skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Software can filter your 46.5661287 exabytes of pictures to guide you to the ones that are most interesting. Besides, what's important is relative and could change with future events. For example, a rather casual photo of Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky was just a throw away photo when it was taken. But after the scandal broke it became worth a fortune.

http://www.worldsfamousphotos.com/2008/10/15/bill-clinton-hu...

In conclusion, photograph all of the things and worry about analyzing it later.
I was excited using meteor but was sadly disappointing after a couple days of "banging my head on every simple things I tried". As far as I'm concerned, Meteor is a big "Screw everything that exist, it sucks. We're better and we've got the time and money to re-build all the life from scratch".

So, in a way, that's great! An mental orgasm for any nerds out there. But in the real life when shit needs to get done, I'm still using everything else that sucks.

Now, before people start saying I don't know what I'm talking about, here are a few examples:
- It does NOT use npm (!) -> Basically, you can't use anything without first converting it to Meteor.
- It does NOT use Express (Or connect) as its base -> Basically, the standard in the Node community. That means I can't just plug-in the 20 or so awesome plugins built explicitly to be used by any kinds of node application that support connect.js
- The current Asynchronous (following node's philosophy) wasn't good enough for them; so the re-created a whole new Mongo version acting synchronously.

But most importantly, it's just extremely annoying to hack with it. It's like a big black box.. you're not very sure what it does and you hope it works. But when it's not working, you can't just hack it your way or read the source. It's a little bit like Django or Rails (but in worst) as you can use SQLAlchemy in Django, or you can use different template engines, but then no project from the django community will work with your app.

The good news is, the meteor team is working hard. Maybe in a couple years it will be stable enough and iterated fast enough to provide a platform where it will be fun hacking and building web apps. But for now, I sadly prefer to stay in the "Everything else sucks" world and hack my way in the node jungle.

(For those interested, I have also tried Derby. As said in the article, it's not yet fully stable and the documentation is really Meh. But I think it's going to be big really soon and I'll be more than happy to give it another fair try. So far, I'm sticking to a basic express (Or locomotive.js which is nice.) I'm also using Angular.js on the front-end. It's something amazing as I feel very productive and it saves a tremendous amount of time.. but at other moment, I just bang my head against the table as I want to do something simple and it's just impossible so I need to use all kind of hacks to do what I'd have done in a couple lines in Vanilla Javascript. Oh well. Hard to be a hipster web developer trying all new technologies :-))
>Angular.js. Now this is more like it in terms of magic. Then, the other day, I decided to add a date picker to one of my forms. Uh oh: http://www.grobmeier.de/angular-js-binding-to-jquery-ui-date.... - how many lines of code just to make it a date picker? I couldn't have written that code myself without several more days of banging my head. Wonder what'd happen if I really try and do something it doesn't agree with... So out the window with that for the time being.

To be fair, you can just use Angular UI as that article says:
<input ng-model="date" ui-date> for a date picker and the ui-jq directive for any other jQuery plugin.
Microsoft will have a problem in the future - not as big of a problem as the Windows one, but still a pretty big problem. They will have to make some choices.

1) Keep Office Windows (and Mac) only as some sort of "competitive advantage"

2) Expand Office to iOS and Android, too, which will have billions of users in the future, more than the Windows ecosystem itself

3) Keep prices as high as ever

4) Dramatically lower prices by an order of magnitude to make sense for the mobile ecosystems, and be more competitive with free or sub $10 Office Suites, that while may not have all the Office features, it will have a lot for many people. If they didn't think that was true, they would've never made the Office 365 web app.

So the problem for Microsoft is that whichever way they go, they will get less revenue from Office in the future, whether that's because more people will prefer cheaper alternatives like Google Docs or even their own Office 365, or because they have to dramatically lower the price for the "native" versions on iOS and Android, or because most people on these platforms, won't care as much about Microsoft's Office, because there are good enough (or free/much cheaper) alternatives.

I think in the end they will get less revenue because of a combination of both not being as relevant on competing platforms, and having to compete on a much cheaper price level.
It's probably a reference to the dark damp winters.

I love living in Seattle, but I remember a December trip to LA a few years ago and thought "I can't find any good coffee here, but if I lived here I might not need good coffee to keep from killing myself"
I had a similar experience. I use backbone for interactive parts of the app and ended up going with jquery-pjax for almost everything else. Another option is to create handlebars templates that are compiled with the asset package. But that introduces some other problems that need to be solved.

I'm ready to get on board with something cohesive that's Ember-ish whenever it matures.
What if I'm laying on the grass looking at the sky?
Straight from the backbone faq: "Backbone.js aims to provide the common foundation that data-rich web applications with ambitious interfaces require — while very deliberately avoiding painting you into a corner by making any decisions that you're better equipped to make yourself."

I think the problem is people come into Backbone.js thinking it's a full fledged MVC framework for in-browser apps, instead you should think of it as a minimalistic set of tools with which to create your own framework (and in fact, a few actual frameworks have been released that are built on top of backbone.js).

One way to taxonomize frameworks is on how opinionated it is - Backbone.js is on the far end of the unopinionated side. If that's what you like, then Backbone.js is for you. If you want something more out-of-the-box, you should be considering the other options.
Thanks for the feedback. Updated so it goes straight to the process first.
we have a chance to find out.
"the D is silent"
What makes you think the technologies in question are invented independently?

What makes you think they aren't? That's the problem with a lot of software patents: people can just run into them (or be accused of running into them and subject to the resulting legal proceedings) without even knowing they were there. Then, suddenly, possibly after years of their own R&D, they get hit with paying royalties on something that had nothing to do with their own development work.

If there was no patent system, they would just use the end result without compensating Motorola for all the work of developing the technology.

Perhaps, but if they're really only trying to make carbon copies of what Motorola were doing, then Motorola have a huge first mover advantage anyway. Specifically, they have as long as it takes to commercialise their R&D work before they have to disclose it, because the work is a protected trade secret like any other up to that point. So as long as they keep innovating in significant ways that others couldn't, they will remain years ahead of their competitors in the market. That seems like a natural and compelling commercial incentive to me, without any need to add artificial benefits via patents.
If "CS research" includes "Software Engineering" then yes, query plan optimisers are definitely currently researched.
Google Glass Competitor Released Today
This.

I can't tell you how old it's become to have to sit there trying to figure out some disjointed bits and pieces of a project for hours. It's enough to just say "Forget about it".

I know I for one am done doing this.
Scala's compile speed (with incremental compiles) is generally acceptable if you have reasonable dependency patterns. If you have cyclic dependencies, it's a problem. However, cyclic dependencies are signs of things that are wrong in development practices that can't be blamed on the language.

You mentioned flight control systems: those are unlikely to be written in Scala, being real-time systems, but if one were, it would not need to be compiled and recompiled on the fly.

Scala's a great language but it's not the right language for every problem. No language is.
> the subscription-based versions of Office 2013—which are sold through Office 365

I wonder whether this will be a source of confusion among consumers. The way I understood it, Office 2013 is the desktop version, and Office 365 is the cloud-based subscription version. But I see both marketed under the Office 2013 moniker. Between this and the Windows 8 / Windows RT, their product names are overlapping, giving these launches a muddled message.
It also prevents 'cleaning lady'-type attacks (or malicious co-workers), which is what I was alluding to.
Idempotent Backbone Rendering
I never understood why you have to take Erlang-the-language to get the distributed systems platform. It seems like the whole node management/serialization/"process" management and whatnot could apply to other languages and runtimes.

That way you could get Erlang's distributed platform, which is highly lauded, but mix it with a faster or more preferable language.
> because libertarians are the only people who express their ideas to other people.

Express them like this? yeah. Well, libertarians and Jehovah's witnesses.
I always said it, Backbone is not a JSMVC Framework; It's a JSMVC Framework Framework (How to go meta!) Basically, it's a solid foundation to create a JSMVC Framework.
Well, really it doesn't miss the point - it's trying to bootstrap this way because of that point.

A social network with no technical capabilities is roughly as useless as a social network with no users. Once you have the one, you need to push for the other if you want to provide value; that's what they're trying to do here.
Animations for DFT
No, a laptop that is turned off is safe from this.

And you don't really need something as tailored as a new BIOS chip, in most cases where you can boot from USB/Firewire/whatever you can just replace the bootloader with one that copies the password as you enter it.

That's why you might want to have your bootloader on a USB stick or something that isn't available to the attacker even if he/she gets physical access.

But that of course doesn't protect someone from altering the BIOS (or even, the firmware of your keyboard...). But it at least usually requires more effort.

Or, one could be listening in by targeting a laser on a window nearby (and watch the reflections as the sound-waves propagate through the glass) and listen to your keystrokes, and based on statistics (gathered when you write HN posts ;)) figure out your password without even getting in the same room as the hardware.

If someone has the resources and motivation to get your data he/she will probably be able to :(
Should be pretty easy to calculate - 40% out of 500 million or so, so about 200 million devices have 4.0 or higher.
It is unknown if there is any effect.
Well, imagine if patents included source code and were only valid for 5 years or so? Something like that?
similar growing disenchantment with Backbone. Minor gripe re: Angular - if you're working with a server side templating language (i.e. Flask/Jinja) you have to configure it to use alternative tags, which could cause problems if working with any 3rd party libs.
Patent office seeks feedback about reforming software patents
I consider corporate research centers to be non-academic. I know for a fact they produce a considerable number of CS advances that are not published but which are used internally or quietly embedded into expensive products.

In all three areas where I have been involved in R&D -- distributed spatial indexing, parallel graph analysis, databases -- the state-of-the-art has been under NDA for years. Basically, any company where pushing the envelope on their advanced software systems is a significant competitive advantage.

The most obvious example is parallelizing graph analysis. Benchmarks like Graph500 are dominated by systems operating at a scale far, far beyond the reach of any algorithm in literature. There is ample evidence that vastly superior algorithms exist relative to what CS academia is producing. In fact, when I was active in this particular area almost four years ago, there were (at least) two different algorithms being used to achieve this kind of scale-out.

On the other hand, most people are not familiar with what is in the literature.
Would you mind explaining why pie charts are useless? Honest question.
> there are a number of areas in computer science where the leading academic papers are literally a good half decade behind the state-of-the-art that is buried in NDAs.

At a former company, I learned of the existence of a code packaging technology that would apply arbitrary code changes to a running VM instance atomically. By 2002, it was possible to implement a web application server whose pages were JIT compiled to machine code yet still upload and apply a code change atomically. With some care, transactions in flight could even be stopped mid-way and continue execution on the new code base. On top of that, it was possible to debug page renderings and change and recompile code in the debugger. Not so fancy now, but this was pretty slick in 2002.
How is this any different from "binders full of women"? A rolodex of people available to be tokens is just as bad as a rolodex of all white men.

The lack of women on panels is a symptom. You don't fix a problem by treating the symptoms, even if there's some circular feedback. In this particular case I think there's very little feedback. How many girls are discouraged from programming because they didn't see women on panels? Or for that matter, how many boys are encouraged to do programming because they didn't see women on panels?

Panels just don't matter that much. Fix the problem at a lower level - get teachers to encourage girls to go into STEM or programming, and get them to encourage the kids' parents to encourage them. Squash sexism in the classroom - "I don't want to be lab partners with _her_, she's a girl" should be right out, but so should "I don't want to be lab partners with _him_."

It's a matter of mindset, and one that can only be fixed in the young. Tech has, latent sexism (and possibly racism) aside, a highly meritocratic culture. Pledges like this will cause men and women alike to question whether a female speaker is there for her opinions or to fill a quota, whereas before, few as they might be, if women were there, there'd be no question that it for was their opinions and expertise. This doesn't remove the latent sexism, it hurts the meritocracy.
It's right here for me: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/360937/Screenshot_010413_052125_PM....

He also has RSS and Twitter, which would be good ways to be notified when he posts again.
OK, I can check with family doc. But I'm not seeing any of the ADD or ADHD symptoms.
Given how embedded they are, it's troubling that they still haven't figured out how to make money off of it.
> Ironically, Google's PageRank is the subject of several patents, and Stanford's interest in the IP netted them $335 million in Google shares when they exclusively licensed it back to Google.

That's not irony, as "should not be patentable" and "is patentable" are not mutually exclusive (I've also never heard of anyone being sued over the many, many pagerank-like implementations out there, so really the only thing going on there is University patent policies).

"should not be patentable" and "is patentable" is actually a large part of the problem, because you have to engage in the game to not be sued out of existence, but in doing so, you're making the environment even more toxic.

I always like to quote the Gosling story:

"In Sun's early history, we didn't think much of patents. While there's a kernel of good sense in the reasoning for patents, the system itself has gotten goofy. Sun didn't file many patents initially. But then we got sued by IBM for violating the "RISC patent" - a patent that essentially said "if you make something simpler, it'll go faster". Seemed like a blindingly obvious notion that shouldn't have been patentable, but we got sued, and lost. The penalty was huge. Nearly put us out of business. We survived, but to help protect us from future suits we went on a patenting binge. Even though we had a basic distaste for patents, the game is what it is, and patents are essential in modern corporations, if only as a defensive measure. There was even an unofficial competition to see who could get the goofiest patent through the system. My entry[1] wasn't nearly the goofiest."

You make market incentives to get companies to patent everything they can. Companies incentivize engineers to patent everything they can. Patent lawyers rewrite the software patent applications to take what is already an abstract set of instructions and turn it into the platonic form of that idea, to make sure they cover all implementations of that idea. The patent office accepts it after 7 resubmissions. You're not going to end up with a good result.

[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
But I think the real question is - do you think most people who need a Word or Excel app for whatever reason will have this kind of problem?
So I did some reading. And I discovered that one by one my cherished beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths.

I’d assumed that it would increase the use of chemicals. It turned out that pest-resistant cotton and maize needed less insecticide.

I’d assumed that GM benefited only the big companies. It turned out that billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers needing fewer inputs.

I’d assumed that Terminator Technology was robbing farmers of the right to save seed. It turned out that hybrids did that long ago, and that Terminator never happened.

I’d assumed that no-one wanted GM. Actually what happened was that Bt cotton was pirated into India and roundup ready soya into Brazil because farmers were so eager to use them.

I’d assumed that GM was dangerous. It turned out that it was safer and more precise than conventional breeding using mutagenesis for example; GM just moves a couple of genes, whereas conventional breeding mucks about with the entire genome in a trial and error way.

But what about mixing genes between unrelated species? The fish and the tomato? Turns out viruses do that all the time, as do plants and insects and even us – it’s called gene flow.
They will almost certainly make the iOS and Android apps only available to monthly subscribers, which includes all their cloud services. If they have "billions" of customers paying them $10-$20 a month, they will be doing very well for themselves.
agreed ... the animation and art direction for it was superb.
There is at least one actual android engineer who has responded to about 10 comments in the bug report.
At this point, the bug report is mostly filled with people saying "i think my phone goes faster, fix this bug", which is non-helpful.
"On the contrary, intel made significant changes to their CPUs court apple's business"

Since Apple has adopted Intel processors, Intel has removed NVIDIA's ability to build chipsets for Intel processors. Apple was using one of these chipsets when this happened. Given the choice between a newer NVIDIA chipset and Intel's integrated graphics, I would bet Apple would still be using NVIDIA.
The Mountain Dew was mostly diet, with some of the throwback stuff thrown in at random.
Part of the problem is that it doesn't support all MS Office features which makes it frustrating when you're working with coworkers and clients using Office. A perfect example is smart graphs (which are non existant) and graphs look different (and bad) and then don't work on the mac version.
In my experience, the two biggest reasons for expensive maintenance are (a) not all the code is understood by the people maintaining the system because past maintainers have moved on, and (b) assumptions have been made for performance or simplicity reasons that remove abstraction boundaries and embed assumptions about how the whole works inside different parts of the system, such that when one part needs major change, many other parts also need careful change; this is made worse by (a), because later maintainers usually only understand a subset of the individual parts.

This isn't something easily fixed by a compiler or language feature. There's no magic bullet.

Bugs "lying in wait" are a minor problem; if they lie in wait long enough, they are almost by definition not a problem at all.
You don't, there's also elixir - http://elixir-lang.org. Elixir runs on the erlang VM but has a "nicer" syntax. (Nicer for some people, I don't mind it, but I don't think the syntax of erlang is a problem.)

Elixir is working its way to being a full erlang replacement, and apparently isn't yet one, but it replaces everything I need. It also has some really nice (And critical for my project) features that erlang doesn't have, due to the way its implemented. Namely, convenient code swapping in a way that would be hard for me to do in erlang.

The language is evolving pretty rapidly and has great guys behind it (Yurii Rashkovskii and José Valim)

You could build a platform that is concurrent the way erlang is... but the reason people use erlang is that nobody else really has.

There's a lot of stuff out there that's sorta pretending to solve these problems, but none that I've heard of have actually done the hard work.

It's not impossible, it just takes more commitment than most people are willing to invest.
WTF jQuery? Royal blue and radial gradients??
http://api.jquery.com/
backbone? magic? backbone is 1534 lines of straightforward, well written, well documented javascript. backbone is about as simple and un-magic as MVC gets, by design.
the majority of cases will not save your phone from breaking. There's only a few "shock resistent" cases and they don't appear to be very popular.
Here's one example, in order, w/incremental compiling enabled in Java:

Class A contains public static final String x = "x"

Class B contains public static final String y = A.x

Class A modified, A.x = B.y

Result: A.x and B.y = "x"

clean and compile, no code changes

Result: A.x and B.y = null

The reason this occurs is because information is lost during compile. The compiler optimizes the references away and doesn't fix them w/incremental an compile. This occurs in both sbt referencing javac and the eclipse incremental compiler in Eclipse IDE.

While this is contrived, the main point is that more complex interactions occur where these references may not be updated properly and you may end up with behavior you were not expecting due to these optimizations. Interestingly, I think the problem can be solved if the compiler were to keep incremental metadata explicitly stating where these dependencies exist. This certainly is the case with eclipse, where the IDE knows about the link, but still produces behavior that is dependent on compile order and not on the code change itself.
> Microsoft will also update the Mac suite at some point, meaning that by the end of 2013, there will be a version of Microsoft Office available for every major computing platform on earth. Just as with Multiplan in 1982.

Could someone elaborate what the sort of work it would take for MS support Linux? I'm really excited that there is going to be web version because I'm sick of LibreOffice.
I think it helped that the dance video is pretty awesome :)