skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Just goes to show that there is usually a huge difference between what we think of historical figures and how they actually were.

It shows that people are complicated and multifaceted. While we have a tendency to either laud or vilify figures (with nothing in between), in reality, historical figures can be both "good" and "bad" in different aspects of their lives... just like the rest of us.

My favorite example of this is Helen Keller[1]. Almost nobody these days knows anything about Helen Keller beyond the age of 18 - they know that learned to communicate despite being deaf and blind, but the nearly 70 years of her life after that are almost buried in history.

Which is a shame, because Helen Keller would have been a notable figure in her own right even if it weren't for her disability[2].

But because she was a member of the official Socialist party, we can't use her story as an inspirational lesson and mention that she held political beliefs that we may or may not agree with. Instead have to make a judgement call as to whether her "good" or her "bad[3]" side is more important to teach, and then forget about the rest.

Worse, this principle is applied in reverse to dehumanize people whom history has classified as villains. The result is that our history is filled with monochromatic caricatures, and we forget that, were we to see the complete picture, our modern-day "villains" may not look so different (for better or for worse!)

[1] I believe Loewen talks about this in his excellent book Lies My Teacher Told Me (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller#Political_activiti...

[2] Naturally, this presumes that you either disagree with socialist politics or think that history lessons should be politically neutral, which is the predominant belief in the USA.
For those interested in this they might also check out underscores theme by Automattic[1].

Bones is an okay starter but if feels like a more thrown together bundling of the latest and greatest of the web development trends (320andup, sass/less, html5boilerplate) than a functional starter theme. But at least it follows the wordpress coding guidelines unlike roots[2].

Question for those who understand open source licenses can this theme even be licensed under the WTFPL considering that it uses wordpress provided functions like (get_header and wp_enqueue_styles)?

[1]: https://github.com/Automattic/_s or http://underscores.me/

[2]: http://www.rootstheme.com/
Desmos Graphing Calculator - Great HTML5 app with smart UI for all math lovers
I thought it was interesting that I saw the full price flash on the screen briefly before I saw my discounted price so I looked into the JS and sure enough they are swapping out offer urls that look like this: /special_offer/49NOV2012/?json=true
You might find my previous comment about this topic interesting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4088162

Here is the code section that you might find interesting in tr_backend_draw.cpp. The comments start at line 1439:

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-3-BFG/blob/master/neo/re...
Something I have always wondered is why deans and other administrators make such great salaries relative to professors. My hunch is that it is simply because they can, but I feel like I must be missing something. Does anyone know if these tough jobs in ways I don't appreciate?
Google-Branded Touch Chromebook Planned
At least Point D seems reasonable, he's only 75% cold?
Most apps seem to "support" surrogate pairs by simply not being aware of them at all.

Good on the V8 developers for recognizing these conditions that their code didn't fully handle and refusing to muddle on through with broken processing.
While I agree in spirit (see my post http://interfacelab.com/is-this-really-the-future-of-magazin... ) his assumptions are pretty wrong. Most of these magazine apps are built on one of three platforms, the biggest of which comes from Adobe. Almost all of these platforms are tied into Adobe inDesign as the authoring tool. Why hire actual iOS developers when your designers can export out of the tool they use to design the actual magazine?

So what he really is complaining about is Adobe's shitty platform. Good luck getting old paper to change their current workflows.

I work on and maintain a few non-magazine apps for a very large publisher and it's a very laborious approval process that moves at a snails pace. Thank god for day rates and retainerships.
In no way do I blame the money, but it certainly made it easier to make bad decisions. A better way to put it would be that it made us make decisions that shouldn't have had to be made that early.

"no idea" doesn't literally mean we had "no idea", we had plenty of ideas. We just hadn't settled on one yet.
They're facets of the same problem. I shouldn't routinely be dealing with either surrogates or combining marks; unless I have a specific reason, it's only an opportunity to make a mistake that hardly anyone knows how to troubleshoot. "n̈" should be an indivisible string of length one until I need to ask how it would actually be encoded in UTF-16 or whatever.
Sorry but the app doesnt feel native at all. it is slow ,doesnt feel snappy on the last iphone. And you can easily tell the difference on touch event ,there is an noticiable lag, and nobody cant do anything about it. Web apps are good for basic lob apps. But for anything more complicated , going native is the way to go.
i just bought 3 for me whole family lol for $49 dollars each. i was provided $69, $99, $199 and $299 multiple times before they gave me $49 dollars.
Just got 3 tests for $49 each. Thanks!
Hmm, semantics? Dont' know:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/idiotic

1. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of an idiot.
2. senselessly foolish or stupid: an idiotic remark.

Either way, not a wonderful statement to make. But, that's OK. I can take the criticism, even if misplaced. I am far more interested in how you would answer my questions. Reminding you that we are talking about what might constitute a reasonable choice for someone to learn as their very first programming language, the questions were:

What would you suggest someone should start with?
Why?
How is it better than starting with C?

And I'll add:

What will they learn that they cannot learn with C?
How would learning C as their first language hinder them?
Why is C an idiotic first choice?
There won't be duties as it's under $1000. I did realise after that it included the return postage.
I see lots of people commenting how Einstein was a jerk, etc. But somehow, I think that list (if it's real) just shows that he wanted order (and control?) in everything he did, which doesn't resonate as bad to me. We have no idea what kind of relationship he had with his wife, so I think it is unfair to judge him like that solely based on that list, more so, because his wife accepted it!
Probably because wages of administrators are compared to what they could earn in business, and professors have no such leverage.
Sigh. I don't know what to say. I admire OP's desire to dive into OS development but I hope he has the perseverance to carry it through, because he has a long way to fill in the huge gaps in his knowledge to build an OS.
Run in your JavaScript console:

document.cookie = 'optimizelyBuckets=' + escape('{"145285685":"145865258"}') + '; domain=.23andme.com'; document.location.reload(true);

The other values I found:

69 -> escape('{"145285685":"145818631"}')
99 -> escape('{"145285685":"145866265"}')
149 -> escape('{"145285685":"145285686"}')
299 -> escape('{"145285685":"145891045"}')

Edit: Actually, it looks like this no longer works. They may have noticed and stopped the A/B test.

You can empty the cart and run

window.$.ajax({url:'/special_offer/49NOV2012/?json=true'})

Then click add to cart and once in your cart it will be $49.

I'm going to have to start looking at more websites' Optimizely codes!
Doesn't seem to work anymore. The price I get is $299.
I didn't say what the OP wanted to do was trivial, but rather that bringing up some sort of OS on a desktop platform is trivial.
This is ridiculous. While signing up, I got this message (I hate my state sometimes...):

"""
23andMe is currently unable to process saliva samples collected in or mailed from the state of New York. The New York Department of Health considers our Personal Genome Service a test requiring a lab license and direct physician involvement.

If you or the recipient of the Spit Kit intend to collect your sample and mail it from outside the state of New York, please select the "Ship to New York" button below. Upon receipt of your Spit Kit, you or the Spit Kit recipient will be required to affirm under penalty of law that the sample for the Spit Kit has not been collected in or mailed from the state of New York."""
@Dramatize: but the US might charge them import duties when you send it back. Not sure if the US has a duty-free allowance like we do.
Hey! And you'll always get the physics engine built-in for free! :-P
Alternatively, you can simply delete cookies and refresh. This is likely going to be impractical if you don't have a cookie-management extension.

I use this:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/edit-this-cookie/f...
I could have guessed this would turn into a massive flamefest, but c'mon people. So what if he's green? This will be a learning experience for him. And I'll hazard that in the end, even if he never ends up writing a whole OS from scratch, that he will have gained more valuable low level experience than the vast majority of those here.
A lot of them are just idiots who post stupid stuff.
Hellbanning stops them from creating new accounts.

Of course there are still plenty of them who seem like decent users who got off on the wrong foot.
Tablets are waiting for their Movable Type
A lot of the really high up positions are heavily involved in fundraising, and the argument there is that "If person X can increase our endowment by just 1% more than person Y, it justifies the huge salary"
Talk is also cheap when you're talking about somebody else not knowing what they're doing.
The Moon’s Youngest Crater
Discovery of organisms in –13C waters may inform search for life on other worlds
I wonder how many of those teams were single-founder projects that took on partners to apply. It is surely very rare for organic teams to experience this sort of drama in three months, no? Or is YC really just that stressful?
Ask HN: Large Django Application Design
We are trying to build an "enterprise" application with Django 1.4. This will be an application that may be both SaaS and custom install, and as previous incarnations (in PHP/ZF) have struggled with both process management (business) and technological constraints (stemming from same, as well as bad code begetting bad code), I am looking to see "how to do it right".

By this I mean, amongst other things, what are good "large" Django applications? What blogs and documentation provide good best practices? I know The Django Book is being actively worked on, but is currently quite dated.

I want to be able to figure out (as best as possible - the application will of course be organic and evolve, and I want a balance between "future-proof" and over-engineered YAGNI code) a lot of the questions that, together, will aid the construction of a good bedrock for an application, things like "how best to manage application configuration", "module structure" and the like.

How about me? Consider me someone who is diving in head-first, for better or worse, with substantial experience with the existing codebase, who suggested the rewrite, and who feels ninety per cent of the way there, and is in search of some "glue", moreso than a "magic recipe".

Effectively, in a single question: if you have worked on a large scale Django application (and for now, Django it is, though I have certainly explored Flask and others), what is the sage advice you'd give someone who needs to plan, and do, the same, to increase the chance of success?
Just picked mine up for $49
Nate Silver finds his Next Frontier
I am holding my breath to learn what language you are going to propose, as a first language, that teaches all of those things.
I just bought the kit for Australia - it was $49 + $74 shipping, the updates are _not_ included - in fact, I think they stopped offering these.

The value used to be that you get the newest research linked to your SNPs, i.e., if there's a new publication on one of your variations you would have been notified.
The only mistake in that was the word "near". It's purely ridiculous, since that method has nothing to do with security honestly saying.
If that were true then there would only be one wheel design in all of human history.
Keep deleting your cookies OR restart your Firefox in private mode, I had to restart about 7 times until I got the $49 offer.
Nope. Someone posted a link above[1] to what I assume is a 23andme FAQ response, stating that they have a Certificate of Confidentiality from the (US) government.

According to this NIH page on said certificates[2], it sounds like even if they were served a subpoena for the information, 23andme could still tell them to fuck off.

[1] https://customercare.23andme.com/entries/21262376-how-is-the...

[2] http://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/coc/background.htm
I'm currently a student at a public university, where we just finished a multi-million dollar renovation of our five-story library. Previously all floors were study space for students, and you could almost always find study space, even during finals. The fourth floor is now exclusively administrative office space, and things are getting cramped.

This story has played out over and over in various corners of the school. An office would spring up in a dorm here or there. The IT department wanted to expand one of their offices into our heavily-used English tutoring center. It's an epidemic, as far as I'm concerned...
Do you really think that all DRM users are idiots who believe in perfect DRM security?

Gosh, people who buy locks must be stupid, because anybody with a crowbar can simply pry the door out of its frame.

DRM deters people from copying content willy-nilly. You might argue about the quantitative results, but it does something, and as long as it has more value than it costs, people will pay for DRM.
Steve Jobs rejected Dropbox and called it a mere feature, not a business, and then Apple created there own version.

Airbnb ... again, it's just a small business at best.

If I could seed my startup idea with $80k I would bankroll the damn thing myself using my own savings, instead of selling my company down the river on a convertible note for a paltry sum. Yes, I have $80k to blow because I have real experience making real money. No, 80k does not come anywhere close to the investment needed to seed a real business.
Agnes Bojaxhiu aka mother theresa is one of the worst media scams out there. Portrayed as a saint, she was actually an extremist religious nutjob. I happen to have visited her hospice in Calcutta and was shocked to see its condition given the significant amount of donations being sent. Victims (not patients, they were poor uneducated rural folk being collected for display) were denied painkillers and modern medication because Agnes believed in the theology of suffering. A quick google will show you that Agnes managed to get most of the donations funnelled back to the Vatican, hence her beatification by the pope. I found the whole thing utterly disgusting and will never trust generic media representations of individuals.
I bet there is a better way to securely share files.
I think it's like most jobs: compensation isn't related to how tough the work is, but about the abundance of people who can fill those positions. Administrators earn more because there are relatively few people qualified and willing to do the work. If university compensation was based on the difficulty of the work, adjunct and assistant professors would make far more than they do.
Ah, the football coach argument.
Elon Musk Wants to Build 80,000-Person Mars Colony
Build it and they might come. With hardware, the best way to convince someone to buy or fund your gizmo is to have them play with it.
What do you hate about online shopping?
I believe that MySQL is one such tool. In recent versions you can work around it by asking for the encoding "utf8mb4" instead of "utf8", but I think they have to be quite recent.

So yes, another way in which MySQL is quite clearly broken.
Argh, "And, yes, you do need two separate types of time keepers" - No, you must establish a quorum of time keepers. Almost everyone's advice when setting up high reliability time keeping systems is to use 1 clock, or >3. 2 is no better than 1.
Dilbert: Random Number Generator (2001)
The only problem here is the review process, you probably can sell customized binaries, but still have to wait
Tanenbaum was right about what? The infamous microkernel debate? Did the experience from writing your own OS solidify that belief?

I think Linus' argument was basically that microkernels require distributed algorithms, and distributed algorithms are more complex.

But maybe in a multicore world that argument is weakened. I like this paper: "Your computer is a distributed system already, why isn't your OS?"

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=945420933600220038...
[x]Only show important updates from this person.

This has solved all my problems with annoying updates
Thank you for finding that, Karunamon.

It is nice that their website includes reassuring language. But really, how stable is that policy in the face of changing corporate owners, changing political administration (romney?), changing supreme court justices, changing geopolitics?

Genome data is of permanent importance. To be able to, even in 50 years, look back at genome records of today, will still be very valuable (especially when combined with genealogy records...).

Look at privacy trends, storage trends, and trends in govt accountability and transparency. Make no mistake, once our sequences are in corporate databases, there is no going back.

I look forward to user-driven cryptographic genome tools, which will allow us to inspect our own genomes, while maintaining personal control over our entire genome (ie., never having to hand the whole sequence over to a commercial or govt entity).
New Project: Nashorn – Lightweight High-Performance JavaScript Runtime in Java
You don't need AI to make the assertion literally false. the pentagon isn't giving up on the concept of "collateral damage".
> Why do you want to count Unicode characters?

Because, there are other countries which use more than English language?

I fucking hate you ascii-centric ignorant morons sometimes, you know, for example

- display welcome message character by character fro left to right

- Extract the first character because it's always the surname

- catch two non-ascii keyword and find its index in a string

In the first example, should I just put byte by byte, which displays as garbage, and suddenly three bytes become a recognizable character?
Experience (and marriage) has taught me that people need their own space. Dont cross those lines. Dont push. Focus on giving them what they want. Making them happy. A happy team is more productive than an angry team. Plus when people feel appreciated and respected, they put in more effort. In terms of financials, always err on their side. I'd rather lose a couple of bucks (even if its a couple thousand) than lose a valuable partner. It really all boils down to how mature everyone involved is. Most of the stupid fights in the stratup world are due to a lot of young immature people who never learned how to share toys.
BeOS was written in C++ and compiled with gcc 2. For all intends and purposes the whole operating system was native code, certainly not running over a VM.
English professors maybe not, but for a lot of departments professors have good business options that should give them similar leverage, and it doesn't seem to help them at all.

Also at Stanford my impression is that a lot of the deans and provosts and whatnot are just professors that have been "promoted" (in the salary sense, at least), so I think in some cases they are even being pulled from the same pool of people.
They offer a full exome sequencing for $999 in a pilot right now, so for a full genome 30x sequencing for 50 bucks you might have to sleep a decade or so
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=responsibilities+dean
The script was amazing.
I don't know about random, but "SECURE" would have been more secure.
Indeed it is cheaper to just get this at $49 than upgrade for $249. This is a great way to upgrade to the V3 chip.

You get more SNPs if you have V2 and they add in V3, so I'll call them and see if I can link it to my account.

Here are the SNP counts per chip version combo:

V2 only: 576,000 SNPs
V3 only: 967,000 SNPs
V2 + V3 (upgraded): 996,000 SNPs
Sunrise.im
Ugh! this is just a puff from heroku. Yes, I'm sure it's a great tech, but we have no idea of whether it is accurate or not. This piece has no analysis, no comparisons, and certainly no independence or objectivity.
A couple of reasons why it makes sense for V8 and other vendors to use UCS2:

- The spec says UCS2 or UTF16. Those are the only options.

- UCS2 allows random access to characters, UTF-16 does not.

- Remember how the JS engines were fighting for speed on arbitrary benchmarks, and nobody cared about anything else for 5 years? UCS2 helps string benchmarks be fast!

- Changing from UCS2 to UTF-16 might "break the web", something browser vendors hate (and so do web developers)

- Java was UCS2. Then Java 5 changed to UTF-16. Why didn't JS change to UTF-16? Because a Java VM only has to run one program at once! In JS, you can't specify a version, an encoding, and one engine has to run everything on the web. No migration path to other encodings!
Researchers Make Flexible, Low-Voltage Circuits Using Nanocrystals
Anytime you have communications problems just do the following. Tell them "Hey $name, I'm really focused on getting this project done the way you want it. But I seem to have misunderstood some past points. Could you refresh my understanding of the goals we have to work towards? Thanks!"

They will either:

- Ask you what your doubts/issues are.

- Make up their minds as to what the next step is.

* Or fire you. :) Either way, you dont want to work with people who you cannot communicate with.
> hanging around with the wrong folks could result in you dying in a battlefield via remote drone attack is more than a little disturbing

Being a minor (16 years old) and a US citizen (born in Denver) won't protect you from "having the wrong father", as Abdulrahman_al-Aulaqi can tell you[1].

It's not reassuring at all to me to know that a human, rather than a robot, is making the decision, as long as I don't know (or trust) the criteria that that human is using.

[1] (Except he can't, because he was assassinated last year, far from any "battlefield" - or even any country that the US is at war with, for that matter.)
Effects of Typography on Reader Mood and Productivity
But there is a big difference. If someone breaks a lock they get into your house, but if someone breaks DRM, DRM-less copies of that movie will be on the pirate bay within a day. Then users copy the DRM-less copies willy-nilly.

Directly controlling the distribution of digital artifacts is nearly impossible.