skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If someone feels strongly enough about an issue to give his or her life to advance it, I'm not going to contradict that sentiment. On the scale of things, the media exaggerates far worse things (e.g. they'd have you believe that violent crime in the USA hasn't been dropping precipitously over the last two decades). Also, giving one's life for a cause is a much more ethical action than taking others' lives for that reason, but it seems quite a bit rarer.

(I know that Swartz is said to have suffered from depression which could be considered another factor in his suicide, but I'm specifically addressing this point which is unrelated to mental illness.)
to see Obama's face on Time (or was it Newweek?)

That's what I love about living in America rather than North Korea: we don't have a news media working in lockstep to proclaim the greatness of the Dear Leader.
I go for grey socks. You can wear grey with basically any pair of dress pants. With non-dress pants, I just don't wear socks.
Kerr's posts make the case that her actions were legal and conventional, not moral.

I'm not claiming she's a demon. It is very common for otherwise decent people to do evil in their institutional roles. But history shows that it's very very dangerous to permit this as an excuse.
Link to "The Next Microsoft":
http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/2012/7/3/the-next-micro...

And its HN comments:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195208
If you don't mind me asking ... what religion are you that considers copyable types to be the devil?
Macro Mode Photo Sharing App Android
I also like the video on this page:

(http://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyw...)

(http://youtu.be/yVkdfJ9PkRQ)
Do you know anywhere that has a collection of MIT-related hacking stories? I also enjoy them when I see them posted here.
1>Throw them out.

2>Buy identical socks.

3>Stop worrying about it.
It seems a bit absurd that the Panama canal isn't on that list given that it cost around $15 billion in present day dollars. And that's with 25,000+ people dying in the process. I can only imagine what the cost would have been if they had take the precautions necessary to prevent most of those deaths.
Designers often come up with such kinds of "unsolicited advice", hoping to get noticed by the big companies, and it's actually the first time I see someone succeeding in this approach (which is a good thing I guess).

What strikes me is that he will be working in the Xbox division, which I already consider Microsoft's most coherent and elegant division, marketing-wise.

Andrew Kim has come up with a branding concept, but I wish Microsoft would have also considered approaching the guy behind this Windows UI concept: http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/24/2822891/windows-desktop-ui...
Apart from the fact that it looks gorgeous, I believe it embraced the "flat design"concept in ways that Windows 8 has failed to elaborate.
I thought the best part of his "The next Microsoft" was choice of font for the logo- it has a softness that fits the name perfectly but stands out boldly. I always felt MS' sharp, italicized font was inappropriate. Besides, any move away from italics is a good move, imo.

Old font:
http://static.squarespace.com/static/50271a61c4aab6c54f9af5e...

New font:
http://static.squarespace.com/static/50271a61c4aab6c54f9af5e...
The Blink Protocol
It's typical to recurse until you're down to small enough sets to easily sort using some other algorithm (usually insertion sort on groups < 10 elements.)
Yes, bytes. I suppose most everyone wants to use dates more than 256 seconds past Jan 1, 1970.
cue embarrassment
The situation in Burma is that Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who was under long-term house arrest by the military dictatorship, specifically requested that people not visit Burma for tourism.

She has now ended this opposition to tourism in Burma.
I hope this does not lead to another suicide. Really - this is becoming a grilling contest.
A lot of people here are arguing that "Microsoft has legitimate concerns". Of course MS are framing it like that - would you really expect them to say "We made this proposal because Google+Firefox+Apple are neutering our Embrace+Extend+Extinguish ritual, and additionally the WebRTC thing is going to demolish the $8B value of our skype purchase"?

The fact that they may have good technical arguments should not confuse you. They're not doing anything to make the web better. They are doing everything to make Microsoft's hold in the market stronger. Everything else is incidental.

Story time:

Back in 1999, I worked on instant messaging infrastructure, and as a result followed the related IETF workgroup closely. That workgroup had very interesting discussions that went absolutely nowhere over a few years. At some point, everyone threw their hands up in the air and adopted XMPP - not because it was good (far from it, compared to other suggestions that were made) - but because an implementation was made and progressing, and becoming a de-facto standard.

What I realized through 1999-2002 following the standardization process was that, although every single argument ever made was of a technical nature, it was a game played between AOL, MS, Netscape and the other members of the workgroup, the game being "either you guys accept my existing infrastructure and give me dominance, or I'm not sharing my toys". And since no one gave up, toys -- to this day -- are not shared, and IM networks are still mostly disjoint.

The WebRTC game might be more delicate, but the validity of the technical arguments (which was there in the IM discussions too) should not confuse you. It's about market control and dominance, not about technical excellence.
How isn't that racist?

Racism doesn't need to involve blathering idiots who want to burn your house down, all it takes is someone to treat another person worse because of their race.

Which is to say, we're all at least a little bit racist. One of the greatest lies of modern society is that racism is somehow exceptional, or intrinsic to a character, when it is in fact highly contextual and can be brought out of anyone.

Race in dating is very heavily influenced by popular perceptions of particular races, including stereotypes - that someone won't give a black person the time of day even if they are articulate and hit other criteria is racist, though the fault here seems to lie more with society than the individual.
I've transferred about half of my domains from godaddy to namecheap at the end of last year. It looks like I have a great excuse to transfer the rest of them now.
Damn. I just moved 4 domains to them earlier today, would have waited if I'd had known about this.

In case it's useful for anyone else, I moved them because they're currently running a promo for transferred domains where they'll throw in a years whois privacy for free and a discounted SSL cert.
Microsoft actually did update its logo recently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Microsoft.svg

It's not italicized anymore but I prefer the old one, though Andrew's choice of font is nice as well.
Best websites to market to employees in silicon valley?
How to market to thousands of employees in technology companies in sf and silicon valley?

any sites? besides quora and reddit?
Thanks.
For what it's worth, Microsoft has already changed the font of their logo recently:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/08/23...
In practice this is an interesting problem for ISS. Considering the varying contingent of shadow-casting (and reflecting!) payloads, orbital replacement units, visiting vehicles and robotic elements the station's geometry is constantly changing. Then we have to consider system and lifespan effects. Solar array orientation alters the corresponding equilibrium attitude of the station and thereby the need for gyro and thrust stabilization. Along with problems we've had with overuse of the solar array rotary joints, there is a lot to consider after and optimal array orientation is found. Space is expensive.
That's basically a direct rip of the Zune desktop software [1] applied to other apps. Windows Phone distinctly reminds me of the Zune HD UI once you're past the live tiles home screen. If they wanted to do more like that, they would only need to turn to their own people that made it. While Zune failed as a product, its team seemingly inspired everything Microsoft's designed since.

1: http://i.imgur.com/gb2DhNt.jpg
There are some advantages and disadvantages of desktop or web apps. Some things can be done with only desktop apps. So they are not dead any time soon. Also nothing stops you from creating a native desktop client for your web app if you need one. But it only depends on your specific app. You could probably share you app idea so we could give a better answer. cheers.
> what I have quoted, ... outright contradicts what you are saying.

I guess I don't see the contradiction. Your beloved quote seems to be saying that you should not to be afraid of being hated by people who disagree with your convictions. I think most people on HN would agree that having accessibility on all web pages is a good thing. I'm sure that Dave is not for denying the web to dyslexics. He is not a "bad" person who's hatred you should desire. I've followed his writings for 20 some years, and he is an interesting, complex, thoughtful, good guy. In this case, programmer to programmer, you have a technical problem to solve.

I hope you read the next section of your link, about the importance of Love, as well.
Are we really going to pretend that federal prosecutors are colorblind, that aren't significant racial disparities in federal sentencing already?
The problem is that these 10.000 $ look cheap regarding the amount of work it requires. I can't find a link but there's several studies showing that people are willing to do a lot of things for free if they like it, but they see it like work if it's paid and they enjoy it less, especially if for a ridiculous sum of money.

I'm pretty sure Wikipedia would have a lot less content if they paid their contributors 1 cent by article.

I think the Nasa should either increase the bounty or make it 0 $.
Failed assassination attempt on Ahmed Dogan
I have Scheme on my iPad. You can get Python for iPad, too. Not much useful you can do with them, but useful for learning programming.

But yeah, if you want to write native apps for the iPad you need a Mac and Xcode. Of course, it's not like people write Android apps on Android very much.
You recursively sort each bucket into subbuckets, and there is a known recursion limit (3 in this case).

Here's code for an LSB radix sort, which doesn't recurse, but is the same idea: https://github.com/pbiggar/sorting-branches-caching/blob/mas...
Yes, when (as in the general case of std::list) the number of objects is not known in advance.
To be honest I'd think nothing of wearing back socks and grey/khaki pants.
Since this is the first request for collaboration with NASA we've seen on HN, are there other obvious problems you'd like to independently analyze with us? ISS? Rovers? Navigation? Deep Space Networking? (etc)
Wow, the comments were incredibly useful as well.
Well put. However, I would argue that we should be attempting to reach the kids who might not realize they could or would like to be future engineers. The problem with the book analogy is that it's very obvious how you would make a book, all the pieces all there in front of you. It's not obvious how you might make an app for the iPad, none of the requirements are present. When I show kids how they're made, they're generally amazed.

Finally, I'm not sure we should trust our educators without question, this stuff changes very quickly and very few of them are programmers. In the 30 years since I've been programming there doesn't seem to be much change in how programming is taught in schools, so it might be time for a rethink.
With radixsort, you don't even need to. By the time you get to the deepest bucket, all the entries have an identical prefix and unique suffix. So they can all be sorted in O(N).

You could construct situations where it would be faster to switch to insertion sort (maybe radix of 2, stop 3 recursions from the end), but in practice you'd pick a radix better (with a radix of 8, you could do the entire thing in 4 recursions and the final recursion over 64 items is faster than insertion sort of 64 items, probably).

Note that you'd generally use LSB radixsort over MSB radixsort, so you'd have a set number of passes over the array, and no recursion.
I'd be interested in hearing how successful a UDF-formatted USB stick would be in the real world. I managed to find a discussion on superuser from 2009:

http://superuser.com/questions/39942/using-udf-on-a-usb-flas...

One fairly big problem you have here is that there are going to be zillions of consumer devices that expect memory cards and USB sticks to be FAT32 and nothing else.
Bleh. Something inherently unappealing about rhomboids, especially when they're framing photographs.
that's an example of solving the problem without solving the problem ;)
> "Don't forget that it's all fake."

An interesting inverse story:

Years ago, just after the fall of the USSR, the Museum of Flight in Seattle acquired a MiG-21 aircraft on the cheap from the Czech Republic [0]. They had it shipped to the US in pieces, and then flew over a crew of engineers and techs to put it back together. They had a few extra days in the US at the end of the process, so the US crew and the Czech crew agreed that it'd be fun to go fishing.

They stopped by a grocery store on the way out. When the Czech guys saw there weren't any lines and food was plentiful, they got upset. They thought they were being shown propaganda. The group ended up cancelling the fishing trip and spending the whole day just driving all over town and stopping at all sorts of grocery stores, big and small, to prove that they were seeing the real experience of real Americans instead of an elaborate deception.

[0] http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/mikoyan-gurevich-mig-... -- I worked here for several years, and heard the story from multiple sources, including the notes Jim Blue wrote about it.
Edward Tufte was a Proto-Phreaker (#aaronswnyc Part 1)
A Winning Cloud Technology Concept
While Graham's Number is very, very large, there is another number that dwarfs it:

TREE(3): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kruskal%27s_tree_theorem

From the article:

The TREE sequence begins TREE(1) = 1, TREE(2) = 3, then suddenly TREE(3) explodes to a value so enormously large that many other "large" combinatorial constants, such as Friedman's n(4), are extremely small by comparison. A lower bound for n(4), and hence an extremely weak lower bound for TREE(3), is A(A(...A(1)...)), where the number of A's is A(187196), and A() is a version of Ackermann's function: A(x) = 2↑^(x-1)x in Knuth's up-arrow notation. Graham's number, for example, is approximately A^64(4) which is much smaller than the lower bound A^(A(187196))(1).
Where the owners have the burden of proof of proving that the building didn't do anything wrong.

It's mindblowingly stupid.
I always get kind of depressed with these contests and never enter them, because although I feel that I could come up with a solution, I also think there's probably thousands of other people out there working on the challenge and doing it even better than me.

So I never start.
I really enjoyed reading this. It covers so many different topics and is relatively simple to understand.
What they're doing is actually pretty clever. It might not be such a sensational title after all.
InstallMonetizer quietly starts editing website, privacy policy
Of netbooks, tablets and Linux's revenge
Also AltDrive Online Backup (http://altdrive.com) is unlimited, easy, supports all major operating systems, and allows for a private encryption key [AES-256 CTR Mode encryption] so that customer's file data cannot be read by insiders. It's cheap too.
Why did AAPL close at exactly $500.00 today?
There has been some speculation that there is price fixing involved, but I find that really hard to believe for a stock with around 470 billion market cap: that would take an insane amount of funds. Is it just coincidence?
I thought the post was promoting the "Pick Four" book?
Yeah. Interestingly I got all the way to the download with Chrome 25 Beta (for Android) but then it couldn't handle the data URI.
I solve the problem by keeping the socks paired using sock holders while they are washed. Also by using different colors for each family member, you solve the distribution problem.

http://www.sockpro.com/
> "real" communism, one which is say, managed my an AI, with no one small group of humans in power, is probably going to be fair and equal.

Any rational agent, whether biological or artificial, A) possesses a set of preferences, and B) seeks to maximize its preferences. If an AI obtains its set of preferences for maximization from a group of privileged programmers or creators, then a small group of humans is still in power in your scenario. If the AI is responsible for deriving its own set of random preferences, then it is effectively operating as another individual in society with no deterministic guarantees on behavior, and to grant it governing authority is equivalent to unchecked dictatorship.
damn you lucky. Other places that have stock have jacked the price up to $550 or so.
Interesting and useful.

(I have seen so many posts discussing programming stuffs here without a single line of code and you are offering real suggestion and giving back to the opensource community, you've done a great job, thanks.)
Face to Face with Kim Dotcom as he launches Mega
Graham's number is big, sure. But in a similar duel[1] between two MIT professors, they settled on this number: “The smallest number bigger than any number that can be named by an expression in the language of first order set-theory with less than a googol (10^100) symbols.” Try and beat that! :)

[1] http://tech.mit.edu/V126/N64/64largenumber.html
If you take the reality of the situation instead of the claims of the officials, then there has never been a communist country in the world and certainly not in NK.
Have you ever worked for Apple or are you just speculating? Your observations are incongruent with my time there. You definitely do not need to be a fanboy to work there.

At an all hands, someone asked SJ why the pay was low and he gave some wise ass remark followed by 'you own stock, don't you?'
Maintaining law and order in the community is not only the responsibility of the police. The police cannot be everywhere, all the time. They can piece together a picture of what's going on by interviewing nearby residents after the fact, but in these sorts of communities it can be months or years before the police become aware of such activity and address it. People in the community have to participate, and businesses have a special responsibility to make sure their property is not used for illegal activity.

Yes, a motel owner is supposed to be generally aware of how many people come and go during the day, what kind of people, etc. This is not a high expectation, and it's the price of living in civilized society.

I'm not sure what you're background is, but safe, civilized communities don't spring up like mushrooms in a damp field. That's not the nature of humanity. Cooperating with the police and actively taking steps to keep illegal activity in check is what separates good working class neighborhoods from the ghetto.
NTFS support is better now than it was then. I think (but welcome corrections) that Windows, Linux (kernel) and OS X can all read and write NTFS now. There are extra drivers for OS X. I'm not sure what they provide. There is a problem with the lack of a real chkdsk outside of Windows. Sometimes the only advice to fix a problem is to run chkdsk in windows twice, but usually the problems that can be fixed by that are caused by people doing silly things like unplugging a drive while writing to it.

UDF on Wikipedia is interesting:

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems)

(EDIT: Wow, I didn't realise how much of it there is, and how bad my copy and paste is.)

* Maximum filename length: 255 bytes

* Allowable characters in directory entries: Any Unicode except NUL

* Maximum pathname length: 1,023 bytes

* Maximum file size: 16 EB

* Maximum volume size: 2 TB (hard disc) 8 TB (optical disc)

* Stores file owner: Yes

* POSIX file permissions: Yes

* Creation timestamps: Yes

* Last access/ read timestamps: Yes

* Last content modification timestamps: Unknown

* Disk copy created: Unknown

* Last metadata change timestamps: Yes

* Last archive timestamps: Yes

* Access control lists: Yes

* Security/ MAC labels: No

* Extended attributes/ Alternate data streams/ forks: Yes

* Checksum/ ECC: No

* Max timestamp granularity: unknown
Watching too much Foxy News, aren't we now?
They probably just want to serve embedded video in a way that they can't be accused of contribution to copyright infringement. What they added is a layer of encryption. But can they do video playback on an encrypted stream? What in-browser video player works with encryption keys?
Graham's number is typically cited as the largest number that has ever been seriously used in a mathematical proof, as the Wikipedia article says, but Busy Beaver passes it very quickly.

One of the nasty little characteristics of BB that Aaronson describes, but can stand to be reiterated since I've noticed many people don't seem to quite follow it, is that any mathematical algorithm you can encode into a Turing Machine in some number of rules X, is therefore at most the top-end bound of BB(X), and more likely (which in this case is serving as mathematician's-understatement-speak for "certainly"), not even close. And for all that the TM "programming language" isn't that efficient, certainly almost anything you can describe in a reasonable English paragraph is, say, well less than 100 states in a TM. For all of Graham's Number's stonking size, in algorithmic terms, it still isn't that complicated.

Generally speaking, human attempts to create Big Numbers by fancy recursively-applied algorithms are still quite simple to put into a TM. This is why it's an interesting point that we don't even understand what exactly a BB(5) solution is doing; a mere five states and the human mind is already lost, lost, lost. I think of Busy Beaver as showing in its own way just how thoroughly we have not mastered math, and never will master more than a tiny little island that happens to be relatively easy to follow, because BB shows us that we don't have to swim out into the great sea of "all math" very far at all for there to be monsters.
What can be said about this?
Small point: You don't even need the name.

Big point: I wouldn't want it user-facing (e.g. the ubiquitous self-checkout that is online shopping), but it might be a nice tool for power users (e.g. cashiers).
Just Don't Fit In
"Imagine if the funeral home could rent access to these, as long as it wouldn't seem undignified. (I'm not too good of a judge of this)."

No... it'd be fine, just hang a suit on it. If you rotate fast enough you could simulate hugging or patting people's back while they're hysterically crying. They won't even know the difference, and it will look totally normal and dignified...
Not true, you're forgetting about automatic synchronization.

With Dropbox, I only have to worry about maintaining one place, the Dropbox. It syncs across all my devices.

Without that, I'd have to sync files manually whenever I delete/rename/change them... I hope you see that it's not the same.
Another big problem is their attempt to prevent mandating any open codecs.
Can anyone access mega.co.nz?