skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you give it directly to the JS working on that data by setting a var (var x = <%= @data.to_json %>;) or passing it in as a parameter to an initializing function call (APP.init(<%= @data.to_json %>);)? Edit: 1. I hope it's not user generated data. 2. The output in this case wouldn't need to be JSON syntax, it could be object literal notation, saving space on all those double quotes but I doubt you have a helper method available for that.
That chapter is very silly.

It compares British and German chemical companies and explains the difference with patent laws. But any company can build a chemical factory wherever the patent laws are favorsble. In reality the difference was cultural: Germans have had a kick-ass chemistry culture since alchemy turned into chemistry.

The chapter explains dye manufacturing changes with patent laws. To anyone with chemistry knowledge, this is ludicrous to the point of deliberate dishonesty. Dyes are embarrasingly easy to discover. If you take an existing dye structure and make a tiny chemical change, the new material is probably colorful and is not covered by the patent on the original dye.

In fact, a lot of early pharmaceutical work was done by taking chemical libraries from dye companies and screening their thousands of structures for biological activity.

The argument against patents on the basis of "me too" drugs is also ludicrous. The chapter actually says that patents are damaging because they give patients too many choices: there is no need to waste the money on having all those alternatives. In reality, there is huge variation between similar drugs. Many variants turn out to work better for different people, and some variants turn out to have unacceptable side effects. The only way to find out is to make a bunch of alternatives and try them all out.

The chapter becomes even more ludicrous by saying thst the COX-2 inhibitors are just a wasteful duplicate of cheap ibuprofen. Folks, ibuprofen and related drugs kill probably a few hundred thousand people a year with side effects. They're more dangerous than Al Qaeda. (Although by bad luck it turned out that the aCOX-2 inhibitors were worse, but in a different way.)

The chapter makes the absurd claim that patents hurt drug discovery and patients, ignoring the elephant in the room of generics manufacturers. If patents were so harmful to innovation, the the generic companies would be leading they way with new drugs. They are most emphatically NOT. Except for a few minor formulation chsnges, they do nothing of their own.
Harder does not necessarily imply less rewarding.
The line terminator is there, it just doesn't render as anything visible. (It's inserted directly as a unicode character, rather than it's HTML-escaped equivalent, so you won't even see it if you view source!)

However, if you take a hex dump of the page, it becomes quite apparent:

https://gist.github.com/4393892

Note: The file is UTF-8 encoded, so you'd be looking for E2 80 A8 instead of \u2028.
Secret Service farms out its Internet monitoring to a private British firm
Show HN: I just released a simple Ruby gem for searching Amazon
Notational Velocity, Adium, Textmate, Omnifocus, Bubble trouble, ...
There's an invisible-to-the eye unicode character in the string "owned," if you copy and paste the text from the website.

JSON is fine with these characters, but JavaScript is not.

For plain-jane JSON this is usually fine, since you're not just evaluating the JSON as JavaScript, but are running the returned data through a JSON parser. A properly-designed JSON parser will escape any JSON-valid-but-JavaScript-invalid characters.

JSONP, however, works differently and will use use the JavaScript parser. Womp womp.

The blog post also lists two other cases, although the first case -- parsing JSON using eval -- is both insecure and incorrect. I haven't seen people do that in ages and ages.
In my case, they can't solve my problem because they are only in Northern California. :(
I think this should be retitled to "Solve the problems you do not really have using a website that is as useless".
And Mark with his millions out of pocket to invest in a company he believes in. If they were votes, he wins.

Do the capitalist thing and stop giving them money if you hate it ohsomuch.
A stirring manifesto; right up there with Luther's theses, or Marx & Engels.
Grandparent got deleted, but it suggested that you may be interested in systems administration.

I was also a Math geek, and hadn't programmed a lick until sophomore year of college. I graduated with a CS degree. Programming was interesting, but I much more enjoyed the hardware aspect, so I went to IT. I'm different than my sysadmin coworkers because I can read source code, write decent chunks of code, use databases, etc. The CS background can be very helpful in figuring out why something works like it does, and then you can start optimizing from both sides (writing better software for the hardware, and fitting the right hardware to the software).
After searching for an easy to use gem for searching / looking up products on Amazon, the best solutions I found were Peddler [1] and Vacuum [2]. After looking into these gems, I found that both a) lacked documentation, and b) were not simple to use. In fact, they both seemed more like a starting point for simply making raw requests and retrieving raw responses.

Searching further, I was not able to uncover anything else even remotely usable for searching Amazon. This prompted me to start building my own solution.

I think my gem offers a much cleaner implementation, a friendly DSL, and although I have some work ahead of me to clean it up, is generally easier for the end user to search and look up products on Amazon.

I'd love feedback, and I'm definitely open to contributions from others. Thanks for looking!

[1] https://github.com/papercavalier/peddler
[2] https://github.com/hakanensari/vacuum/
Meh. Where are the tears for all the mom and pop ISPs who can't afford to blanked a city in fiber? How will they ever compete with market funded google? :)
Hi Chris Webb,
Thank you very much for sharing alternative apps.

I'm searching for a service which wouldn't be hosted or have a dns name in U.S., especially for mails, because subponeas are not controlled enough there. Is there any chance some YC start-up works on something similar?
Pretty sure that's what it says.
Given some basic analysis, I think it's quite safe to say that it'll be a failure.

Android and iOS are already extremely well entrenched, and they're where the money is for developers. There are other OSes, including Blackberry OS and various Windows versions, out there an actual phones already, too. At best, FirefoxOS is starting at 5th or 6th in line, although it's probably further back than that. That's a lot of catching up to do, especially given that it isn't really revolutionary or unique in any beneficial way.

Android and iOS give developers much more flexible environments to work with. To many experienced developers, especially those with a diverse background, being forced to use JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS is just not going to be seen as an advantage. If anything, it should be considered a reason not to target Firefox OS.

Things haven't been very bright for Mozilla lately, either. Firefox's usage is dropping, in favor of Chrome and even IE in some cases. This isn't surprising, given how it has been one mistake after another since Firefox 4. Thunderbird is on the rocks. Firefox for Mobile has been a complete failure. Aside from Bugzilla, which is looking pretty outdated these days, their other projects don't have much of a user base.

When one takes an impartial look at Firefox OS, there's just nothing compelling about it. There's no reason for its existence, and it doesn't really offer anything we couldn't already do. It seems to me to be more of a "we can do that, too!"-style project driven by vanity, rather than any real need. They'd be better off putting the effort toward improving Firefox on the desktop, which seems to be their only remotely viable project.
What kind of development does it need? It does what it's supposed to do, no?
Fair Equity program on SF Chronicle
The OP specifically stated that the reference to "Europe" typically refers to Western Europe which invalidates your comment. The thing about generalizing is a) it's generally accurate and b) it can be helpful. It has to be pretty egregiously wrong to be harmful.
Look sean, if you're really the guy who posts a lot about Scala, I do respect you and would like to read your writings, I've been a Scala fan since 2009. What you've said here is fucking ridiculous, as a Chinese, I live and grown up in China, never really saw anyone who does shit you said. The term "Wu Mao" we do use humorously to refer someone who'd root for the government without any reason. Can you fucking believe that, somebody who can speak both Chinese and English doesn't have job, but posting shits online for 50 cents? Can you fucking believe that anyone has the ability to successfully manage such kind of organization?
You guys are too stupid to insult.

I came across this news when I browsing this website today, and saw ridiculous comments. I tried to say what I saw and believed, now you idiots are thinking I am hired by government for 50 cents. I love my country even if it's running by single party, even it has many problems, that doesn't stop me from loving my country. You idiots just don't believe a Chinese love his own country.
Ask HN: Incremental database snapshots?
Hey Everyone,
For us its very easy to backup and restore a full database. It seems extremely hard to create snapshots of a database. I was wondering if anyone had any experience working on incremental database snapshots, that can later be applied in order to restore a full database. We use mysql most.

Thanks in advance
This is awesome. I would entirely freaking love to be chewed out like that. I feel like this is what it feels like to be set back on the right track by folks like a young and tempestuous Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc. Sure he's cranky, but even through his crankiness you can tell he is fundamentally right.

DHH needs to swear more.
Geography is only part of it.
ENOENT isn't a new error code. It's the standard errno value that indicates an attempt to access a nonexistent file or directory on all POSIX platforms.

The problem is that it was being misappropriated in a nonsensical way, returned by an ioctl call. ioctl can only be called on already-open file descriptors, so it makes no sense for it to complain that the file doesn't exist. If the file pointed to by the file descriptor didn't exist, the file descriptor wouldn't have been able to be opened in the first place (errno would have been set to ENOENT by the call to open).
Bill Dudney and I are organizing a conference for iOS app makers in San Francisco next month. It's unique because it's not being run by a platform company, a media company with a network of sponsors to satisfy, or a professional conference organizer. We're just two app developers with some ideas about how to make an event that's more productive for app developers like ourselves.
Check out our speakers, and I'm sure you'd find that the people who are signed up so far are just as impressive. Join us?
I'm afraid you ask too much of the Internet.
Not usually, but in case you or anyone else was wondering I've been spending the past few months optimizing the MVP-building process and have gotten it down to ~36 (uninterrupted) hours, even for non-trivial sites. The result is this: http://prontotype.us/
Haha, it looks like putting in those words maybe did block the Chinese.

Nothing frightens me more than a society with no freedom of speech, except for one that gleefully has none.
SARS and other pandemics are spread by modern-day Typhoid Marys
I vote for this as best 2012 HN post.
You can compare Europe to the US, but you are comparing a diverse geographical area to a nation state. Apples to Oranges. It's like comparing the US to Asia.
I switched to Pyramid for this exact reason. Django and Rails were both getting in my way where as Pyramid is just as powerful but without getting in my way.
You can't protect your assets in a Flash game either.

In general, your assets are only protected by copyright.
Hey guys Firehed and a bunch of us put this together. Feel free to submit a pull request if you want to add something :)
STARTUPS: IT'S THE PLANNING PROCESS THAT'S IMPORTANT SILLY
It's a lovely idea, but from a design point of view, the site looks really quite unpleasant: the green pastel background, ugly font choices, an uninviting table of links as the home page, and inlining the figures far too small to be useful.

I would recommend at least following some of the design choices of the original book, so the difference between text and figures is not so jarring. But better to extract drawings out of the scans and relabel using a consistent set of fonts, while creating a more interesting and captivating layout. It would be awesome to see this book brought to life by a more modern design with all the benefits of hyperlinking (both internal and external, e.g. wikipedia).

It's a real shame the presentation is so poor, as the information is actually really useful and interesting. A great start anyway.
Mine is "I can't even be bothered to fill out the sign-up forms for all these web sites you redirect me to".
Any animation fast enough to look like a coherent image is easily captured by an external camera as a single image.
I've never worked at Microsoft, but I'm pretty sure Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sent messages like that to working groups, and even department lists. I have no idea whether it's right or wrong, but I don't think this kind of thing is atypical for big tech projects.

Linux just happens to be open source, so when it happens in Linux you hear about it.
You died. A burst bladder is quite fatal.
Very interesting post. I'm on the business side of the coin and I am struggling with the same issue. I'm in my early twenties. I graduated from Umich in april. As an undergrad everyone around me worked at top corporate firms so i followed suit and interned for a prestegious bank during a couple summers.

I learned very quickly that I hated doing the same thing for someone else every day. I always felt that anyone could be doing what I was doing.

On the other hand I worked on a startup at school and i loved it. I felt like I had a purpose creating something new that nobody else had seen or worked on before.

Unfortuanetly that startup didn't work out because the team wasnt right. But I'm not giving up on my dream to create. I wont be working at a coppration anytime soon. Ive been working on my own startup since graduating and It's been working out quite nice. I just raised a seed round from a great development/incubator firm based out of nyc.

I'm looking for a cto to manage our development team if you are interested. Email me at davidmspi@gmail.com. You'll never have to code for us!
The biggie is in-app purchase support.
My personal programming style when possible is to break - loudly and informatively - on any unexpected condition so that a human can fix it. A new error code meaning who knows what would qualify.

Now a widely distributed user library is probably not the right place for that style. But I cannot trivially disagree with a developer who took that route.
Is that still the case for FreeBSD? I thought they did some work this year to help speed it up. Also, the Linux emulation under FreeBSD was always slow for mutex (did you test under Linux emulation or native?), but they have implemented futexes now and pushed uncontended mutex to userspace to speed it up.
Good points, but on the flipside, German solar is probably roughly a third as productive as sunny American states could be... so when you factor in the added output per equivalent installation, the 3x grid cost should be roughly mitigated. However, the trouble is the costs are not primarily correlated with size of installation and the cost of the panels themselves are no longer the primary cost driver. This means tertiary costs like installation and regulation, which do not necessarily scale with system size, are an important and complex piece.

edit: it's not 3x but still as high as 2.5x in some places: http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/us_germany_spain/pv_map_us_ge... and more if you compare to northern Germany. Anyway some parts of the US have significantly higher power costs than others (not surprisingly these are generally good solar sales markets)
i just went to the site to look for that option...
xtrabackup (http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/) is the way to go in my opinion. you can create full and incremental backups...
It feels like splitting hairs, but at 10W this uses significantly more power than a Raspberry Pi ("A" is 1.5W, "B" is 3.5W). Just a heads up.
Isn't it true that the Western European economies are high-tax, high-regulation economies with high degrees of risk-aversion (both public and private) compared to America? Where does that stereotype fail?

From what I know, it's hard to fire underperformers in most of Western Europe. Many traditional industries are protected (like French book stores). Taxes are high. Anti-market sentiment is strong. It's not a place where I would want to start a company to do what has never been done before.

I'd like to be wrong. I hear Europe is a nice place to live, otherwise. But it is called the "old world" for a reason.
Most of my projects occur on Linux, save dealing with iPhone unlocking/jailbreaking (done in VirtualBox).

I hope they get the Linux port out stat, because the Windows one is pretty useless to me.
Don't be surprised, it's classic marketing. The easiest problems to solve are the problems your customer didn't know they had. The marketing pitches for such solutions always begin by introducing you to a problem you didn't know you had.
That makes sense. I was confused because I was also getting the error when I typed the line into the interpreter by hand. The issue being that I forgot to assign it to a variable (facepalm). Thanks for the explanation.
Note Ethernet is via a USB device, which limits throughput and latency, and generally increases CPU load. Hard disk connection is the same: USB only.

Something like this with SATA and Ethernet on a fast bus would be awesome
I stopped right after this:

But prematurely deciding to freelance for any length of time can severely damage your career and mental health. You’ll feel pressured to take any work you can find just to keep the bills paid and your skills will erode as you crank out an endless stream of cheap WordPress sites.

This is a gross generalization. When I started doing freelance a bit over a year ago, I had $500 in the bank, one client, and was quitting an internship at a low bar design studio. If any word applies to my story, it's premature (I decided to quit 24 hours before I resigned). In professional terms, I was an idiot.

But, that didn't mean I was left in a lurch of WordPress sites and sorrow. Rather, it led to immense motivation to develop my skills and build up my network. How did I do it? I was realistic about my skills, my pricing, and the jobs I would get. Then, I busted my ass to turn around excellent work. Time after time, I delivered, either resulting in repeat business or referrals. What's better, my skills have significantly developed.

Don't be discouraged by this. Acknowledge where you're at, where you want to be, and work to build a bridge between those two points. It take a very long time and a lot of hard work. If you're serious: don't give up and keep getting better.
UEFI Secure Boot on ARM machines (Windows RT) cannot be disabled but this is to protect revenue, not the machine. This allows subsidized hardware, hoping that Windows Store app sales will make up for the loss. This is the same business model as the Xbox.

Secure Boot on x86/x64 machines is required to have an option to disable, or the machine will not get Windows 8 certified.
Toosell blog | How to Rate Home Security Systems
There are a gazillion of these. (Most of these are dual, there are a few quad cores mixed in. For XBMC, the dual core is more than powerful enough. The quad core won't fix software rendering, it's up the OEMs to get CedarX working (it's close) or Pivos to push out more amlplayer updates for utilizing the Mali GPU for accelerated playback.)
http://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=prod...

It's like the AMLogic-M3 f16ref. There are a dozen different flavors of these and the roms are interchangeable but there's no community around them to get continuous integration and good builds of XBMC setup. There should be an effort to get a distro that will generate nightly builds to target these devices with Linux/Android and optionally XBMC.

I keep rehashing this and everytime I do I say I should start a blog or set of resources for this... I need to follow through but my other projects are more immediately exciting :S
Just got a premium account. Awesome service, and it's great to know that it's being actively developed.

Side note: I love the vim keyboard shortcuts.
> swap out SD cards and reboot

That's something I was wondering about: is there some state inside the Rpi itself? If not, then a system backup/restore is only a matter of dding on the SDcard.
Why men love breasts
Ask HN: When travelling a mile or less, do you walk or drive?
Yes. It's just that being hit by the weights is actually not the failure mode you should be worried about most. It's having the wrong stress on your joints for longer times.

It's a bit like barefoot running vs shod running. Shoes protect your feet, so they are ostensibly safer. But they also make it easy to have bad technique and wreck your joints, especially your knees.

> (1) If I'm doing a chest exercise, for example, with 270+ pounds, and I fail on a machine, I can get out of it. With free weights, I need a spotter and it's much trickier.

Depends on what you are doing, and how you are doing it. The only real need for a spotter is for barbell bench pressing. There you can bench press in a squat rack with the safeties set to the right level. But there are lots of other exercises that provide a similar benefit without trapping you. E.g. (weighted) dips (on rings), push up variations, hand stand push ups, standing overhead presses.
"it could have come from a higher intelligence."

Yes, his higher IQ! That's how Newton studied and advanced derivatives.
The entry for app.net is glorious. I should have known what it was just from the title.
Entertainment space startup looking for a iphone developer
We are a startup working to revolutionize Hollywood and the movie business. The company is started by serial entrepreneurs and Hollywood insiders. We are currently talking to various networks and studios in Hollywood.

We have a demo of the application ready. We are looking for a software developer who will take our product to the next level.

We are looking for a person with vast experience in developing apps for iphone/ipad and Android phones/tablets. The person must be able to develop apps in Objective-C/Java and/or using platforms like Sencha, Phonegap, etc. It would be great if you have any apps on the app store. The ideal developer would also be well versed in web services, in HTML/CSS/Javascript and be able to produce beautiful web pages.

Compensation will include a mix of equity and small amount of cash. The opportunity is ideal for someone who wants to work long term with us, in the movie business towards what will be blockbuster product.

We are located in Sunnyvale,CA, but you may work remotely.

If you are interested, Send mail to me (address in my profile)