skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Your criticisms are completely wrong": Stallman on software patents
As a professional non-lawyer, the problem I see in your comparison is that he requested the data, and was given it. He did not just enter the door. He knocked on the door, and a staff member opened it up for him.
Well, I said that, and today vWorker coincidentally emailed me to tell me it had been acquired by freelancer.com . Paying for the privilege of bidding sounds like a losing model, and I don't know if the free 10 bid plan is sufficient to do anything; on vWorker you always had to place a lot of bids before you could expect to win.
Not mentioned in this article, but the Android compatiblity might be a big thing.
Hopefully they take and stick to a stand that preinstalled carrier bloatware should be able to be uninstalled very easily and disallow always running services like on WP.

This is a happy medium between the hardline no-preinstalled-carrier-apps of iOS and the anything-goes Android phones.
Until Mozilla finally ships H.264 using <video> means you have to double-encode every single file, once using comparatively primitive tools, or use Flash as a fallback for Firefox and IE8. Until then, GIF files are much easier to work with.
Lawyers in reasonable activity shocker.

It'll never last.
How exactly does performance.now() stop one's execute button from taking a second to wake up? Measuring something does not make it faster.
the manual for the service in question is here - http://www.google.cl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=milflip&so... (from a google search of "milflip"). it seems to be a web site of charts (not terribly secret).
More details at:

CrowdStrike: http://blog.crowdstrike.com/2012/11/http-iframe-injecting-li...

Kaspersky: https://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193935/New_64_bit_Linu...

Both links were submitted to HN but didn't make the front page; I guess the third time's the charm?

CrowdStrike in particular concludes, "Based on the Tools, Techniques, and Procedures employed and some background information we cannot publicly disclose, a Russia-based attacker is likely. It remains an open question regarding how the attackers have gained the root privileges to install the rootkit. However, considering the code quality, a custom privilege escalation exploit seems very unlikely."
Remote controlling a Greenhouse with sensors
Guess what the most wanted christmas present will be...
Conservative in the sense of personal and societal responsibility and a strong adherence to tradition. Switzerland is the same way, very conservative by European measures, but by the way we (Americans) rate conservatism, not at all. All these countries are socially progressive with strong safety nets, but relatively liberal economically (again, in the real sense of "liberal"). I would think that the American/New world conservatism is the one that's messed up and twisting the meaning of these words.
I looked for a bug, and found https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600919.

The reason given (that I could find, it's a pretty verbose bug entry) is that WEBP doesn't support alpha. Sounds like a pretty weird reason to me, but I'm not a Mozilla developer.
Your editor seems pretty advanced and very responsive, it is much better than previous existing ones. (I know, there was a javascript one several years ago)
Deploying on N9 seems to be a real possibility. Currently they seem to be doing their development on N950, the qwerty-equipped sister model of N9 that never was brought to the market.
An Unexpected Error has Occurred
It's likely the parent has listed this way for brevity of the post, while still trying to show the potential for complexity, which I believe is the key point here and i would agree with it.

The dict-as-a-switch expression is common to python, but it can be masked as the parent has shown in larger examples.

I have no idea how we could apply static analysis techniques to a construct like this. To be honest I tend to avoid this approach on readability grounds. It could be cleaned up with a dict subclass but I think inlining the dict call mechanics is simpler to read, even if it produces larger code, leads to repetition and couples you to this approach (which would be a strong consideration in the case of writing a library - where this type of code is most prevelant).
Jolla has no clout. They can't take a stand on anything. The best they can do is build it into the system that all apps can be uninstalled and hope no one at the carrier brings it up.
Insane Chinese railway uses the 2.4GHz ISM band for its signaling
People don't like windmills because they are "ugly".

They don't like power-lines in the country side.

They certainly wouldn't like a 2.5M+ diameter tube running around. In London, 56% (IIRC) of the "Underground" is above ground, much of that above road level.
why is no one else commenting that it's 2012 and we still rely on passwords?
Bootmetro: Windows 8 Demo in HTML5
It's that time of year.
I could have been clearer in my original post. Let me clarify by addressing your points.

1. People get into planes and cars every day routinely because we have been using these technologies for decades. Any new technology that comes along will be held to much higher expectations of safety and quality than currently available modes of transport were at their inception. Understanding the risks and learning how to mitigate them to an acceptable level will take some time but we should be able to get some of the benefits of high speed transport earlier.

2. I'm not suggesting making an unsafe for humans version or a version with incompatible design goals. At some point on the path towards having a system that is acceptably safe for humans, there must be a system that is safe enough to send non-human cargo so why not take advantage of that? Having a real functional system would allow larger scale testing that could provide very useful feedback when trying to work out all the kinks before human passengers get on board.

3. Good point. I've got no idea of the scale of any impact on road usage that this would have. It may or may not be a compelling goal by itself, but as a side effect of implementing technology that is a necessary stepping stone to transporting people, it could at least be a nice bonus. Negative PR from job losses comes along with many disruptive technologies and is generally an area where there's lots of room for improvement.

Shipping may be invisible to most but people do notice the ease of access to goods, in their availability and price. The eventual possibility of cheaper same-day shipping over large distances sounds okay to me. This doesn't have the same direct impact to an individual as being able to travel that far or fast themselves but its a start. I might be going out on a limb here but it seems to me that having faster means of moving goods around at large scale should make much more efficient distribution of resources possible. That's something we can all benefit from.

I'd be disappointed if Elon did shy away from the goal of a new form of human transportation but no one has said that's what SpaceX are doing when they send unmanned capsules up to the ISS.

Replacing a rail freight line with a system that can potentially move physical goods at the scale of road freight at twice the speed of air freight, and doing it cheaply, could be Hyperloop's minimum viable product.
Yes, that's the one. Yes, I know the guy in question personally. He's an extremely well respected security specialist who unfortunately got the full kafkaesque treatment[1].

[1] - http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/008118.html
Sure, in certain situations like inside of a LAMBDA one might use a LABELS or LETREC (depending on whether you're in Lisp/Scheme land) form to close over the arguments that don't change between recursions... it's typical to use a short name since no one else will ever see it outside of the function definition.
SalesPortal a Finalist for 2012 Red Herring Top 100 Global Award
Fun, but also kind of a waste of precious helium.
Women Entrepreneurs Surge But Fight Their Demons
What happened to the Wired (magazine's) Icons Series?
They said that they are launching the series, published the first one (a pretty good interview with Marc Andreessen http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/) but seems that they have changed their mind and published the book instead.
yet another post that says: hackers/developers are male. clever ancient word brethren still excludes females.
It beats looking at a 6 laner highway! And you could burry it halfway and still have easy access.
The article says the rootkit works by inserting a line into /etc/rc.local. If my /etc/rc.local file looks OK, can I assume I haven’t been infected, or does the rootkit use more sophisticated means to hide its presence?
It has 16GB of on-board flash behind a flash/SATA interface chip, basically a 16GB SSD as parts on the board (more compact and cheaper than a replaceable 2.5" drive). That is plenty big for the OS, lots of programs, and your home directory as long as you don't go overboard with pictures and videos. Those should go "in the cloud" or on a SD card.
I could never get interested in F1 again after Senna's tragic death.
Please don't try to compare battery capacity by looking at just the current*time. That's an irrelevant number if the voltages aren't the same. The Chromebook has a 30Wh battery, which is twice the size of Nexus 7's.
bear in mind that weev's an awful poster child for this. he's a known internet professional troll and has made a lot of enemies in the past few years through his actions. ISTR he'd probably been under investigation for a while and this is what stuck.

as noted elsewhere in comments in an article about the event he laughed that what he was doing was probably illegal, suggesting knowledge of a likely crime.

i'm no fan of an absurd application of laws, but there have got to be better poster children for this sort of thing.
I feel sorry for the kids. I think the iPad is going to lose its lustre pretty fast. If you want great games, get a Wii U, not an iPad. If you want a great tablet, wait two years or so until the ecosystem is mature. Buying an iPad now is little better than buying a ticking clock of obsolescence.
I've made mistakes like this before so I tend to go over office pictures with a photo editor before I post them.
They differ all over sweden depending on how old you are, how long you've been working for and how much you earn.

In Stockholm you pay about 30% in income tax (add 20% if you earn more than 401 100 SEK annually, you earn about 360 000 SEK annually as a newly graduated MS CS student). However you also have another tax, the employment tax, which isn't displayed on your salary specification and is paid by your employer in addition to your salary. The employment tax is 31%. This makes the effective income tax about 81%...

The sales tax is 25% for most things.

We do have free public education, and healthcare for everyone under 18 (it's heavily subsidized after 18 but not free). The standard of our universities is not bad but i wouldn't call it world class as they try to make you believe... We do have problems with the earlier education. Stockholm doesn't have any problems with natural disasters or bombings but the housing situation is pretty crappy.
I just switched to mailgun because of your comment. Hopefully you will still be in touch with users after you get a lot bigger.
I am actually a bit sorry, I guess I was in a foul mood. I just couldn't relate much to that feeling of entitlement. I don't necessarily think that guy is going through a depression, though.

He did something, it failed. It is normal to be sad about that for a while. No special intervention might be necessary.
I do not believe the purpose of incarceration should ever be justice for the victim, it should be safety for other potential victims (either from the criminal, or from those who would see the crime go unpunished and decide they can do the same). That's the reason why we should put mentally insane criminals in mental institutions and not in jail, too; if everything works well, that should shield the lowest chance of more people being hurt.

If you want justice for the victim, punishing the perpetrator is not the best way to go about that. Making the criminal make reparations is a solution in some cases (notably not in murder).
Program Your Subconscious for Better, More Consistent Workouts 
A self hypnosis script written as a parable (you are a Viking warrior) and is designed to allow you to hypnotize yourself as you read: http://summonthewarrior.com/unleash-viking-power-and-intensity/
Buenos Aires is amazing and an awesome city, and everything is lined up so you can just go there and fly under the radar and work:

- easily renewable visas, just hop on a boat to Uruguay and come back the next day

- lots of short term accommodation

- lots of coworking places where you can get a couch, a desk, an office or whatever

- lots of convenience, like ordering food online at any hour through buenosairesdelivery.com, there's always a laundry place that'll wash and iron same or next day within a couple blocks, there's supermarkets and great restaurants everywhere

And the people are nice, the country is great, and the women are probably the most beautiful I've ever come across in my travels.
Second option is rather unlikely, given how many unknowns you would be solving against (geometry of the seen, geometry of the not seen, incident light sources, camera response curve etc) from comparatively very little data (a continuous signal that is sampled and heavily quantized to just 8 bits per channel).
Inside a James Bond villain lair that actually exists
It's actually a very clever way to seed access to their honeypot.
Clickable: http://summonthewarrior.com/unleash-viking-power-and-intensi...
As computer programs show us, the only way to remove ambiguity is to be incredibly specific. In practice, this would mean laws that are very, very long, and have to revised very frequently.

Why? Because you can't formalize away the fact that humans can't think of everything ahead of time. We make laws about your rights regarding messages you write on paper, then telegraphs and telephones and email come along. Either you try to interpret the law to cover them, or you revise your definitions of "messages" to include or exclude them.

In a "specify everything" system, everything that the courts currently interpret would have to be sent back to the legislature. The effect would depend on what you do with gray areas in court.

Option 1 would be "if a case is ambiguous, put it on hold until the legislature clarifies the law." That would clog up the courts and effectively merge the court and the legislature.

Option 2 would be "decide cases based strictly on existing law and let the legislature revise things for the next go round." That would create a lot of absurd outcomes, where a small loophole, with no ability to apply "common sense", means innocent people are convicted or guilty people are freed.
Can anyone let me know if these are legitimate? I have heard things about them in the past..
It's also pretty easy to have a one-letter convention for type-obvious situations. For example, if I name a variable s, f, i, or n, then I always know that it's a string, float, integer or integer, respectively. Beyond type information, I also always know that "n" is going convey the notion of a count.

Obviously again this is only reasonable if you only need to know type information, but if you're writing a function like

repeatString = (s, n) -> (s for i in [0...n]).join ''

then it's completely pointless to give those more verbose names. You wouldn't actually be conveying additional information until you got to an utterly ridiculous point like

repeatString = (stringThatWillBeRepeated, numberOfTimesToRepeatTheString) -> (stringThatWillBeRepeated for i in [0...numberOfTimesToRepeatTheString]).join ''
Pressurized tubes lost to fax machines as a way of delivering messages.
Paranoid schizophrenia combined with a high degree of intelligence and drug addiction is a really sad thing.
Your version of Romeo & Juliet might have worked out a lot better for all people involved, though.
GNOME to release official "classic mode" extensions
Whomever put that up will be breached, which is not a pleasant experience. The level of dressing down will be aligned with the sensitivity of the environment the account is used for. In the case of MilFLIP, it's an Internet facing resource so there's nothing too serious.

Milflip's an Internet-based web site for military flight information, primarily approach processes for different places. If it's the same milflip it won't be too serious. The user guide is publicly available online[1], as is the site.

[1] - https://www.aidu.mod.uk/Milflip/help.pdf
That's a risk you take with racing. It's taken a while but they've put a lot of safeguards in place. Over the years I've seen things which should have seriously injured drivers but they managed to walk away. Probably the worst thing I saw was when Felipe Massa got hit in the head with a suspension spring in 2009 during a race.
While it'd be nice to have it be fully upgradeable, I think the important thing to keep in mind here is $249.
Really? Really??

So, you're saying that's more dystopian than the thought of secret laws for 'national security', on top of a body of laws that already spans over 200,000 pages, whereby even with non-poorly-written laws, you're still likely breaking one every single day?

Because that's what we have now. So if those are my options, then shit yes, I will take mathematical certainty of the legality of my actions any day.
IE10 CSS Hacks
Shit that looks cool. Like Metro without all the ugly frumpy bits. Very sleek and futuristic, like the whole interface is sliding on sheets of tinted glass.
A sling would be much better for this: it's much smaller than a huge gun and also more flexible since the direction and elevation can be changed by altering the release point and axis.

Centripetal acceleration is a = v^2 / r so for 300 m/s (about mach 1) speeds, for 1 gee centripetal acceleration you'd need 9 km radius.
No fallback mode in GNOME 3.8, future of gnome-panel
Just wanted to say that I really love this editor. Really simple to quickly create diagrams. Great job!
I'm not sure where this database is from, but I'm in Union Square. This database only lists one murder last year (I remember more than that, but I can't find them right now). But just from the last 2 months:

Lower East Side: http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local/new_yor...

Union Square: http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-10-07/news/34309226_1_s...

Empire State: http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/24/justice/new-york-empire-state/...

(Correcting self: police only killed the killer; but wounded 9 others)

> You can't let random infrequent events worry you.

That exactly WAS my point. Despite how scare the situation in Israel looks, it is just as safe and just as random as NYC.

> Most of NYC is very safe, if you don't feel safe at 3am you're living in the wrong place.

Boerum Hill is a place a lot people I know don't feel safe at night. Is union square (where I live) the wrong place? I see people arrested (handcuffs at all) after mugging / snatching / sexual assaults on a monthly basis on my 5 block walk to work. (That's in the daytime).

It's not that I feel unsafe in NYC. But compared to Tel-Aviv, crime in NYC is rampant.

I previously lived in Curry Hill for a few years, and I did go down to jog in the neighborhood at 3am. But chelsea/union square does not feel as safe.
Good point. We could reduce some of those unknowns by getting the original photograph (would have camera data in its metadata), and we could assume at least some of the light sources in the ceiling and through windows.
Nice clear tablet-friendly design. Bold to go with text-only too. How is this news chosen and paraphrased though?
True that.

Now where is that quote (just for fun):

"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." - Phil Karlton
The Roller-Coaster That Is The Startup World
Wow this sounds safe... get some random drug that these people make at the end of it? Could be anything.
It is too late to edit the above. I was trying to convey irritation and even anger, but many seem to think I've gone over the edge to hostile or even threatening. I should written more carefully.

Posting while drunk is one thing. Posting angry while drunk is one thing. Veering near someone's personal space while drunk and angry, probably not such a good idea. I apologize for any alarm I caused.
Moreover it also seems to target a specific kernel version [which is used by the latest debian 4bit] , from the securelist [1] article:

'The malware module was specially designed for the kernel version 2.6.32-5-amd64, which happens to be the latest kernel used in 64-bit Debian Squeezy. The binary is more than 500k, but its size is due to the fact that it hasn't been stripped (i.e. it was compiled with the debugging information). Perhaps it's still in the development stage, because some of the functions don’t seem to be fully working or they are not fully implemented yet.'

1. https://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193935/New_64_bit_Linu...
Notwithstanding NASA's policy on lifetime astronaut exposure to radiation, if they can reduce exposure on a trip to Mars below a lethal dose, I don't think they'd have a problem finding people who were willing to sign a waiver on that policy.
Freelancer acquires vWorker
Interesting that there are still shrink-wrapped software packages that cost a lot. In fact you could buy a dedicated computer to run just that for some of the prices and it wouldn't make a big difference in cost.

Wonder what other apps like this are left that have a wide audience, excluding "enterprise" stuff? I guess Microsoft Office is one.
Well, I suppose its a matter of taste. I initially didn't know what I would need an iPad for when I received it. Nowadays, a year and a half later, I wouldn't change it for anything. Its amazing for checking emails when I wake up, for checking facebook right before bed. For porn its amazing, easiest thing to take to the bathroom, try taking your macbook pro hehe.
11 Simple Economic Lessons to Make You a Smarter Shopper on Black Friday
Lyapunov Exponents in Haskell: Part 1
Ask HN: What companies in London have unlimited holidays?
I've seen a growing number of US based companies offering very flexible working arrangements lately, and reporting excellent benefits to this policy.

Have these progressive ideas caught on over this side of the pond? Any companies doing this in London? Would anyone with experience (positive or negative) care to share?
I am pretty sure there was a time when the number of letters in a variable name had a significant impact on memory consumption. Hence the old 8 letters cap. edit: more like a C language-specific thing http://www2.its.strath.ac.uk/courses/c/subsection3_6_2.html
"Some old implementations of C only use the first 8 characters of a variable name."

In this specific example I hold the position that the problems doesn't come from small variable names but from a lack of good documentation. Short variable names aren't a problem per se.

For instance, most articles I read tend to define acronyms one time at the beginning of the corpus and then only use acronyms for a given idea/concept/reference.

Writing good documentation is hard.
Well, if you have news, but can't talk about it, you don't have any news. So why say anything about it at all - unless you want some PR?
Unless it was Prince William of course...
Scalar Type Hints for PHP 5.4
Congratulations on this, a great idea. Auction theory tells us the second price sealed bid auction (ebay system) is better than the English auction because it reveals true price intent far better than the English auction. http://www.econport.org/econport/request?page=man_auctions_e...

Is there a reason you went with the English auction?
Ray Kurzwiel And The Verticality Of The Silicon Valley Mind
How much do you love it? Do you think it's perfect? Do you like responding to emails on the iPad? What about reading HN? Do the thumb keyboards work for you? Do you like the autocorrection? Do you use a case or cover?