skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It just reeks of "bacteria BAD, <x> GOOD" mentality. Like giving everyone broad-spectrum antibacterials for minor diseases without realizing that it slaughters the bacteria in your gut, which you generally need to be healthy. Or the claims that magnets or cell phones or ionized water will only kill good / bad bacteria, leaving you infested / healthy, 100% guaranteed*!

The suggestions are interesting, and I might look into them more carefully, but it has seriously tripped my they're-using-overly-religious-reasoning alarm.
Laser power beaming keeps drone fully charged
What makes it unusable for you? I've used OpenOffice and derivatives since 2006 on Windows, and haven't had any real problems.
>Of course not. It was already false, long before I declared it so.

Show me how it is false. I am a very reasonable person who is prone to change his mind when presented with a solid argument. I am inviting you to make that argument.
Twitter is so embedded in the worlds culture, I'm hard pressed to believe they won't succeed
> Seriously. You have no idea what you're talking about.

This thread was about Galaxy Nexus, not Nexus 4. Pot, meet kettle.
Study Says Yahoo, Google Help Fund Pirate Sites
A previous tool for the same class of exploits (Firewire DMA): http://web.archive.org/web/20100510013948/http://www.storm.n...

Were these kinds of exploits noted when writing the 1394 spec and ignored in favour of the DMA feature?
Attaching a dongle seems very suspicions to me, unless it something like a library computer. A library computer shouldn't have any critical data in the first place making the point moot.
Indian court to rule on generic drug industry
The reason I used Meteor (http://redacted.meteor.com / https://github.com/doctorpangloss/redacted) is because it is fast, exceedingly simple, and gets you a working program in five minutes.
Document Your Project Or We Won’t Use It
> "But that's not because the algorithms are new and awesome, it's mostly just because the exact specs of the hardware are not happily shared."

No, that doesn't fully explain the situation. They're worried about far more than their competitor knowing how many ALUs are on their GPU. Graphics drivers have to solve several hard problems: optimizations for shader compilers, scheduling, and memory management, and that's before you even get into the graphics-specific stuff. In recent years, GPUs have been one of the most active areas of research into computer architectures. For you to suggest that a modern GPU and its drivers don's embody any hardcore CS research is just plain stupid - if GPUs were simple to build, then Intel would have shipped a good IGP by now.
Ah, true - they're just pill-looking. My mistake, thanks! I don't see 'diluted crystals' anywhere (the pre-brush rinse maybe?), but you are correct on gum / mints, so it's at least a lot more focused.

Still - "consuming x grams" != "keep a ratio of X in mouth at least Y minutes per day". If consumption is what matters, how does it work?
Mh, no, the 3D cylinder is not even default ( i think ) and it's just one option of many. I have set it to normal scrolling behaviour as we know from other home screens.
The 3D cylinder is just one option. This example shows that you can have a very different homescreen (an option you don't even have on the iOS).
Another homescreen with a totally different layout was slidescreen. Sadly it was discontinued: http://slidescreenhome.com/
My point is: Customization is a great thing to have. Atleast for me. All the examples i show you are just a tiny fraction of what is possible, i just don't care so much for nice looking as i care for useful and handy.

The Weather widget is hell of a lot of themes and is quite awesome, the animations on opening etc. They did redesign it recently and it looks just nice. I get that "looks nice" is very subjective but i don't see your point. I can read all texts perfectly fine on the phone.

Another point is: I couldn't live without a calendar widget anymore. It's too nice to have the agenda for the next days right on your homescreen.
I like. An RSS feed would be nice.

EDIT: Just kidding, I saw it at the bottom.
While leaded fuels may have been avoided, I can't see how CFCs would have not been discovered by someone else.
Huge +1 on rails-api. When used in combination with rabl, it's the most formidable Backend solution there is.
This assumes that you're somewhere with wifi (or 3/4G, I suppose). I do a good chunk of my iPhone media consumption during my commute via the subway - there's no internet underground, so everything needs to be pre-downloaded.
Hard Problems In Game Development
The common approach today is to run X and a VNC server inside the chroot, then VNC into it from the android userland.
Other languages coming soon!
Can't wait for mine to get here!
Have you tried LibreOffice recently? It had a major breakthrough some time ago (a year? can't remember) that improved loading times enormously and actually made it usable.
I am very fond of lisp but even I find it amusing that you use Common Lisp on one hand and think that programming languages should be excruciatingly small on the other.
That's a good point and demonstrates very well how far you can customize.
>Bluetooth is for your xbox controller, not sending files

I used Bluetooth for sending files for years with many of my older phones, and I find that ability still comes in handy from time to time.

Also, the Xbox 360 controller doesn't use Bluetooth, although the PS3 and the Wiimote controllers both use Bluetooth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_Controller
What don't you like about Backbone? I never hear anything constructive or even a solidly coherent argument from its detractors
> <snip> but once you get up and going (...) </snip>

See, that's the problem. How do you get to "up and going" if the docs are sparse?

Just to be clear, this is not meant as a criticism of Ember, just a general observation that I have made time and time again when looking at new projects and reading comments saying things like "yes, X is not documented and hard to get into but once you get up and going it's all roses"
They're not just variations on fundamental CS problems because the complexity of the problem is dominated by physics + hardware + infrastructure. E.g., while most CS undergraduates are exposed to control theory, a power control loop isn't a simple application of a controller. It has to deal with the physics of signal propagation, knowledge of the kinds of environments users encounter, the characteristics of the underlying radio, and the nature of the network infrastructure. All that insight and experimental validation is ultimately packaged as an algorithm (although a very specific and detailed one).

To analogize to another domain: a power control loop in a cell phone base band is as much "just a variation on fundamental CS problems" as is register allocation for a hairy architecture like x86. Yes, graph coloring gives you a conceptual framework to start with, but that gets you 10% of the way to a usable solution.
I don't agree, to me he makes a lot of sense. I'd love for the social web to be more focused on the future and activities rather than that of an old photo album capturing the highlights of everyones oh so interesting lives.

I think your response to c) is somewhat over simplified, facebook is definitely not what I want but i still use it until what i actually want comes along and people start using that instead.
The technology may not be the most important thing, but (excepting a few weird industries with significant legacy costs that newcomers can ignore) it's also the advantage the young start-up has against the established company.
> If you really think about it, type-classes are all about passing around a global vtable implicitly. If anything, Scala's implicits are a superset of Haskell's type-classes and allows for techniques that Haskell isn't capable of.

First, I'm not a Haskell expert, but from what I understand there are no vtable passed around nor attached to "objects" in Haskell.

Type-classes are used to find an implementation given an instance. Without extensions you cannot do this:

> lst :: Show a => [a]

> lst = [1, "hello"]

So Haskell isn't the slightest dynamic here.
> Ember Data is a heavy hard-hat area and no wonder you were frustrated. Really, just start with your own data layer and get used to Ember first

So why is that? This was my big head-scratcher with Ember; surely the access to a data layer is the whole point of these javascript frameworks? I mean all backbone is really is a layer between REST and client-side javascript. I guess i'm missing a whole class of JS applications that don't need access to a server-side data layer, but for me that's the fundamental reason to be looking for a JS framework in the first place. So to come across one so highly regarded which doesn't have it baked in was very jarring.
You seem to be saying that it's "fundamental computer science" to be aware of a problem and the naive ways to solve it, but not fundamental CS to know what methods are actually usable in the real world. That definition may have its merits, but is certainly not appropriate to use in a patent law discussion.
> Most people who have used Office:Mac will attest that it has a better interface than the original.

I've never met anyone who didn't think that Office:Mac is terrible compared to Windows Office.
Sort of. That's really part of the Federal Circuit's ever-expanding scope of patentability, which the Supreme Court has made some moves to hem in (as noted in the third paragraph in the section you cite), and is a somewhat recent development. The Supreme Court in fact ruled exactly the opposite to the Federal Circuit's test that you paraphrase, ruling that "obvious to try" is a valid obviousness test. In other words, even if encountering a totally novel problem, if a person with ordinary skill in the art would have also tried the same solution as yours, it should not be patentable. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSR_v._Teleflex

The fact that the decision was unanimous has a lot of us hopeful that the new patent cases that the supreme court is taking on will see more of the federal circuit's nonsense cut back. It won't be patent reform, but it will be progress.
I thought I felt constrained by clauses in the "IP" section of my contract, but then I remembered: patents.
Definitely true. It can be really great if the main developers are actually using the IRC channel to coordinate development, but I think that can only really work when there aren't a ton of users to be poking in all the time. Kind of a Catch-22 problem; Linus would not be well-served to hang out on a Linux channel, because (as anyone who has seen his Google+ posts can testify) an army of sycophants would feel the need to interject their own non-content responses to everything he says. A small project, however, can still coordinate among developers while helping the odd user who shows up.
I'd also recommend looking into Chaplin for stronger routing / app design. It's got a great CollectionView, which is one of the most common use cases for Backbone (also seems to solve a lot of the gripes with plain Backbone
So Common Lisp and Fortran are scripting languages? This test seems to be more like "Is the language heavily influenced by C or C++?"
Apple topped 53% U.S. smartphone market share in Q4 2012
Ask HN: How do you get people to accept diversity?
I've been seeing a trend of people wanting to work with people who are EXACTLY like them. Same knowledge, same mindset, same thinking, etc. That does kind of work until your "gold mine" runs out and you need to do something new.

It would be like having algorithm designers trying to create an entire social network.
> Since the type system in Scala is popularly touted as Turing complete

So is GHC's. Turing-Completeness says nothing about speed, only about termination prediction. GHCi can type check most codebases in much less than a second. The puzzling thing about the apologism for Scala's slow speed is that some people seem to think that no FP language has ever had a fast compiler before...
If they can do that, it should also be pretty easy to identify your political affiliation. And speaking of which:

http://persecuting.us
So is a law banning certain allergens from food a regulation or a protection from violence for those to whom the allergen is poison?

What about law requiring those who give others food to warn them about potential allergens?

What about a law requiring that warning to be stated in a clear, easy to read manner (rather than hidden fine print)?

(say the allergen is soy, which is not an obvious ingredient in say, ice cream, yet is present in a lot of ice creams).

The line isn't so clear as you pretend.
Of course! Thanks :)
I'm not part of the "All DRM is always bad. No exceptions" consensus group. I'm in the more pragmatic "I'm OK with DRM, especially for time-limited rentals when it works well and is really cheap" group.

Can't we all just get along?
I not disagreeing that they do include core CS problems, I just don't believe their solutions to the core of those problems are that far ahead of academia.

In terms of the vendor specific features, sure, neither academia, not anyone else knows much about them. But in the fundamentals of scheduling, binning, etc, I don't think anyone is very far ahead of all of academia.
Just in time for CES :)
That's a huge invasion of privacy (except in national-security cases, wherein people know to expect an intensive background check) and of questionable legality, but yes, it happens.

This is why it's a good idea to speak with someone after you're called for a reference. If their prospective employer is calling shadow references (e.g. references they didn't volunteer) they have a right to know that it's going on.

ETA: If you're worried about shadow references, the best thing you can do is fake an offer with an "exploding" date to get a decision shortly after you interview. If they only have 2 days to make a decision, they'll stick to the references you provide and not nose around in your past where they don't belong. One can question the ethics of faking an offer, but it's no worse than calling shadow references, so do what you will.
Google invades the iPhone
Not sure this will catch. When thinking of the act of taking photos, an important part of that act is pointing and shooting in any given moment and it seems that will not be possible with the Memoto. Of course, you can unhook it, point it and wait up to 2 minutes to make sure you have the shot but it's not exactly practical. On the other hand, this isn't a replacement for pointing and shooting with a normal camera.

With more and more lifelogging devices coming, I hope someone will make a device similar in size to the Memoto that I can wear on my collar which blurs out my face when I'm being lifelogged by someone else.
It's absolutely the case that participating users add more to the system than nonparticipating users (hmm, possibly moderated a bit by signal-to-noise ratio...?)
Sure, but that's not CS is it. It's physics and hardware engineering, which just happens to be codified in software.
Hulu CEO & CTO Stepping Down
I've been using angular.js for a while now and there are a few reasons why I've really liked it:

- dependency injection: because everything is injected, it makes writing isolated unit tests very easy. It also makes it very easy to swap functionality in and out without affecting other parts of the app.

- two-way data-binding: most of the pain of being a javascript developer comes from managing and manipulating the DOM. After using angular, there is no way I will ever use a framework that doesn't automate this tedium by providing two-way live data-binding (knockout, meteor, and ember all do this). The best part about having less DOM manipulation code is that it makes writing automated tests easier and makes those test much less brittle.

- extending HTML: this is often a main complaint of angular. People say that directives "pollute the DOM" which I find to be a strange complaint, given that HTML is a declarative (sometimes) semantic language to begin with. HTML5 added a ton of new attributes and features yet nobody complained that these new tags were "polluting HTML". Angular simply allows you to extend HTML's functionality even further, and in doing so it makes it very easy to understand what an HTML template is trying to do without having to dig through any JS code.

- testing: the angular team made testability a priority, which I was something I always really appreciated about the Rails team. If you're not writing tests for your javascript code, you need to start. Having full test coverage in both end-to-end tests and unit tests has been a major source of stability for me and my team.
Yes. It's pretty ironic. :-)
GPS data is just a series of timestamps from multiple satellites simultaneously. Making that into lat long is a typical use case, but not inherent to GPS data.
A Motherboard Walks Into a Bar...
Yeah I know exactly what you mean in Haskell. Its just that in scala given the java inter-op there are a whole hunch of escape hatches that will always be there. I remember in the coursera exercises when you submitted code that used mutable vars...it would flag your code and deduct points. So essentially even if someone provided a purefn annotation...to actually enforce that, the compiler would have to scan each function and disbar i/o, calls to rng, calls to global vars... tall order.
Personally I use LibreOffice and find it good in many use cases, but sometimes you just need Office - either for compatibility reasons, or because you need some special feature.
That isn't horrifying at all; one person loses (you), but the consumer wins big time. On a utilitarian basis, this is great.

What would be more horrifying is a dearth of innovation for fear of other people copying it. Is that realistic? Is first-mover advantage enough? What about prize funds (e.g. Netflix prize, X prize, etc.)? Would the inefficiency costs of those mechanisms be larger than the coordination, government regulation, litigation etc. costs that patents cause?

Are there any kinds of innovation that definitely would not happen under alternate schemes, that we absolutely need patents for?
If it is unknown that it has no effect, the effect that it has is unknown.

'has [an] unknown effect' does not preclude there being no effect.
As the article mentions outside of freenode and tech departments / company's who are tech oriented IRC is dead or atleast declining.

Back in the day you could find a server to talk about your favorite band or hobby or tv show. Meet like minded people and make friends.

Today Twitter or Google+ is probably the closest alternative but are lacking the essence of what IRC was.

At scussion.com we are working on building realtime chat to be integrated with these communities (interest based communities).

I would love to just have a hangout to chat about sci if or sport like IRC was back in the day.
You're confusing solid engineering with research.

SQL Server started as a fork of Sybase (Microsoft bought Sybase's source code and started hacking). Sybase, in turn, was based on Ingress and "Ingres was first created as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the early 1970s and ending in the early 1980s" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_(database)).

SQL Server is literally based on technology for 70s.

Ingress was started by Michael Stonebraker, who then did PostgreSQL (which added novel, at the time, extensions to relational model), who then did Aurora, C-Store and Vertical (column-oriented databases), them Morpheus, then H-Store and then VoltDB.

Stonebreaker did more research (as in: creating novel things) than Microsoft as a whole in SQL Server.

SQL Server is a great database but it's a result of Microsoft paying an army of programmers for 24 years to work on improving a single product. It's a result of running a profiler often, not some unknown-to-the-world algorithms.
Where do you store your encryption key? In registers?
Hello,
I wrote a script called node-eyefi. https://github.com/komola/node-eyefi it is an alternative to the windows client and acts as the server. We are currently rewriting it in coffeescript.

After a download is complete it can call a custom script.

Thomas
We actually think that AMS is significantly better, but I'm glad rabl works well for you. :)
Just because a grad student somewhere has discovered an algorithm doesn't mean their knowledge is on par with the company that knows when that algorithm is actually useful, and has shipped code using it. Writing a textbook on matrix decompositions and factorizations doesn't mean you would be able to create a Google-quality search engine given a large enough server farm and a few months to crawl the web. The state-of-the-art is far more than what's theoretically possible, and the really abstract stuff like proofs of bounds on the asymptotic running time of a solution to a problem have never been the kind of research that is patentable. Even if the equation is known in academia, if a company spent years and millions of dollars to find the right coefficients, then the company is ahead of academia in a non-trivial way. Reduction to practice matters.
The cynical side of me that has used Microsoft software for 3 decades asks: 'WTF did Redmond break to make it "better"?'
This is why I unmapped Backspace -> Back in Firefox. It's just a source of heartache.

Typical example is trying to backspace in a textarea -- whoops -- textarea didn't have focus. Your progress was probably lost because most textareas these days are actually some textarea-looking Javascript magic.
Locomotive and Railway to add two more.
How lead is chemically similar to calcium? They are on opposite...

Then you go on to explain how lead is like calcium in its bioavailability, so in relation to the operations of a human body, lead is chemically similar to calcium (only dangerous).

http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/126/1/5.full

For example, lead’s ability to pass through the blood–brain barrier (BBB) is due in large part to its ability to substitute for calcium ions (Ca2+)
> I would pay a lot of money for a Linux Excel.

What Excel functionality do you need?
To save people the clicks it takes to get there, this is what the app has access to:

* Your basic info

* Your location

* Your status updates

* Friends' profile info: hometowns, locations and relationship details

* Status updates shared with you

Seeing how this is a 300-word blog post from AdvertisingAge that reads like a 300-word summary of a Friday press release, I'm guessing is that there's no real science or ingenuity behind this, other than perusing your timeline history and looking for:

a) the last few friends you were tagged with at an event

b) the last few friends you were tagged with in a photo

c) in the absence of a) and b), text-mining your friends' status updates to see if any of them said "I'm sick/have the flu"
When you host your chat on somebody else's service, you don't have privacy (or confidentiality).

For me, that trumps all your points. It seems that for you, it doesn't. The world's a crazy place.
Agreed re: Greece. Greece's bonds don't have the credibility because they aren't denominated in a currency that Greece controls.

There's no reasonable analogy between the US running a deficit and anyone's credit card. Again, like the commenter at the top of the thread, public and private finance are two different things. The US has infinite spending power. The constraint is not "affordability" but inflation. That's it. A "financially sound" budget for the US is one that maximizes employment with the minimal amount of inflation. It has nothing to do with deficits or surpluses.

You need to look at the federal budget as part of a closed loop of spending and income flows with the private, public and foreign sectors. Just like every country can't run a trade surplus, the public private and foreign sectors can't all run a surplus or a deficit. It has to net out. If the private sector runs a surplus (spends less than it earns) of 4% GDP and we have a current account deficit of 4% GDP, the gov't deficit will be 8%. It's just accounting.
ResponsiveText + NLP