skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's got upsides and downsides.

Downside: like you say, it'll cause second guessing. It might be a genuinely great idea but no one is sure how it's going to spin out in the real world, which could create a business of conservative ideas.

Upside: Yahoo needs new things to get the attention back to "Yahoo has released a new product, and it does X" rather than "Yahoo hasn't done anything and we think they're sucky".

It depends if the 100 million users is a fast and firm thing, if it's a case of get it done in 6 months or aim for 100 million users it could be more interesting. Lots of crazy idea being done quickly.
New android sliding game
Hi all,
I'm new Android developer and I recently publish my first game.
It's a classic sliding game with realistic look.
Check my blog for all the details. :)
What makes you think it's not there already?
This work is based on a fairly old research paper. Since then, there has been significant progress on detecting dogs and cats more reliably.

Two prominent groups that are working on it are Andrew Zisserman's group at Oxford: www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/publications/2012/parkhi12a/parkhi12a.pdf

And Peter Belhumeur's group at Columbia University, who'll be presenting a new paper on detecting and recognizing dog breeds at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) in 2 weeks. [Peter was my PhD advisor]

More generally, many people in computer vision are getting excited about "fine-grained visual categorization," which is about classifying things at roughly the "species" level. This is in contrast to a lot of the previous computer vision literature, which either focused on generic categories (e.g., people vs animal vs car vs rocket-propelled-grenade) or specific object/instance recognition (e.g., face recognition).
So which textbooks will this include? Do they need the publishers' permission to redistribute their existing work under a CC BY license?
I am behind Notch on this.

A strategic move for Microsoft might be:

(1) Build an eco-system around their app store by providing benefits to users through it (some natural and others artificial).

(2) Impose an increasing level of control over what developers on their system can do.

And then once this power-relationship is established, you do this to maximize profit:

(3) Lock out non app-store members from developing.

(4) Take rightful dictatorial control over the developers in their market. What they can sell, how they promote themselves, what prices they can sell at, whether the money goes directly to them, etc.

(5) Ensure the stable dominance of the big app development studios by negotiating them preferential agreements.

Control over the means of distribution is power. This is the natural progression of people optimising for wealth.
For a good overview of methodology and terminology, start here http://www.idiap.ch/~rodrig/publications/pdf/rodrig-thesis-2...
DHS to test unmanned aircraft for variety of applications
Buddhist statue acquired by Nazis is space rock
Emergence = unpredictability
Of course theunixbeard would be the only one to get it.
Your stats are inline with what I expected. Thanks.

What I was actually interested in was PubNub stats to see how such service can help with apps like yours and to help in figuring out how much it'll cost.
Did Airbnb and Dropbox fit PG's growth model?
What kind of CEO do you want to be?
Hi, just want to say I really enjoyed reading all of your comments on this thread. Thanks for taking the time to write them.
I train with weights, and I they certainly do not weigh the same on different days. Some days are better than others, a log helps keep me on track.

Of course that's me. It might work for you though. In my coaching experience I find, that most people are not objective enough (or have a good enough memory) to work like that.

Tracking calories on paper vs in your head is a similar objective/subjective mess for most people. The mind is very good at deceiving itself.
Startup Precog says big data doesn’t need to be so complex
Are the musicians before us better? Are the artists before us better? Who's to say?

Better questions are..has the best song already been written? the best painting already created?

Sure, now we have more tools and low barrier to entry, that should only increase the likelihood of the best talent coming in to this field. I'm excited to see what can be created as a result.
Well that's even worse because it means that the artists, writers, etc. have simply moved out of the city.
Wouldn't the more obvious conclusion be that Adobe believed 10 years ago that the way to make money was to cater to those that don't want to program and just want something that "works" and now they've decided that there is a large enough user base of people that are willing to pay for tools to help with real programming?

I don't think these products would have been at all successful 5 or 10 years ago, the web "wasn't ready".

> Adobe has been steadily building steam in this area for years, but they have never marketed their efforts so well as they are today.

If Adobe have been building these products for years that would mean they haven't been "not understanding developers": they just didn't guess 5 years in advance this is where the web would be. Silly contradiction.
It's called a pull quote, and yes, it's pretty standard for long magazine articles and their webby counterparts as an aid to skimming.
Zeus for Rails2.3 . Could be very helpful...
I suspect a major factor is that the fee, when paid by the tenant, acts as a filter to shut out less desirable (i.e. poor) tenants and those who might not stay long. This is possible because demand vastly outstrips supply.

At least it's like that here in Germany - the broker fees for good apartments are almost always paid by tenants. Any apartment where this is not the case has probably major downsides. In other cities, where the supply/demand situation is different, broker fees are paid by the owners and the broker's added value is marketing (i.e. finding good tenants at all)
Yup, one can already see some of the books appearing on the cove of men that love to say Arrr a lot ;)
But not the one I'm looking for ;(
I am hugely in favor of this move. It's a tiny first step to decreasing the cost of education and further opening educational access to truly everyone.

But, if I may indulge in a cynical moment, I note that one of the touted benefits of CC-BY in the article is that commercial companies can develop tutorials from these tax-payer funded books.

What if the tutorials then become the required texts? Are there any safeguards from this? If not, it's inevitable that it will be done.
CIA.VC is dead (apparently forever)
Probably a very good move in that with talent, sometimes you have to box it in so it can break out. Hopefully this blanket rule appraoch will restore focus.
Hopefully not a silly question, but would it make sense to mine bitcoins with something like this, or are GPUs still more effective?
Curious if any fellow HN'ers know when these textbooks would be made available. Dont see any info on the linked page.
You can actually still install things from outside the store, but it's not as easy as clicking on it. With people clicking everything in browsers in general, this measure was sadly probably necessary.
Closest look yet at a distant black hole
I Am Not A Programmer
Would be nice to have a third option, that incorporates the country limitations into the purchasing process and warns you when buying the app that it has no data/support/whatever for your country. At least then those of us who do travel frequently and want to be able to use these apps when we do will have that option.
Element 113 found at last?
Google obeys Brazilian court order, blocks YouTube political video
And it's also quite trivial to uninstall the amazon lens. This is the sort of control things like iOS don't give you, and Win8 is stupidly moving in that direction.
Any valuable insights into this new facebook app? Possible to violate any facebook terms and conditions?
I work for the California Digital Library, and most of my work involves using or writing open source code; and this establishes the California Open Source Digital Library.

Ironically, we launched a textbook site (only for UC) this week http://licensed.cdlib.org
Well if that helps you feel more comfortable with your iPhone purchase then more power to you.

Regardless, in a year or so hopefully iOS users will start to see some more Android influence. There's a lot of catching up to do right now.
Religion of a Word
It said some random part of my tshirt was a cat. Then I dragged a picture of a cat, and it said 0 cats. :(
1979 calling.

> Documentation was better back when.

When I started programming properly ('84, '85?) it began with being issued the full shelf of IBM 3060 manuals - and when I mean shelf, I mean 3 feet. All my reference material was for the version I was using - relevant, complete, practival. We used to say RTFM and we meant it, you had an M to RTF.

Lots of people hate on the Erlang documentation http://www.erlang.org/doc/ but I love 'em, proper shelf, proper docos.

I am trying to write some HTML5/Javascript sound stuff and help is picking overcooked vegetables out of Google Soup - ech!
How about Chrome Firefox running on Linux...?
Trailing whitespace on GitHub is only a problem if your editors treat it differently across the team and it generates a herd of rampaging git farts that obscures your commit history - that is a real problem that you do need to solve.
It's a style of presentation that's very common in magazine articles.

The big boxes are there to give an idea of the most interesting, most important, or most attention-grabbing things in the article, for rapid skimming. (In magazines, I think they're there to grab your attention as you leaf through trying to find something worth reading. That doesn't apply in quite the same way to an article on the web.)

So the intended use is that (1) you skim quickly over the article, looking only at the stuff in the boxes, to decide whether it's worth reading, and/or (2) you read the article normally, basically ignoring the boxes.
It doesn't matter if 'average Joe' knows about Jelly Bean specifically, it's that he's now more aware than ever of an alternative to the iPhone; which allows him to be more critical of his purchases.

Next thing you know average Joe is researching Android phones and watching youtube videos about Jelly Bean.
PouchDB is CouchDB for the Browser
Quoting from the linked text of SB 1052

"The council shall establish a competitive request for proposal process in which faculty members, publishers, and other interested parties may apply for funds to produce the 50 high-quality, affordable, digital open source textbooks and related materials in 2013.

Nothing in this subdivision shall be construed to limit or
restrict the council from developing or acquiring, either for a charge or for free, existing high-quality digital open source textbooks and related materials that otherwise meet the specifications of this section."

So it looks like next year there will be a RFP for funds for developing the texts (assuming they don't use existing digital open source texts). And anyone (including folks here) could apply to that RFP, though I assume people used to the process will have a distinct advantage.

An earlier section of the bill establishes a committee to determine exactly which 50 books will be developed.
There seems to be a new one of these each week. Here's my attempt from around a year ago: http://keithcirkel.co.uk/jwerty/
As an interviewer how would you prove during a trial that by asking these kind of questions you were not intending to discriminate the interviewee?
Hackers Breached Adobe Server in Order to Sign Their Malware
A bit sad if that's “not particularly powerful” for animating a few letters on a freaking web page ... :-)
How to Build a Windmill, Part 2: Parts, Nuts, Bolts and Blades
Exactly. I, on the other hand, live in Italy, where solar panels work pretty well.
Reminds me of this resignation letter.. apparently it's fictional, I remembered it being genuine, but the point it raises is valid I believe: http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-hereby-resign
Correct but the article would have been a better read if the author didn't put the exact same words he used in the article in the quote and than place the quote behind the original text.
Shopigram, a disrupting way to sell online from you iPhone
The reason for why it is not a widespread practice is probably because you scare off way too many potential employees. I know I would consider ending the interview instantly if asked to hand over any passwords. And for sure I would not take any job there.

Scholarships and universities is where there might be a case for the law. I would like to see some real examples first though where current law does not already stops this for scholarships/universities.
I'm going to guess,

* Not being able to ship Minecraft in the Win8 store because it uses Java and Java doesn't (yet?) follow the rules required for the store. Store apps require you to use approved APIs, where as Java, being older, calls all kinds of stuff not allowed by store apps.

* Not being able to provide updates anytime you want as each update requires approval.

* Not being able to give away free copies of paid apps (need codes from MS)

* Not being able to bundle with other apps like the humble bundles as the store provides no way to bundle apps.

* Not being able to resell licenses (not sure if Minecraft supports that. If not they could decide to in the future. But not if they're in the Win8 store)

I'm sure others can list more things you can't do on the W8 store that you can do on an open platform.
Thumbs up for PlayFramework, our web app dropifi.com is built on java/play. Play combines the awesomeness of the Java JVM with the simplicity of a "rails like framework" into one framework.
How can you possibly know all the factors involved?
4 Lies That Unworthy SEO Professionals Tell
Thanks, very interesting. And some useful links.

I wrote my masters dissertation on hypermedia back in 1991, and I remember that references to AWMT kept appearing in papers I was reading. When I read it I could see how it related to hypermedia as it existed in the early nineties, but 1945 seemed rather distant and the paper seemed to stand on its own, rather than being the start of something. I haven't thought about it since, but it now seems obvious that this was because of my lack of knowledge at the time. I wasn't aware then of Englebart's work, for example.

I re-read Literary Machines only last year, but had completely forgotten that Nelson included AWMT in it. I may pull it off the bookshelf again tonight.
Ah, thats good. If his users want to use the default Metro platform to launch and play the game, then they can right?. Oh wait...
This app makes it really easy to publish something you want to sell online. It seems like the friction is very low on that side of the transaction. Now, it doesn't seem to make the buying part much easier. I'm wondering how this will evolve.
It is almost certainly illegal in the European Union.

The EU Data Protection (i.e. privacy) law means that if you're collecting personal information (in any way, not just computer), then you have to:

(a) Explain why you are asking for it, and you have to give a legitimate reason why you want to know it. You cannot store information you cannot explain why you need it

(b) You then have to store the personal information in a secure manner. So you can just ask for access to someone's Facebook account and then share it around the office.

(c) The personal data requested must be proportionate to what you want to do. I doubt "tell us everything about your social life" is acceptable for just hiring a person for a job.

(there might be other reasons why this is against data protection law, but I can't think of any off the top of my head)

Not to mention the much stronger employee rights (e.g. you cannot not hire someone based on family status, sexuality, etc.), and it would be much harder to prove you didn't use that information if you accessed it. (Employee protection is stronger in EU, none of this "at will" crap)
Movie Pirates Handed Jail Sentences, Ordered To Pay 1.1 Million Euros
A good step forward, however it would be better to have a generic data protection/privacy law, (like EU Data Protection Directive) that goes beyond just "employeers asking for social media passwords"
I just get the loading icon spinning forever.
When the second factor is a "rich" device, such as a smart phone, attaching transaction information to the interaction would be a trivial - instead of texting "The code is 1234", text "Transfer $100 to account 9876" or "Login attempt from IP 1.2.3.4, FooCom Inc, Springfield, Oregon, USA.", followed by "If correct, enter code 1234. If not, DO NOT enter the code and contact us at .. "
Too many subheadings, stopped reading
This times a million. Microsoft, OpenBSD and Golang are the only things I've found that produce good quality extensive reference documentation these days that I can take offline.

Python documentation, while extensive, is crappy.

I still miss my Sun Ultra enterprise 2. That was documented to bits.
The book is hard to get hold of now. There are used copies on Amazon, but the prices are stupidly high. I bought a dead-tree edition from Eastgate Systems [1] a few years ago at a reasonable price, but it seems to be out of stock now.

[1] http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/LiteraryMachines.html
The problem is: what if it becomes non-optional in the future? That would be very much in Microsoft's interest, and they have a myriad ways to help it become reality without outright making it mandatory and risking another antitrust case.
I believe he's right, though - I've heard that Mode 7, and specifically the fact that it could simulate a 3D perspective with that effect, was a selling point of the SNES over the Genesis/Megadrive to developers (that, and its higher number of colors). I admittedly haven't played around with Mode 7 much myself.

Apparently Wikipedia has a nice article on it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_7
You don't need to location AppX, the Android Intent system (Android being the only consumer mobile platform with an NFC implementation at the moment) can respond to the data in the NFC tag and open the appropriate app.

I'm not claiming it's frictionless, but just that there's less friction than a QR code.
Hipstertechnoauthenticity
"GMail took 3 years from prototype to launch"

Apparently it was available internally http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail

It certainly does not take 3 years to produce GMail, if they had the focus.
Compiler design has an interesting example of how you don't need to be wizardly to do interesting things anymore.

Jack Crenshaw's series of articles is an interesting example of this from an era that's already bygone (his example was a compiler written in Turbo Pascal directly generating Motorola 68000 assembly) but is close to our own time in many ways that count. For example, he emphasizes the fast turnaround time you get when your compiler is running on a PC instead of a mainframe across campus.

Specifically, his little digression in the eighth part is on-topic here:

http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/tutor8.txt

He specifically mentions the multi-pass design common to early compilers (63 passes for a compiler written for the IBM 1401!) as being down to having to fit the compiler into limited RAM. Similarly, Crenshaw's compiler relies on the existence of a fairly capacious stack to allow the parser to be recursive; on a 1950s-era mainframe without a stack, or a 1960s-era minicomputer where procedure calls were not re-entrant, you'd be left to do a lot more bookkeeping by hand.

Then you have the massive emphasis on error detection and reporting forced on programmers by the slow turnaround inherent in batch systems: You can't just die at the first error with a one-line message if it'll take two weeks to run the program again; soldiering on and verbosely reporting every step was the only way to get the most out of your precious computer time.

And, of course, less-optimized code is easier (and faster!) to generate, but can only be justified if your machine is fast enough the optimizations aren't actually needed. tcc, the tiny C compiler, is a modern incarnation of this idea; it compiles fast enough you can throw the result of the compilation away and run the compiler every time, like you do in Perl or Ruby.

And he mentions standardization: His compiler can only handle grammars you can express cleanly in BNF, which is okay because those kinds of grammars are dominant now anyway. Kinda hard to predict that ahead of time, though.

http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/
MyVR (YC W12) raises $1.4M to attack the vacation rental industry
> For me, however, no matter how many new or interesting projects I would begin working on, the question that would ultimately appear in my mind would be, “Why are you doing this?”

This is not meant to be critical or in any way superior, but shortly after acquiring my first programmable calculator in the early 1970s and extending to the present, I have no doubt about why I write programs -- programming works in a world where nearly nothing else does.

Governments don't work. Religions don't work. Relationships don't work. Philosophy doesn't work. And psychology certainly doesn't work -- it's a field with more self-deluding, self-important frauds per square meter than any I can think of.

But programming works -- if you become skilled at it, you may end up writing real solutions to real problems that people find useful. I get calls every day from people who have problems they could easily solve if only they knew how to program. For example, today I got an e-mail from someone who needed to compute the relationship between sensor height and volume in an underground storage tank that (a) had an unknown shape and size, and (b) had also been deformed by overhead truck traffic over decades. I solved the problem for him, using a little math knowledge and some simple programming.

Programming is to modern times what literacy was to the Middle Ages -- it puts you in the enviable position of having an essential skill, one people simply can't do without.

> I Am Not A Programmer

I am a programmer. Looking through my notebooks from the 1960s, I realize I was a programmer before I had a way to gain access to a computer -- I kept trying to solve problems algorithmically, years before I had a chance to write a real algorithm or see it executed.

I think back to the early 19th century, the time of Charles Babbage (difference engine) and Ada Lovelace (the first computer programmer), and I think how tragic that they spent their lives pining for access to something we take for granted.

This isn't to overvalue computers, only to say that having access to computers now seems like a natural right, a good thing, but being denied that access is like not being able to breathe. A few decades ago, almost no one realized this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lutus
That wasn't exactly my point. My point was that the bloatware/crapware problem in Windows has gotten so out of hand that MS had to do something and that something was to start tightening up who can ship software for the platform.

Of course there is nothing stopping people shipping crapware for Ubuntu or any Linux distro. The advantage of open source OSs is that you will always have a choice about how much "nannying" you want from the OS.
> Really, that's a complaint of yours? I actually which there was a setting to not let these install at all.

That comment made me very sad :(
Microsoft Excel File Format
Yes, you actually can. A start screen tile in Windows 8 can launch a both Metro and desktop apps.
The water, while scarce as part of the whole atmosphere, is concentrated within the sulphuric acid clouds (25% by volume). So if you can float a balloon with a pump at that altitude, you should be able to get water fast enough. Human or robotic explorers should be very safe in the cloud deck, with low ambient pressure and temperature. You may even be able to dissociate the hydrogen from the acid itself.
Git presentation for the novice and the semi-experience git user