skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't believe Michael Forbes hasn't been mentioned yet.

His story was famously shown in the documentary 'You've Been Trumped' -- various tactics are used to get Forbes and others to relinquish their property so it can be used for Donald Trump's golf resort (including cutting water lines, and piling the surroundings of their houses with sand effectively ruining the view).

The documentary is definitely worth watching, here's a trailer: http://vimeo.com/45591729
What was the article's subject?
Just read this last night and was glad to see it already on HN. While I don't necessarily agree with everything in the article, it's important to get an extremely alternative view every now and then!

Of course, the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle. But without the crazies pushing out front, the middle never moves!
The Google search app is out, and kicks ass.
Burst out laughing at this!
It's such a neatly produced package, light+LAMP. I have some simple ideas for ambient monitoring and a power outage mode for the battery light... but mostly I think it would be amazing to see what a community around this would come up with!
Can you define what a computing device is, per say?
I've taken some mathematics and logic courses at a university level, and the thing I took from those experiences and apply everyday is the reasoning and proof structuring. Struggling through and coming to something of an understanding of the concepts of analysis (calculus) and algebra were a pivotal point in my intellectual development. As somebody for whom math has never come easily (and still doesn't), but for whom the beauty and wonder of it all was still enchanting, I'd heartily encourage any and everyone to learn some higher maths in detail. The specific results may not always be applicable day to day, but the way of thinking will stay with you. Good luck!!
So how come in a meeting room at a conference, with maybe 200 people actively using multiple wireless devices plus WiFi access points broadcasting, nobody's computers are affected? Are avionics really that sensitive to environmental RF interference?
Yeah, there's always an angle with these guys.

Trust what they say publicly as far as you can throw them... And only trust what they say privately if you have a gun to their head.
The "GUI" is in the kernel (gdi32.ll, user32.dll, comdlg32.dll, etc). What you see at the CTRL+ALT+DEL screen is actually the "SYSTEM" user's desktop.

You are, however, technically correct, but finding arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities in the "GUI" these days is not a trivial task. And if you've done that, you can do anything you want to the system.

As Raymond Chen (Windows API developer) would say "that would involve being on the other side of this airtight hatchway".
There are plenty. The analysis of basic algorithms involve math (e.g. QuickSort, binary search, etc). Programming a user friendly website can involve advanced mathematics, for example you want to recommend to your users a product that might interest them (Collaborative Filtering)
PKP is an xz-based losslessly compressed image format
Oh yes, I probably got a third of my ~70GB of MP3's via Audiogalaxy back in the day. I loved that you could see what was available even if there weren't any users who had it that were online. You could queue them up and they would download whenever someone who had them signed on. You could find the most obscure stuff and you would eventually get it. Sometimes I'd even do random things like queuing up all the (non-religious) songs with Jesus in the title. Got some really bizarre songs that way...
While an interesting read, it struck me as an odd, we've taken the wrong fork, nostalgia piece.

If you look at the very early days of computing, you tended to find three types of degree/backgrounds: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Philosophy. The double E is obvious: building the kit. The other two, the potentially Left Brained or Right Brained approach to programming. All three of them have one thing in common: A structured, _logical_ approach to solving problems.

If there is anything to lament, it is that we still have the tug of war between left and right brain approaches. The reality is that one size, indeed, does not fit all. We should accept that and move on to getting the work appropriately done.
How Curiosity took a self-portrait on Mars
"Despite the aesthetic virtues ascribed to functional programming, I find the preceding solutions to be more beautiful than their recursive counterparts. They run in constant (rather than linear) time, and they are easily adapted to work with non-integer inputs."

Isn't this wrong? I don't think pow is computed in constant time.
> * Apple Maps caches a much larger area offline, while Google Maps is basically useless without a network connection

Google Maps for Android has the possibility of caching e.g. a whole city offline, which is great for travelling (since we haven't solved roaming yet). It might be a Labs feature. The iOS client has been lagging so bad, I figured they would have fixed a lot in the new version.
When I worked at Lotus, we got a request from a prison for old books, manuals for inmates. So you could try that. Unless they're on penetration testing or something ;-)
Developing a Lua VM in JavaScript
1.) Yes, I think so. 2.) Don't worry, it has been done before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1259695

(That particular instance doesn't work anymore, though)
Dubai Internet Conference: UN group favors greater gov't roles
Ironically, though, FP is perhaps the worst programming paradigm for actually performing numerical computations.
Researchers Develop Underwater Sensor That May Help Robots Swim Like Fish
The iPod, maybe?
This just baffles me:

"The chairman, Mohammed Nasser Al Ghanim, says there was no vote, but the proposal was adopted by consensus after taking the "temperature of the room.""
Read the "Findings of Fact" and "Conclusions of Law" documents from that case. The big missing piece is a monopoly in the relevant market.

http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm

http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f218600/218633.htm
Generate color palette from image using clustering algo in Clojure
Actually 2013 and onwards, they see a very solid growth in market share and number of devices for MSFT, and AAPL. They see a significant slow down of the Android train. I wish the analyst writes his name next to Goldman Sachs, because if this holds true he ll be a grand visionary.

Au contraire, I would put around 2016, Windows go down below 10% and 10% for OS/X+iOS. Android would go above 60% and 20% would go to other categories of underdog innovations or rebirths. (Glass computing, ChromeOS, Tizen/Bada/Joll/WebOS, FirefoxOS/Ubuntu/KDE/Linuxes, Card-size computing/Rasperry PI etc, and finally YC-accelerated HW innovations.
Here you go: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bourke.gli... (though Android not iOS)
I'm in Pittsburgh and also have never had a problem with Apple Maps. It fails at a "fuzzy search" like "shadyside" (a neighborhood in Pittsburgh), but if you give it a specific address or type the correct name of a place it works fine. Fuzzy search is admittedly why Gmaps is still way better.
It's far from smooth on iPhone 4 and 3GS
The trick with defeating cold boot attacks (aka freezing the RAM) is easily mitigated by a system administrator that forces the system to hibernate instead of sleep (aka write volatile memory to disk).

It can also be mitigated by requiring not just the TPM chip, but also a PIN, PASSCODE, or a PASSCODE that is cycled ever 60 seconds or so (on something like an RSA fob).

This presumes the system has a TPM chip, or a similar mechanism that can provide an original point for a trusted boot.
This was one of the first things I noticed as well. It seems like such basic functionality (the maps app in iOS had this since at least iOS3), I was amazed to find you can't edit them in the app (thankfully you can see @andrewaylett's comment for a way to do it).

There are several serious bugs in the saved locations functionality.
I found that if you 'pin' a location (say a building) on the map (by pressing and holding) it will show the address. But when you 'save' it, the details of the address get 'lost' when looking at your search history. I ended up with multiple entries in my list titled 'Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan' (which is the equivalent of, say, 'Manhatten, New York, USA'. Clicking each one still takes you to the correct location on the map, but they are impossible to tell apart in the list. Also then when using the 'directions' widget on the map and picking the destination, these saved locations appeared as longitude/latitude!
I wonder if these issues are specific to Japan? I submitted feedback about this.

That being said, overall the app is quite impressive, and I'm sure it will improve.
Why the artificial distinction between yellow cabs and black cars in NYC?
Show HN: Sweebr - an online POS register
Zee TV
Depends on how much stress I have on my plate. On a good week, 8 hours, on a bad week, closer 4. I seem to operate as a real human being in either case though.
The other day I had a "near miss" in traffic because somebody passed a garbage truck at the top of a hill -- they were coming at me in my lane and forced me into the shoulder.

This wasn't an "accident" because we never collided, never called the cops and never made an insurance claim. The situation worked out OK because I did what I was trained to do and because I was lucky. If I was distracted by my phone or if there was a pedestrian in the shoulder, things could have been different.

Things like this happen in coding all the time.

For instance I was looking at some code where frequently there is a list of items and there's also some flag that is set when the list of items is not empty. It does something like

if(listNotEmpty) {
startProcess;
foreach(element in list NotEmpty) ...
endProcess;
}

this pattern was used perhaps 15 times in a very large class. This code can be correct when everything is done right, but this kind of code is risky when it comes time to maintain it.

Why? Because now there's an entanglement between two variables. Someday there will be a time when somebody changes things and the list is empty and the flag isn't set or vice versa. The correctness of the code depends on some other code that is far away being correct, so it's brittle.

This kind of muddy thinking also seems to spread. In another part of the code there is list A and list B and in the early development of the system it turned out that A had elements or B had element but not both. So when it came time to do something with list B, it got processed if A was not empty.

Again, this might be correct, but it's still technical debt because in the future A and B might not be mutually exclusive. On top of that, it puts a huge cognitive load on any reader of the program because when they look at the place where B is being processed, they've got to think about the relationship with A.
Samsung Galaxy S II Video: Email and Messaging
I don't think that's true. The TSA is unpopular, but it's seen as a necessary evil by most Americans. The average person has thoroughly bought into the government's propaganda that security theater serves some functional purposes.
If this is true (and I don't really believe it) then all electronic devices should be banned from the cabin and carried in the checked luggage AND flight critical systems should be designed to be robust against such interference in case there is a terrorist attack using a hidden electronic device designed to operate at many times the power.
Is this really what the Goldman brand is worth these days? Not that I disagree with you, but you have to wonder: given that they rely so heavily on their name, this level of distrust must be affecting them. Nobody wants to do business with the mob if you can avoid it.
Playn - Cross platform game library for N≥5 platforms - Google Project Hosting
1,000,000?! Anyone born into an upper middle class family, whose parents paid for college, tutoring, etc, has a $100k or more head start over someone born into a bottom 40% family. These aren't 1 in a million people. Maybe 1 in 10.
> iPhone and iPod touch owners download Google’s new Maps title to complement or even replace Apple’s own

Google for the directions, Apple for the lulz
Most probably iPods. They were selling like hot cakes in those years.
Finally! I get back my street view and my public transit schedule. Welcome back!
A customer review:
"Boring UI, slow data and seems pretty feature-free. I'll stick with Apple Maps."

This strikes me as funny and suspicious.
Use Service to Simplify Run Loops - Ruby
Or perhaps based on the US, where commuter rail and rapid transit everywhere provide very different levels of service.
Apple maps is great if you want to drive yourself into the ocean.
Sweet, so in a couple more years I'll finally be able to see that down arrow! :)
3 Steps To Breaking Into Any Industry
Original discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=389727

Discussion about bd's javascript reimplementation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392036
How to create a calendar view in CSS3
This simply shows how bad apple's decision was to switch to their own solution before it was ready.
Check lights for shorts and trouble spots
Math seems extremely important to me as a programmer, even for CRUD apps.

Let's say you graduated HS and slept through your algebra classes. Now a few years later you're a programmer with pretty much no math skills other than what you've learned in elementary school.

Math seems to teach you one of the most fundamental and useful things about programming. The ability to reduce a problem from something that is complex into something that is not complex.

I've only gotten a taste of some basic algebra after taking some online CS courses and really, coming into it with a background of "embarrassingly poor math skills" I can really say that it has changed my life for the better.

I'm still clueless when it comes to some algebra but I find myself looking at problems and being able to solve them much easier now and this is only after a few weeks of programming related courses that happen to use algebra on some occasions.

The math isn't what made it easier. It's applying the same things to solve math problems to programming.
I think that it can be implemented in constant time for floating point numbers. For integers I know that the exponentiation by squaring takes O(log(n))
Hands-On With the Tesla Model S 4.0
Funnily enough, I was reminiscing about AudioGalaxy over lunch today. Probably my favourite (or at least most fondly remembered) music download service - I used to love being able to queue up a load of music (and there was loads of really rare stuff on there) and then leave the client running while you were out of the house (in the dial up days - couldn't tie up the home phone line for too long otherwise) and see what it had downloaded for you when you got back in - quite often some little gem you'd queued up months ago and forgotten all about, but the one user with it had finally come back online!

The only place I can think of which a comparable selection of rarities (at least for electronic music) is Soulseek, but AG seemed more reliable, and the split client/web concept was brilliant. I'd pay a decent amount for a legal version of it, if they could somehow get record labels to agree that any file (including white labels, bootlegs etc) could be shared and they'd just get a cut of whatever they could match up to a label/artist. Not holding my breath!
Most people (read: buyers) don't view it in the same way as you, though, which is why it's dangerous. People feel cheated if they pay more than someone else for the same product.
I think many floating point functions (e.g. sin, cosine) are implemented using Pade rational approximations - basically, the ratio of two polynomials. (http://www.dattalo.com/technical/theory/sinewave.html)

This usually gives enough accuracy for the purposes of floating point.

However, I'm not sure if "pow" can be usefully implemented this way. I am guessing no, because pow grows faster than any polynomial eventually...

edit: Hmm, pow at least looks linear here: http://www.netlib.org/fdlibm/e_pow.c
per SE
Researchers uncover Tor-powered Skynet botnet
Rapid7 researchers have recently unearthed an unusual piece of malware that turned out to be crucial to the formation of an elusive botnet - dubbed Skynet by the researchers - whose existence has been documented in a very popular Reddit "I Am A" thread.
It has only recently become clear in the U.S. that federal law permits the use of eminent domain to help private parties do economic development. Have a read through the Supreme Court case Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), which is a totally approachable decision ( http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US... ).

Civil libertarians were not thrilled by Kelo and some have pushed for state or local laws that prohibit the use of eminent domain for private parties to engage in economic development. So, taking someone's land to build a shopping center may not be legal in some cities or states.

See also the Lost Liberty Hotel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Liberty_Hotel), a proposed hotel to be built on David Souter's land as a better source of economic development for the community than his house.

For a good time, drive to New London some time and check out the land that was under dispute in Kelo. It's still a sad, empty, vacant lot — although the Supreme Court allowed a developer to seize the land, they ended up deciding not to develop.
It's A Mean And Wicked World - Time Forgot (To Change My Heart) [Daniel Romano]
I used the new Google Maps for my GPS on the way to work this morning to do a side by side comparison with my regular GPS software from Navigon. A couple of things I love:

1). It connects to my car stereo via the phone bluetooth profile so even though my car can't stream music by bluetooth, I can still get my turn-by-turn directions. My Navigon uses the whichever audio profile is used for music, so I only get the turn-by-turn over the car stereo if I'm plugged in by wire. Kudos Google, that's a really nice touch. Thank you.

2). I like the way it displays the streetview when you arrive at your destination so you can see where you should be. Another great touch.

And a couple of things I really don't like at all:

1). "In 300 metres...[pregnant pause]... turn left".

2). I don't like that it doesn't provide the street names in the audible turn by turn directions. So in cases where you have two streets in close proximity, unless you actually look at the screen, you're left guessing which is the correct one.
Not that I think this is accurate by any stretch, but what would account for the massive jump in "Other" in 2005. Smart phones like Nokia before iPhone + Android?
Police Taser Chinese Woman After She Tried To Buy Too Many iPhones
The article didn't claim that FORTRAN or C are required for these calculations. Rather, It lamented that the prevailing attitude of Lisp practitioners was to eschew the knowledge behind those calculations.
"Software Wars" fundraiser: a movie about OSS, Linux, control of information
"If left without a meaningful competitor in tablets, we believe Apple's dominant share of tablets will act as an anchor that pulls its smartphone share ... steadily upward over time"

Hm, that's not how anchors typically work.
New Chip Integrates Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, NFC, FM Radio. Coming To iPhone?
In the UK we have a law allowing "the government" to force people to sell their property (for a fair price).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_purchase_order

Does China not have this?
Math is a very broad field. The point of this article is that applied math is generally not done in functional programming, and is not typically part of computer science research (more often happens as dedicated applied math research).

Types, logic, and category theory are the sort of things the author thinks that functional programming people concern themselves with, and he is raising the point that these mathematical concepts only help people create better languages and write safer code, not do "useful" things like weather/weapon simulations, solve optimization problems, or image/video processing.
Augmented Reality as an effective tool in Education
For many people in poor countries, the smartphone is their computer. If nothing else, these people use smartphones to log in to Facebook and use it. That's a computer.
Someone needs to convince joel to start writing again.
> I couldn't find one; mathematics had its discrete side, and made use of programs in many areas, but was uninterested in the theory of computation; computer science was mostly java training (I chose mathematics).

I don't understand why schools do that. There is so much to know and learn in computer science course, yet somehow learning j2ee takes precedence above everything else.
The UK is not exactly alone in driving on the left : Nations like Japan, India and Indonesia keep it company (among the 76 [0])...

One explanation that always made sense to me is that when driving a manual/stick-shift car, taking your dominant hand (statistically the right hand) off the steering wheel for a secondary task like changing gear is more dangerous... YMMV

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-hand_traffic#Ju...
According to the site, the project is pretty much dead. Shame, as I agree with the OP that Apple hardware is better than anything an Android manufacturer has turned out - or is interested in turning out. I can't remember the last time I saw an Android phone under 4.3" big.
You are correct that Windows 95 did not have the security model of NT, but administrators could limit what users were allowed to do in the Windows shell. If I logged in with my user account I could not play the game I wanted to play.

"You can restrict what users are allowed to do from the desktop and what they are allowed to configure using Control Panel." - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc751094.aspx
"Programmers make horrible designers..."

Correction: Most programmers make terrible designers. I've met and worked with some that can handle both well and a few that are exceptional in many realms technical and design.

Now the "designer" that glued the Metro interface on to Windows 8 should stick to smartphones. I'm about to write shim to make the OS boot into a CLI interface, so I can avoid the "Tiles" and get somework done.
oh, sorry - above is wrong if red is derived from rebol. sorry again.
I wonder how this thing with Apple App Store works, and why some items appear in US store only, and in other (Croatian, and i see from comments Uruguay and Turkey) hours or even days later.
Mathematica borrows heavily from FP and is well known for its computational performance. And yes, a lot of its guts are imperative, but most of the internal libraries that encapsulate the actual mathematical concepts are written in Mathematica itself.
Details on how they implemented it:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/JBsCrDEVyVE/FIyZ...
Possibly, I don't know much about the engines behind THQ's games really. To become just an engine company requires a well rounded and adaptable engine. There's probably some market for a superb niche engine but that is a weak position to put yourself in as a company.

They might be reinventing their engine so often because they can't get a good future-resistant engine out of it.
Startup Realities - Infographic
GoogleTranslate Your Thoughts for Everyone
How to Ask Someone if They're A Decision Maker
2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world
Still, the article says "Microsoft is in danger of becoming a small player in today's global computing market". Which is not backed up by the data provided by the article. Unless we have the raw numbers, it could well be that Microsoft has been growing.

The fact that the total share of MS has been shrinking doesn't necessarily mean that MS is a small player in the global market.
New York, here- it's pretty bad. Improved from initial launch, but still far, far worse than Google.