skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"There are legitimate complaints about access to case law. While all federal courts that I'm aware of freely post their opinions on their websites (e.g. http://www.ca3.uscourts.gov/recentop/week/recprec.htm), the same isn't true for all state courts"

The part about federal courts is incorrect.

Maybe you meant "all federal appeals courts", which is almost true.
However, at the federal district court level, a significant percentage of federal district courts only post opinions through PACER.

Here is a good example, our lovely friends in the eastern district of texas:

http://www.txed.uscourts.gov/page1.shtml?location=attorney

"
Judicial Opinions
The E-Government Act of 2002 requires that the court provide access to the substance of all written opinions issued by the court, regardless of whether such opinions are to be published in the official court reporter, in a text searchable format.Written Opinions are now searchable and available at no cost to CM/ECF and PACER users."

There is no other option
One of the side projects I have to embark on is writing a companion to TAOCP that shows how to implement the algorithms in a functional language, probably Scheme or some subset of Common Lisp. The main complaint I have about TAOCP is Knuth's insistence on using assembly language to illustrate the algorithms -- otherwise, they give what is probably the most in-depth description of the motivation and analysis of algorithms I have seen (much more detailed than CLRS, though CLRS is more complete).

Also, it is worth pointing out that there is no "complete TAOCP" yet. It remains a work-in-progress; I am looking forward to Volume 4B (though I have yet to actually finish any of the current volumes).
well, let's look.

map f (h:t) = f h:map f t

map f [] = []

member x (h:t) = x == h || member x t

member _ [] = False

I think the only difference is that you can't match for equality directly in the pattern.
When weighing this, also consider the fact that professional game developers get paid relatively little, especially per actually-worked-hour, due to an enormous oversupply. The opposite is true for defense and Android developers.
MIT hacked again, URLs redirected
I did not know that! Thanks for sharing this.
The issues with Charm have absolutely nothing to do with my position on outsourcing. They're two unrelated points that occurred in the same conversation :)

It wasn't the development that was the issue. It was the preview of things to come, running an infrastructure product, and the general inability to hire somebody to just take that over for us entirely. Do not want.

As for "core"… what does "core" mean?

If you are helpless to fix things in your product, even on a stopgap emergency basis, you are going to be in for some miserable times. Unlike writing or design, code is completely impenetrable if you don't know a lot already.
keep them for another half a century. then sell them as antiques.
If it was just a matter of being in the wrong rating category, it seems like it would make more sense for apple to just re-categorize it. Any insight into why they pulled the app instead of doing that?
Cydia running over 20 million iOS devices in the last 2 months
> "On a tech centered website such as Hacker News, it seems a perfectly reasonable position to ask someone not to appeal to emotion in an attempt to garner page views and/or karma"

This is bordering on deliberate obtuseness. This is not a matter of appealing to emotion. This appealing to experience and asking for guidance during a fragile period of development.

In a "tech-centered" community, we should do our best to nurture young people who want to follow in our footsteps. I simply have no respect for anyone who can't see the value in that. It's the worst kind of childish, self-centered worldview.
One Button Deploys Made Easy
From a random "Show HN" a few weeks ago to what seems like a polished company that's been around for years, I just wanted to say you guys are absolutely killing it (and making a joke of all the dev power that probably went into Google's own inferior Tag Manager).
Benefits of Being Under-funded
Show HN: The best dribbble shots, every day.
I think you make a great point--the thing is that is really depends on the program, and students should meet students currently in the program, chat with them, and see how things are for them.
There's a bit of lipping it involved (especially across the 12th), but most of the secret is to drop the back of the tongue (usually somewhat arched) to open up the chamber of the mouth/throat and allow you to play with the resonance a bit. You'll usually hear that run with a bit more of a "wah" (I'm pretty sure I remember that being the official, technical term ^_^)to the timbre than is normal for a clarinet, tightening up into a more normal timbre at the top (where, honestly, fingering is mostly wishful thinking, and has less to do with selecting overtones than lipping does).

On a somewhat related note, the advent of MIDI and the subsequent wind-type controllers meant that I'd spent a whole bunch of money on a Lyricon the previous year for nothing...
One of the thing I usually find hardest about trying out any new web-stack is not necessarily writing the code but wrangling with all the ecosystem BS around it.

It's nice for a tutorial to acknowledge this and give you a VM to play around with.
Los Angeles Hacker News Meetup [video]
This is unfortunate; it would be nice if dissertations were the beginning of a "forever" project, or perhaps the continuation of one. Sadly, most of the dissertations I have seen have been a bunch of quick projects stapled together with one overarching theme, with a minority being answers to big questions (like Craig Gentry's thesis on FHE). I can think of only one, in fact, that was the beginning of someone's "forever" project, and that is Darse Billing's dissertation on computer poker players (he seems to be spending year after year working on poker AI).

My experience in grad school has been this: we are discouraged from having "forever" projects, and encouraged to have "lots of little projects that you finish and forget about" dissertations.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was done after some parent complained.
My Standing Desk Hack
The Touchscreen Paradigm
What did she do her PhD in? Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall seeing it in her article/rant.

I'm on the second semester of getting a PhD in chemical engineering and so far I love it. My undergraduate school was much more of a time-sink (then again, it was rated one of the least happy schools in the US). Right now, I can do my research anywhere and anytime I feel like it. I get to use the world's best equipment at the best national labs and I get to guide the direction of my projects with the help of my advisor -- who is also amazing by the way.

So maybe that's kind of a humble-brag, but it should be. The author shared her n=1 miserable experience and I'm sharing my n=1 great experience so perhaps you should learn about getting a PhD yourself and decide if that's what you want to do instead of listening to people moan about what martyrs grad students are.
Why would they get into trouble with Github?
Introduction to Haskell, Lecture 2 is Live
Okay, some courts post through PACER, but the opinions are still free, both "as in speech" and "as in beer."
There is a great Jane Jacobs book about the death and life of American cities. http://www.amazon.com/American-Cities-Anniversary-Edition-Li.... It goes into how architects and other well intended people overthought and did things which destroyed usability of cities.

Also, OT, but "The New Topograpphics" is a great and seminal photographic book about the new American Landscape.
I agree this should be a civil matter, but don't complicate matters like this. Typically, wronged parties with limited means are able to hire lawyers on contingency. That's true even if they're facing giant insurance companies that have hundreds of lawyers on retainer. The defendants in this sort of case are likely to have much shallower pockets.
Is there support for ecommerce tracking with Google Analytics?
This.

Mono is awesome. I haven't used linux in years, but I managed to install linuxmint and setup Mono + Nginx + ServiceStack over the weekend. It's a bit difficult at first, but when it works it's nice. You can even build in visual studio and copy the files over to your linux box.
I have seen Informix, DB2 (which one? there are four code bases), and Sybase. Oracle is still the #1 database for many reasons. Is it vastly superior? No. But it's not what I would consider bloatware anymore than another commercial RDBMS.
Great thanks Ian!
Programming Bootcamp Turns Lawyer Into Hacker
Assuming I understand it correctly, the paradoxical thing about this article is that it seems to imply the engineers currently working there would have failed this interview question.
Ruby Toolbox is a great source. I think opensourcerails.com has an equal and opposite value. Often times it is difficult to visualize how all of the tools fit together, before you start. Having a site where you can look through an open source fully functional site and figure out which tools were used to create it is helpful, for the beginner.
The idea is that each account has a balance. Say I have a checking and savings account: there's one row for each and the bank will kindly let either of them get a negative balance provided the sum of both balances is positive.

You may not care for this schema design, but I think most people would be surprised that Oracle silently corrupts data and violates constraints here.
> If Apple is indeed getting back into the game of selective, uneven enforcement of their guidelines...

This never stopped. Selective enforcement is a policy that they enforce, and have freely admitted to.
The easiest way to test out Firefox OS
That's funny that we both posted about how great it is to get a ChE PhD. Glad you're enjoying it.
You want more examples then?

* iTunes installing several start up processes and Quicktime players

* printer drivers CDs installing all manner of crapware

* OEM bloatware

* Winamp installer recommends all sorts of sponsored crap

* Adobe's terrible update system (ok, not really what we're discussing here, but i resent having to reboot my entire OS just for an update to a PDF viewer)

* and the amount of programs that install start up processes just to check for updates is depressing

* Even Microsoft themselves are guilty of pushing crapware (eg Bing seach bars) in Windows update

....and that's just off the top of my head.

I know this sounds terribly negative but it's fair to say that Windows' current method for allowing developer to run rampant with 3rd party installers is sub par by today's standards. And I think even Microsoft realise this because they're now switching to a package manager with online repositories with Win8. I just hope that their main focus isn't to fleece the developers like Apple do.
http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders-Amsterdam-NL/

Go and try by yourself man, you'l
be amazed :)
You're absolutely right, and I'd call that a failing of the law. Just because someone intends to create a system with some degree of security does not mean people who access said unsecured system should be considered criminals.
Perhaps a better title for the series would be "Getting Started with Django in the Real World"

Because in the real world, you need to know things like chef, vagrant, ubuntu, apt-get, pip, virtualenv, heroku, ssh... if you want to do anything beyond building a demo app that only runs locally. I use all this stuff every day and I'm looking forward to going through this tutorial.

I'm also quite excited about the prebuilt VM that targets Heroku as my colleagues and I were just about to do this ourselves to retool our deploy process. This'll be an awesome start, thanks!
How academia betrayed Aaron Swartz
Zipcar and the Death of Entrepreneurship
> And large urban centers like NYC, SF, and Boston aren't driven by development companies with profit motives?

They also have to contend with larger local populations, often with a stronger political voice. It's also more capital-intensive and planning-intensive to build in a city than to plop down the same McMansions on cul-de-sacs outside of town, so there's a lot less uniformity. So the answer to your rhetorical question is no, not like suburbia is.
hey we don't support it yet, but we've gotten a couple requests for this, so we'll be looking into it soon!
These are just the developer devices. The first Firefox OS devices sold to end-users in Brazil will be manufactured by ZTE and/or Alcatel. (Note: I am a Mozilla employee, but I don't know anything about the Telefonica devices beyond what's been publicly announced.)

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/07/02/firefox-mobile-os/
Github, I always comment this here, and will continue to do so as I know you monitor these threads.

Please let us have unlimited private repositories for single user repos.

I'm a freelancer and would like to use Github for both personal (which I can open source) and commercial (I can't share the source) projects.

Currently your pricing scheme is borked. I can 7$ a month for only 5 repositories. That's insanely expensive for such a small repository with MINIMAL traffic in an out.

Remember: I'm the only one commiting code here, it's a freelance gig.

Should you offer this feature of free private repositories, you'll become my sole off-site code backup. BitBucket offers free unlimited with a limit of 5 contributors per repo. If they can do it, why can't you?
Interesting, thanks! I use Windows mostly, but I dabble in Ubuntu every now and then as well, and I might have a spare computer soon, so I though I'd give it a try. Didn't want to bother with it if it wasn't ready for prime time though.
The system was designed to be hierarchical: as you go further toward the left (assuming LTR languages), each part of the name would tell you something more specific about the server. The name "somesite.com", for example, would be for a COMmercial enterprise called somesite, while "somesite.net" was for a NETwork service called somesite. Country-code top-level domains would let you know that you were specifically dealing with that country.

The .com and .net top-level domains have pretty much lost their meanings, as have some country codes, like Tuvalu (.tv) and Christmas Island (.cx). Without their meanings, the system does indeed make less sense than it once did.
In either case, how is what the woman did with this conference a good thing? On the one hand, she categorized people as "male or female" and on the other she created a situation where there were a higher proportion of women speaking at the conference than were even in the field.
The article is a pretty good account of the reasons why talented and capable people drop out of Ph.D. programs (often for the best), but the reality is that your mileage may vary - a lot depends on the fit between student and advisor and department. It's definitely a major test of your time management and self-motivation skills.

The battle to find a topic and convince people that your topic is relevant is painful: contrary to popular belief, working in academia is in its own way far more competitive than in the private sector: you're constantly evaluated and critiqued.
Haha, funny there's another chemical engineer on HN. Maybe our major is just a good one for grad school experiences.
I wouldn't take the unpaid internship. It's not worth it. If you're good, you wouldn't be free. There's a developer shortage, don't let these fuckers skin you.
thank you so much :) that means a lot.
A word on cryptography
neither is MIT right now.
Do the voice call minutes include inbound calls? Google voice has unlimited inbound calls and only charges for outbound calls.
Well, you load up your account with $10, and you can use them on text, data, minutes, etc. It's 5c per text.
There are other methods to tests apps. Perhaps Apple needs an anonymous but controlled 'approved beta test' group who willingly give their feedback and save everyone some time and grief.
i don't get what MS is trying to achieve. the market isn't there anymore. so why prop up a business with outside money?

dell for consumers is done. low margin commodities can be done without that kind of overhead. a race to the bottom is profitable for while, but then you reach it and boom.
ITWire still has problems with basic accuracy
The inverted pyramid method seeks max efficiency under the condition of not knowing how long your audience is going to stick around. That's why it's so prominent in journalism - you never know when the reader might just move on, so get the important parts out first. Outside of that condition, its efficiency breaks down and you'd be better off structuring a presentation within the allotted time.

And if that's the kind of relationship you have with your coworkers, someone's probably being overpaid.
When I see images of awesome looking food, I think "Hey, I want to try that!"

Same with pictures of people sky-diving, drinking, racing in fast cars, etc.

All of these things can be pretty dangerous, in fact far more dangerous than having sex. Better start the bans!
I'm curious to hear someone's response to this as well. To me, it seems like a lucky break following by a whole lot of networking.
I am reminded of a comment I heard attributed to Bill Joy which was "Nothing says 'circling the drain' like one former tech leader buying another former tech leader."

I see that there are several reports of this rumor floating around, I suspect that its true and the 'leaker' is someone who is trying to get a better deal by letting the world know you can buy Dell for $14/share. I expect it is a positive for Dell to go private again, but I don't know if its in Microsoft's interest to be part of the game. I expect a successful Dell strategy might be to partner with Redhat and move their product line to something more standard with solid Linux support. Which is to say something closer to Supermicro's strategy but with Redhat on board.
This is the same argument that has been used for decades for many problems. Like making gas $10/gallon to reduce dependence on middle east oil. It never works and is an unamerican argument. It's tantamount to saying Marx had it right all along. If this were 1950-56 i'm sure your argument would have been better received.

That said, what Apple did was ridiculous. Youtube, safari, chrome, Flickr etc etc all have the potential to show nudity. Big deal, the walls of the Uffizi are lined with nudity... Damn Puritans, we're still paying for their religious fundamentalism in this country.
What about non-nude porn? Images that people find gratifying, but don't involve naked women?
This should give you a starting point for speculation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm
"I know Hacker News types think that’s a great list of niches, but it’s actually a really terrible one. You can’t sell to ANY of those people."

This piece of the conversation really left me wanting more, especially since I've been using that very same list with no success over the years. What are some good niches? Better yet, what's a heuristic for picking good niches? She seems to suggest we should focus on an audience we already have, as Nathan has with web developers (designers?), or that we could easily build. So I am the local corporate javascript expert: perhaps I could rally that into an audience of javascript developers or maybe even people that really need javascript developers?
The Getting Started with Django series is off to a great start. Kenneth's soothing voice and background music makes it easy on the ears to listen to. The video quality is also great. The initial subjects are, in my opinion, essential to almost every web developer working in a multi-environment setting. Not to mention a great introduction for those just getting into Django. I'm looking forward to more of Getting Started with Django from Kenneth to see what else is in store for those new to Django and to those that utilize Django often.
InfoVis Online Course opens this week
Media PaaS Offering: Windows Azure Media Services
Mostly-off-topic:

"Gleam" does not mean anything that fits in those sentences. "Glean" would fit in the first sentence, although maybe you'd rather use "discern", or something more pedestrian, like "learn" or "find" or "discover". In the second sentence, both "gleam" and "glean" are nonsensical; maybe you'd like "browse"?
Higher education is important. College is optional.
I think that's because it's a different publisher (i.e. farmed out to Aspyr).

It's also the same version that's up on the Mac App Store which has limited multi player functionality.
Orika, simpler, better and faster Java bean mapping framework
Fellow Korg X5 owner here (in fact, mine is still in perfect working order, sat underneath my bed).

It was an amazing little machine, especially for the money - I had great fun programming the user sound banks to do some Jean Michelle Jarre(ish) pieces.
The Humble Store has a number of Linux games: http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Humble_Store

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a favourite of mine, not sure how easy it is to get a copy of these days though.

DEFCON, Darwinia: http://introversion.co.uk/

Wesnoth is a great turn-based strategy game and has an unusual amount of polish for a FOSS game.

SpringRTS is a really fun RTS, if you can look past the many bugs in the launcher/lobby: http://springrts.com/
CSS Performance, Debugging, Naming Conventions
Fast and easy testing with FBMock
I think we're conflating Snapshot Isolation and MVCC (e.g., Snapshot-isolation/MVCC). MVCC is a general concurrency control mechanism, not an isolation level. Coupling MVCC and Snapshot Isolation is like saying "using locks provides serializability," which is not true in general--it depends on how you use the locks.

That said, Snapshot Isolation can lead to anomalies like Example 1.2: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.142... If you perform additional synchronization (e.g., 2PL, as you describe), then you can get serializability.
FDA FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) Links:

Commonly-requested documents:
http://www.fda.gov/regulatoryinformation/foi/electronicreadi...

File a request:
http://www.fda.gov/RegulatoryInformation/FOI/HowtoMakeaFOIAR...

Structured data about drug reactions ("adverse events") reported to the FDA:
http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInforma...
>I agree, this marketplace approval thing sucks.

No what sucks is as a consumer having apps not do what they are supposed to.
Acqui-hiring Khoi Vinh is the big news here (no offense to his colleagues). He's a huge personality in the design world. "Fast Company named Vinh one of "The 50 Most Influential Designers in America" in September 2011." Congrats to the Mixel team AND Etsy.
I expect it is a positive for Dell to go private again, but I don't know if its in Microsoft's interest to be part of the game.

Even according to your prediction, at worst they get their money back and then some. My guess is that MS wants the next Dell to still be a MS ally. Microsoft isn't going away anytime soon and Dell needs to keep that in mind if they want to be worth more than what it is today.