news, which is why I explicitly distinguished between them.
As a YC founder, whose YC startup got torn apart on HN, I find no truth to this statement.
We're building a service that will allow you to schedule a number of "email moments" a day: incoming messages are temporarily queued until those moments and the sender is notified when you're checking your mail next time. We're looking for test users at http://kukoo.com
So your complaint is the POTUS should've come to the AMA with more time to spend, hunted down "better" questions to answer, and then spent more time thoroughly answering the questions.

You clearly are not reading the subtext of what (s)he's saying, or you're willfully ignoring it to appear steadfast in your dissent: it has been admitted and acknowledged that the POTUS had a limited amount of time with his interactions on Reddit. The complaint is that the answers given were reiterations of campaign points and political tent-poles.

The President took a unique and unheralded opportunity to interact with the voting population in a highly interactive way, and demonstrated a familiar ability among politicians to respond to a question without actually answering it. As citizens and by proxy a community that represents a base of voters likely to support a president keen on engaging his constituents on topics they're overtly concerned about, and responding to them in a fashion they find most accessible: he failed on both fronts. This is frustrating. This is our problem with Mr. Obama's appearance tonight.

"Time", which you seem so fixated on is not our problem with the President's appearance this evening; his lack of at least initiating a dialog by providing politically safe answers is.

Here, cliff notes-as it appears painfully obvious you have not even read the AMA itself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451556
What do you want to make?
Printable lenses seem like a good thing. I don't think the others are serious concerns:

An object that is dangerous just sitting inside a 3D printer seems unlikely in the near future. It would be very difficult to print something that has stored mechanical or chemical energy. Even printing something that's sharp would be a challenge. Obscene objects are not really more problematic than subjecting unwilling viewers to on-screen pornography.

The toy industry exploits peer pressure in children to make parents buy overpriced junk. It deserves to be disrupted.

Printing keys is not likely to be a significant attack vector. Most keyed locks can be easily defeated with picks or bump keys, and new keys require only a file to manufacture today. A grinder or Dremel tool makes it as quick as a 3D printer would be. Getting a good image of the key to be copied is a bigger challenge than being able to make a new key of any shape.

Printing plates are not the most significant barrier to counterfeiting modern banknotes. Other security features are harder to duplicate, and a 3D printer is unlikely to help.
No, because everything along these lines that appears on the front page gets killed. It's one of the major flaws of HN imo - a huge lack of transparency.
How to Get Early Customers to Respond to Your Cold Emails
exactly what i did. maybe it was changed in ML.
I had the pleasure to work with John some a while ago when I was part of the Sage Math project.

Very saddened to hear this news :(

(Just donated. I'd urge anyone who has benefited from John's amazing Matplotlib project to considering donating to help his family).
Web2py 2.0 is out
Riddle | | RubySourceRubySource
I used PostGIS in proper GIS scenarios and it was faring quite well. The advantage of PostGIS is that it supports all the index types you need directly. And been around awhile, in a good sense.
This opinion about CS minor is not controversial. We are almost unanimous to say it is stupid.

AFAIK, automated pretty formatter is not controversial.
I wonder if your opinion about pure functional language is controversial.

Thank you for bringing to light some real controversy. In particular the old one about compiler optimisation. See for reference http://books.google.fr/books?id=6kHs4s-79bkC&pg=PA43&...