skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A fun sci-fi read would be about a futuristic government that "subsidizes" an Industry for much-debated, but ultimately politically driven reasons.

Rather than simply making cash-handouts, however, the Government & the Industry conspire to hide these handouts by creating new by-products for sale to consumers.

The Industry grows and rejoices, extending its products into as far ranging lines as sweeteners, fuels, and plastics.

To drive adoption they interrupt the free market through price manipulation and straight forward mandate from their "Environmental" agency.

Despite overwhelming evidence that consumers are being harmed by these by-products - record obesity, less efficient engines, and environmental damage - the subsidies only grow.

I'd like to see how the protagonist would drive change as presently my best solution is to rage via comment board into the echo chamber.
> Google+ is a social network. The only person who thinks otherwise is you:

Vic Gundotra disagrees.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/10/vic-gundotra-google...

http://mashable.com/2012/06/29/google-plus-problem/
FTL is the best game of the year as far as I'm concerned.
Point taken, I'll stop wasting my time and your time.
Some reasons:

- The government is accountable to the people, but who is Facebook accountable to? Shareholders.

- Government surveillance has at least some oversight, with a long history of regulation.

- Allowing government spooks to note your alcoholism is less worrysome, to most, than having drunk pics appear on the public Internet, for mom+boss to see.
If you are in SFBay, check out City CarShare. Cheaper than Zipcar for short trips, and quite a lot of vehicles. I belong to both and find myself using CCS much more than Zipcar.
Good, better, best, bad worse, worst are relative terms; they only have meaning in context.
> Do you use Unity?

After much messing around with xfce, gnome-session-fallback and cinnamon, I finally stopped worrying and learned to love the Unity just before upgrading to version 12.10.
The way that Google is pushing G+ down my throat has really made me more determined not to sign up.

The question that I ask myself every time I get redirected to a G+ sign-up page is What's in it for me? My friends don't use it it and I have no interest in using it as a glorified RSS/Twitter.
There's a difference between pushing you to transition to the new model and pushing you to use the products.

While I agree that that's pretty in-your-face, that's not what GP was talking about.
Why I am going into entrepreneurship (and why I am blogging about it)
I agree, the assertion that you shouldn't test is absurd. For example, TDD can save you time by catching bugs for you. When Iv'e worked on apps without tests, I have to test manually each time I make a build, which gets annoying. That's time I could spend coding. I think the solution is something in the middle ground. TDD can sometimes veer off into a time wasting effort for the sake of TDD. Just TDD the complex parts, or the ones that are likely to break. Also write the tests that are easy, or quick to write.
Announcement: https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the_apache_softwar...
In addition, it's terrifying how a service that forces you to identify yourself tries to gather information not only on your social network but also on what search queries you run, who you talk to, what you talk about, and what videos you watch. Imagine what Cardinal Richelieu would do with all that information.
The nuances are in the patents themselves. Are they non-trivial? Are they innovative? Did they require any significant amount of effort to come up with?

I'm of the opinion that two measures will help fix the patent system, and this applies to most fields.

First, the duration of patents needs to be cut. 5 or so years would probably suffice.

Second, there needs to be an incentivized prior art busting effort. Perhaps the party filing the patent could put $1000 or so into escrow for a 1 month waiting period, and if someone manages to find valid prior art, they get the money.
copy / paste my man! big time saver. unfortunately i can't do anything about having wasted your time. sorry
> because they're afraid of some fly-by-night swindlers who nobody will remember in five years.

Fun fact: I said Facebook would be dead by 2006.

I feel a little obligated, at this point, to admit I was wrong.
James Joyce, Ulysses.
I'm not on MSR directly, but I am part of a future research team at Microsoft. Internally things are interesting - you have the freedom to do pretty much whatever you want, but you have to justify it's usefulness one way or another. Microsoft is made up of thousands of tiny little teams that are mostly autonomous - each team has to prove that there's a reason for it to exist though. With research, especially things that will only come to fruition ten or twenty years out, it's very hard to directly measure it's impact. One of the things we end up doing is alternating between future and near reaching projects so that we can justify our existence with projects that are tangible in the present, but also contribute to future goals as well.

In a sense we are product focused as well, except our target market isn't consumers, but rather people up on high within microsoft. We have to sell our research to them one way or another, and it's often the research teams that have the best advertising sense about them that end up doing the best.
Plus, they admit no guilt like the banks!
http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Te-Ching-Lao-Tzu/dp/1613822421/?_e...
Awesome! 20 years later this is still my favorite game ever.
Only a 1000x difference?
This isn't an in-band signaling error, per se. This is not an issue of escaping the quotes or something, rather the way this issue works is that User.find_by_username(params[:username]) is interpreted wildly differently if params[:username] is a string compared to if it is a different data type. If it is not a string, then the "options" for the dynamic finder are automatically extracted. It turns out that you probably don't want to leave it up to your user to decide if that param should be a string or a more complex data type...

for instance, before this patch you could do User.find_by_username('whocares', :conditions=>"ARBITRARY SQL")
Could Real Networks' Media Cloud Finally Ship...At Intel?
Real Networks' Unifi personal media cloud died a quiet death after winning best of CES. Could the man behind the vision finally deliver... at Intel?
Although their bank balance begs to differ... Ultimately though I would agree with you and hope smartphones will just be thought of as small computers in the future, you buy the hardware and have choices about what OS you want to run. I would love to be able to install different distros like with PC's, Mint Mobile running Cinnamon Touch would be good.
OMG, I actually learned the metric system in public school in the 1970s. Then Reagan got elected and canceled it.

Now American kids have to get into drugs to learn the metric system.
Five things to know about Ubuntu Phone
'It's for GEEKS!'

Yeah, they said that about Android.
Huh. Now I need to figure out why I thought they were older than that. Sorry.
There are no 'keyword arguments', however Ruby does provide syntax sugar for options hashes.

For example, this:

my_method(1, 2, three: 3, four: 4)

Is the same as this:

my_method(1, 2, { three: 3, four: 4 })

Which can be picked up by the method like this:

def my_method(one, two, opts)
three = opts[:three]
four = opts[:four]
puts one, two, three, four
end
Email Open & Click-Through Analytics from over 80 Billion Emails
Web is another GUI that works remotely for an individual application. Sure it's not perfect but neither is X.
Absolutely. Also I usually have to get up and search in my pocket for my credit card, and then type it in. Time wise that counts for at least 3-4 steps on basecamp's "timescale". Only companies with really good reputation can pull off such a simple product and make some money out of it - and I'm not even sure they'll be successful at it.
At some point Google should insert a reference to every user who has signed up on any google property into their google+ user db. At least then we will have one huge news day about how "well" google+ is doing and that will be the end of this farce.

The impetus for such integration comes from the top: Google Chief Executive Larry Page has sought more aggressive measures to get people to use Google+, two people familiar with the matter say.

That is extremely telling about Google. Taken positively, it means the founder has bet the company on social. Taken negatively, it means google's biggest bet is so far a spammy and largely disliked product.
Advertising success is hugely dependent on repetition and retargeting is pretty much the perfect way to inexpensively get repeated impressions in front of a defined audience with a confirmed interest.
> The Boeing 747 was introduced in 1970, and we're still traveling at around Mach 0.85.

The Concorde was introduced in 1976, the world has made it rather clear that the speed is not worth the costs.
yeah saw that too, but then I got exited and was looking for a ROM download for the Nexus S or 4, but their doesn't seem to be any.
Seems like a classic case of the law of unintended consequences at work.
The kicker is that the government is using Facebook to surveil you.
The important bit here is that expiration failure "glitch", and the details thereof. If it's just a straight up glitch and the law called for the expiration of the RINs after one crossing then this is a pretty clear-cut case of fraud. If a bank error puts a million dollars in your account, or if a car falls off a shipping truck into your front yard, that doesn't make it yours. By the same token, a glitch in the expiration system doesn't make exploiting that glitch legal.
Stupid question, but how was that not discovered until now? That seems quite major, or something that the developers would have tested for ..
I did wonder if that was the case but I couldn't find anything about it. Just discovered re._MAXCACHE which implies it does cache. Tested and in my case the performance is the same.

Thanks for the tip (I was posting half hoping someone would have a better solution). That's another 3 lines of code removed :)
3D-Printed, Smartphone-Controlled Drone by Chinese Startup AngelEyes
Hi, Roger! I really appreciate this. Responses:

1. Re: CPA reporting, we do break those numbers out in the campaigns table down below your main reporting graph. Sorry that's not more clearly labeled!

2. Re: Dynamic ads, that's not something we have in the main self-service app that you're using but it is something we offer folks who commit to minimums.

3. Re: Frequency caps. We set sane frequency caps automatically and adjust them over time for self-service customers. This protects our brand and the advertiser's! For folks who commit to minimum spends we can give over full control of those settings if desired.

Happy to chat anytime this week about getting you squared away on these fronts. I just wrote to the e-mail address attached to your account to see if we can chat. Feel free to ping me at brad@perfectaudience.com if that's easier.
Anyone know where I could get one around Santa Clara? As a Canadian I don't think I can buy one in Canada. But I have to go to Santa Clara for the Open Compute summit. I checked the nearest best buys but nothing.
A bit of helpful contrarianism about how Metric isn't always best:

Dan Bently, "Metric Doesn't Work", OSCON 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdK-Cr1pe30
I think the main problem is that the site format is very focused on a single sort of interaction: questions with at most a few specific answers.

That gets said a lot, but the truth of the matter is that it works just fine for this kind of thing, too. Stellar case in point: The linked article. It even has (or at least had) features which are specifically designed to support this kind of scenario. Remember the Community Wiki feature?

The site is absolutely littered with great resources on topics which a small number of the site's moderators have deemed too subjective to be of value but which the site's users have upvoted into the stratosphere or provided extremely useful, thoughtful answers which other users proceeded to upvote into the stratosphere. Oftentimes they were around since near the site's beginning, enough time to become top Google results which are often linked by blogs, and generally done quite well for themselves - all a testament to how excellent a job Stack Overflow's format does at producing extremely high-quality content on these topics. Only to get closed anyway within the past year or two, in the service of trying to force this bizarre reality-deaf Pronouncement from Above that, regardless of what anyone's actual experience may be, you are mistaken and Stack Overflow can't actually do that.

In summary: If the people who run Stack Overflow were in charge of Apple, there would be a ban on music/podcast player apps on the iPad justified by nothing firmer than condescending lectures about how Steve Jobs prefers audio players that fit in his pocket and has therefore pronounced that the iPad is fundamentally unsuited to the consumption of audio content.
Great work, thanks for making it.
see 'sharing' in the dictionary.
Migrating a Spring MVC application from XML- to Java annotation-based config
How to spend your investors’ money
As much as I dislike the idea of new government departments, it sounds like they do need some kind of 'evil' department who's only job is to think up ways to abuse proposed new laws and regulations before they go into effect.

Similar to how generals have the intelligence section of their staff put on only the enemy hat and poke holes in their plans.
I still prefer Google+ to App.net.
i have a bridge to sell you - interested?
This is from May 2011, but I found it to still be a great resource.
Example: http://www.idontplaydarts.com/2010/07/mongodb-is-vulnerable-...
That's what corporate R&D is. Are you opposed to all R&D not done by universities?
Web Scraping with Node.js and Chimera
Firefox OS Building Blocks
He linked to "proof" that meditation strengthens the mind, when it was actually a single un-peer-reviewed study that suggests it might.

Poor science.
Changing styles is my guess; less a reliance on auto-generated magic. There is nothing wrong with this:

find_all_by_user_id_and_conversation_id(params[:user_id], @conversation.id)

But this is equally (actually more) concise:

where(user_id: params[:user_id], conversation_id: @conversation.id)

...and it builds on the composable scope system (derived from ARel).
Nothing about my statement requires arbitrage to be reducible to fraud in the average case. "Arbitrage" can be a euphemism for fraudulent activity even if most arbitrage is not fraudulent.

The heart of the matter is good faith. "Fraud" is a crime created to capture activity in bad faith with respect to the property regulation. The importation here might be legal, but there is a demonstrable lack of good faith that justifies calling it fraud.
> Do you know how easy it is to port touch-friendly UI frameworks/SDK's such as MOAI (http://getmoai.com/) to Ubuntu? Damn easy.

Starting from an existing touch framework/application is not the problem.

"Porting" a desktop application to a touch application is not "just" (to quote polshaw) adding a new UI. There's a world of difference between a desktop GUI--esp. in the Linux world, where many apps are remarkably different due to the ecosystem--and a touch GUI. Touch target sizing, what information to get rid of (if any?), what to add, speed (arguably more important on a mobile device), hardware acceleration (read: being gentle on battery life & improving touch responsiveness)... it goes on.

The OS might have Ubuntu/Linux roots, but it doesn't automatically mean it gets a free ride to a great touch-friendly mobile app library.
I think there's a difference between catering to a geeky/technical audience and leaving an entry-level developer feature available. We want these devices (tablets, smartphones, etc) to be little computers, but they aren't and they won't be without basics like a usable bootloader. With such basics available, the geeky/foss/linux/etc community can at least tinker and adapt existing software. At the moment most of the effort is proof-of-concept chroots and just figuring out how to boot a custom kernel, never getting as far as hardware support. Device manufacturers are laughing, happy that none of them can be used as computers. It means a new sale for a slightly different UI feature (wasn't the point of computers changing the software - including the OS?). IBM didn't intend to make a general purpose PC - they just wanted to be in the game, so they sacrificed controlling the integration. Thank goodness for that, because it led to the PC as we know it. Tablets and smartphones are convenient, but they are still not computers. All the parts are there though... All they have to do is leave uboot on. It doesn't mean the UI has to be made for a geek; it's negligible effort, and I hope Ubuntu ushers in that change.
> I mean, every time you press Alt, the menu bar at the top of the screen flashes. That's a horrible, distracting misfeature encountered in the first 30 seconds of using the thing.

It's configurable.
I don'r profess to performing a litany of self help routines.

If you take the time to read a stupid blog post about the usual pathways to happiness, then take the time to comment on hn, even if you are copy/pasting from some reservoir you keep of stock comments, you're still wasting time on the internet as you just professed not to. I'm sorry if it offends, but the hypocrisy is almost as distasteful as the blog post we're all commenting on.
Perhaps, but it reads oddly which is reason enough to avoid it.
I understand and am sympathetic to Clinton but in the eyes of the public he lost and looked silly.

There's two battles progressives (and I am one) can fight here and getting sidetracked into the fight over framing this as a hike or not is not a battle they are going to win. OTOH while there was bipartisan support for letting the payroll tax holiday expire, Obama had proposed extending it for another year and bargained it away to Republicans. So if the GOP wants to call it a hike let them and remind everyone that they wanted this hike more than the Democrats did. That's a battle that's far more winnable.
The government is quick to enforce "spirit of the law" or "letter of the law" when it's most convenient for them.
Or dictionary views: they stay current as the dictionary is updated, and allow set operations.
In order to be fraud, doesn't there need to be some form of misrepresentation or deceit?
Spot on analysis.

I think it would be interesting to have a gratitude journal in which gratitude to myself is copiously recorded. e.g. "I'm really grateful that I had the dedication to get up early this morning so that I could make this day more useful to myself."
That's why you don't cut to 1/5...

I suppose it's all numbers in the end.... Mankind has found a way in the rest of the world to make metric work!
This is the exact quote from the posting linked for this article:

----
Impacted code passes user provided data to a dynamic finder like this:

Post.find_by_id(params[:id])
----

It later tells you to apply the "to_s" function to the "user provided data" in order to avoid the problem.

I'm unclear on how that is "misinformation".
But it's not a real profit, i.e., they weren't selling anything.

The money (in the form of RINs) was stolen from the EPA. You better believe the government will be recouping it.
I don't know, we have a project that is still on 2.3.14 and Ruby 1.8.7, and we have not had any issues with compatibility. The old gem versions we have relied on all still work. And some of the gems we use are relatively new; for example, we use Dalli instead of the old memcache-client gem.

The only issue has been with our deployment environment — there is just too much effort required to support both 1.8.7 and 1.9.3 on the same box, so this particular app is still running on separate boxes that are configured using legacy Puppet scripts.
[Interview] Do You Have 'Entrepreneur's Guilt'? (We Do)
This is a false dichotomy. Plenty of people ignore privacy issues on Facebook, and there are plenty of "silly and exaggerated stories" about government surveillance that get people freaking out.
When does leveraging a platform flip from good business to unfair competition?

The moment you gain monopoly status in one market and attempt to leverage that status in another. Until then, happy bundling! Read the Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law docs from that case. They make it pretty clear.

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

http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f218600/218633.htm
Gerrymandering and a cure - shortest splitline algorithm
I think you misunderstand what "stand your ground" laws are actually about.
This is not a rubyism, it is a Railsism, they wrote a method called extract_options! and use it everywhere to get this kind of behavior. This is not how vanilla ruby works.
Is there a cached version? I cannot access it.
Steve, you used the word "they" yourself up above:

> They've been writing their own operating system...

Not criticizing, just pointing it out. I read it and wasn't sure why you had used "they".
Except the US did not go to war against Nazi Germany to close the concentration camps, but for their own self interest. Every single nation acted in their self interest during WW2, and excluding the single outlier of the Holocaust, I haven't heard of any actions by any nation that were any more or less moral than that.

Edit: My apologies, there were clearly plenty of other atrocities (eg Rape of Nanking if you consider that as part of WW2), but it is simply is not accurate to claim that Swiss were evil and the US were shining knights.
recheck your axes readings
My admittedly vague feeling is there are so many balances in the system that it was likely reviewed by a larger group, having lengthy expert-level discussions in a non-public forum, before release.

I've heard the theory that it's a government think-tank project that in asome sense 'escaped', in that it was thrown out to see what happened and has thrived beyond expectations.
What the night sky will look like over the next 7 billion years
Emacs. And Emacs.
This is why when someone says "It runs XYZ!" I presume they mean it runs it well enough that it doesn't get in the way under general usage.

People sometimes take liberties with claims about what runs on what, but generally do follow that guideline.
Or perhaps better yet, they could just scale back a bit on the gamification.

I suspect the real root of the issue here is that there's a lot of karma points attached to the green checkmark, so that the gamification system effectively punishes people for not checking one regardless of whether it's really appropriate to do so. And someone noticed that, and got as far as realizing that the problem came down to the gamification system was slightly out of phase with where users were actually finding value in the site.

But then they had a brain fart and decided the best way to fix this wasn't to tweak the gamification system to fit humanity, but instead to try and tweak humanity to fit the gamification system.
You are being extremely disingenuous. This is the rest of the quote:

“It embodies what we believe in and our sense of values,” Rashid said. “It states, first and foremost, that our goal as an institution is to move the state of the art forward. It doesn't matter what part of the state of the art we're moving forward, and it doesn't say anything in that first part of the mission statement about Microsoft. It simply says our goal is to further research in the fields in which we work.

“The second part is equally simple: When we have really good ideas, our goal is to make sure we get them into use, that we change the world with our ideas and with our technology. We take our best ideas and push them into our products as rapidly as we possibly can. That's important.”