skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They patented a scientific process

It seems they've patented the result of a process, not the process itself. The seeds the farmer bought are patented.
"Lots of people aren't curious"

every child is curious, we just beat that out of them because the questions sometimes make adults uncomfortable
Ask HN: What are some best practices/strategies for backing up a web app
I'm building a social bookmarking site and I'm looking for some advice on automated backups (scripts, third-party services, etc.) so my app doesn't turn into the next Ma.gnolia.
I'm a beginner Haskeller and I'm really enjoying this blog so far. After reading through a few tutorials, it's refreshing to get some theoretical background to it all. It helps make the language more intuitive, even if it's not teaching concrete uses of the theory. Subscribed!
> Lots of people aren't curious

Lots of adults aren't curious, but it seems like most small children are. What's going on there?
To be fair to batterseapower: Ubuntu on the desktop could be an example of not-that-mainstream software which doesn't always work well. Unity at the beginning deserved its reputation, that it was a change from a stable Gnome 2 to an unstable experiment.

Guess it is not so bad anymore, but if you liked Ubuntu in production servers, going the route of a small window manager could be more your style (don't know if I'm stating stuff obvious to you, just in case).
I think you're right that it's a generally accepted fact that the average man has more testosterone than the average women.

Also I think you're right that it's a generally accepted fact that high levels of testosterone in animals is associated with more risky and aggressive behaviour.

But I'm very sceptical of the way you've linked levels of testosterone in average males to risky and aggressive behaviour, and additionally linked risky and aggressive behaviour to being more employable in tech.

However if you really believe this, I had a look on wikipedia and it links to a paper that says that men with high levels of testosterone are more likely to drink five or more alcoholic drinks a day, and to smoke. Also that men with low levels of testosterone are more likely to be obese.

Wikipedia also links to another study that says that mens' levels of testosterone generally lower when they fall in love, and recover about 1-3 years into their relationships.

Maybe you should consider this when you're next hiring, and go for a skinny, smoking, drinking male, who is not in the early stages of a relationship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#cite_note-pmid1019...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#cite_note-pmid1517...
I learned the multiplication tables by memorization. Would I have been better served by having numbers explained to me, and then a guided, self-learning experience where I figured out the theory of multiplication myself?
Here is a good article showing how to implement perlin noise and its outputs: http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/models/m_perlin.htm

Also, *yeah.
Oh right, so I am not imagining things. Or maybe you have "installed something you shouldn't have"? I had to buy a couple of new routers back then for my first-gen Macbook Air simply because it couldn't connect to a non-Apple Wi-Fi. There are more examples in this post: http://dear-apple.com/dear-apple-put-yourself-together-82158
Email tool SaneBox is amazing, and worth every penny it costs
You can turn the animation off using the menu at the bottom right. Having written a few blog entries about how much desktop PC technology has stalled out, I chuckle a bit that a modern PC struggles to do some two-dimensional SVG/SMIL animation.

Thanks for the comments. If you like it, you may be among the minority. :)
check out the sagemath project, too.

http://wiki.sagemath.org/sage_mathematica

there are some other electronic notebooks out there but not many do latexification, drawing of inline graphs, etc.
What kind of novice user buys a laptop and questions changing the OS, or even knows what an OS is, or that there is even an alternative? I think you claims are ... dubious. Novice users, like my grandmother, never ask me if they should install Windows. They just ask me to fix it after it breaks. And it breaks often. On the contrary, when I put something like an iPad in their hands I go a lot longer between support calls. That's my experience having dealt with more than a few 'novice users'.
I have ~40000 songs in iTunes, what about you? And Chrome was working fine until I moved to a new house. Regarding me being the only person with this – maybe you can tip the other guys in the right direction too? http://google.com/search?q=chrome+error+324
Let's invert that and close the loop: memorization is by nature a side-effect of accessing knowledge for some useful purpose. Accessing knowledge for no purpose but to memorize it is, by that definition, pointless.
Related and on-topic: Scott Hanselman wrote something similar a while back....

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUps...

Makes for hilarious and introspective reading at the same time (if that can be done somehow!)

P.S: Here's the old HN thread on this one:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4531549
"how do people consider a "language reference" as a good documentation?"

"when I'm picking up a new language or a new tool, the most important things is to have examples on how to use the language to get things done"

You look for different things when you think about how to implement the language. In a sense, the implementation doesn't really care about the use cases: it merely cares that the behavior matches the stated behavior in the documentation.

the IDEAL documentation for a developer is a proper PEG/LALR grammar for the language. That way you can properly parse expressions. Clearly they didnt provide it.

The documentation gives enough information to reduce an abstract expression from the GUI down to a mathematica expression, which is enough to build an AST. From there, it's a matter of building up each component to match the semantics.

"Another problem I have with mathematica is that although the different functions are extensively referenced (I won't use the word documented), the language itself is not very well explained, and by language I mean how to piece all the functions together and more into one coherent piece of software."

That's the job of the programmer. The documentation should explain how each bit works and the rules for combining the bits, but it's up to you to take the pieces and build something.

Think about Legos: you have a pile of bricks, and no one is going to tell you how to build a rocket ship using those pieces. That's up to you :)

"Take the unix manual for instance. The first thing I do when checking the manual is to search for example. Reading the list of switches is useless to me unless I have a working example of how the thing works."

The manpages do a poor job of explaining the zen of unix. Once you start thinking of operations as transforming streams of text, then you start thinking of tasks in terms of smaller units.

For example, a few minutes ago I needed a way to upgrade all global `npm` modules. I knew there was a way to get JSON lists (npm list -g --parseable --json), which lines I wanted (the ones starting with ' "'), and what I want to do with those (get the name and install). Putting it together, one straightforward way is

npm list -g --parseable --json 2>/dev/null | grep '^ "[a-z-]*": {' | sed 's/^ *"//;s/".*$//' | while read x; do sudo npm install -g $x; done

Now, the documentation doesn't explain that this is a way to do what I want. But the documentation gives enough information to know where to look.
I had no idea that redhat had a magazine, thank you for that
Thanks, shin_lao! I got a tweet about this too. Holy cow, that was not intuitive. I tried swiping from the top, but the context menu at the bottom appeared. Apparently, not a long-enough swipe from the top.

So I discovered the "sort of task list" you get by swiping rightward from the left and then back to the left. I tried then dragging the thumbnails up, down, left, right. Nothing.

I figured eventually I'd take the time to search for a how-to, but what I was doing was just a stream-of-consciousness.
The Double Agent Who Infiltrated Al Qaeda
Even if you had achieved that, you would memorize the multiplication tables eventually!
Exactly, I have linked to that post a while back as well.
The curiosity we see in children at play rarely translates to the kind of self-directed learning that Nabeel holds up as an ideal. This is not the education system's fault--ask any teacher and they'll tell you that they'd love for children to be engaged and curious, and they're frustrated that it frequently feels like leading them by the nose and making them drink.

But there's another side as well: Watch children at play, and you'll see that children frequently sort themselves into leaders and followers. Children are often curious, but very often they're also looking for someone to give them cues and direction and structure. Children are complex; people are complex.
Interesting stuff - and specifically, the numbers recommended are interesting. I've heard a 4-hour work day recommended in a few places.

Personally, I tried working 4 hours a day some years ago, whilst dealing with a death in the family. I was startled at how close to my usual 8+hour workday my productivity was - indeed, I'm not sure, looking at output alone, you could have told my 4-hour period apart from my usual work cycle.

I'll be interested to hear if anyone tries this 90-minute cycle specifically, and how it works out for them!
BTW. Why didn't you exchange your iPhone 4 if you home-button was faulty???

I had mine for 2 years (before I switched to iPhone 5), I didn't have any problems with it.
I was thinking about getting a Kindle, but then every book review on Amazon includes a complaint about book being unreadable on Kindle. And I was interested mainly in books about programming that include listings which get garbled. So I thought why bother... At least I can read PDF on iPad.
You get utility from knowing your times tables proportionally to how often you use them. The difference between the amount of time and energy it took you to memorize them deliberately and the amount of time you would spend manually multiplying until you learned them organically defines whether or not that was a useful thing for you to do.
1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS. World's highest resolution video surveillance
https://bugreport.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/RadarWeb.woa It requires an Apple ID, but otherwise you are free to submit bugs... It isn't brilliant.
Yes, a little biased against the laptop form-factor. But mostly biased against Google owning all my stuff for me. I'd rather I own my stuff and access it everywhere without "synchronization" from my compute/data server. But that might as well be science fiction.
They aren't patenting natural organisms. In this case, they are patenting specific modifications that provides glyophosphate resistance. This is a fairly legit patent, and if you don't believe this should occur; then basically any patent modifying organisms should be banned, which will have far reaching consequences not just to agriculture, but medicine, bioenergy, chemicals, and biomaterials.
MongoDB: How to drop databases and collections
The real question is why have we devs been forced to bastardize this OS since 2009 in order to actually use the darn thing? Where's the innovation Google? Where's the Chromebook for Devs? Because I bet if we looked at the numbers, we're the only ones buying these things anyways.
This comment really clashes with your user name =P
You are right, novice users don't install operating systems, but most laptops come with one pre-installed. Not knowing any better they could simply go by aesthetics when they select computers. In this case they are likely to end up with an Apple product: the computer itself, as well as the UI, looks very good.

edit: I was a bit confused by your reply, but I now see why: I wrote 'install Windows' when perhaps should have written 'use Windows, or 'buy a computer with anything but Windows'. My mistake!
+1. Interesting idea for a research article, but post when you've done the research, not when you've just had the interesting wild hypothesis.
You assume no new libraries will ever need to be written.
That's what I meant to say, why haven't the prices of those professional machines plummeted down to under $100? They're still very expensive.

You can imagine there being a machine that does all the cleaning, maintenance, etc. with a push of a button. It's just not as affordable as machines that burn 650 MB of audio data onto optical disks.
This reminded me all the hours I sunk into playing around with terragen (http://planetside.co.uk/). Definitely remember playing around in photoshop with filters (clouds! and difference clouds!... which I guess is just perlin noise) making height maps.
I apply a few drops of alcohol and it works again for a while. I was about to go to change it a few times, when it is really pissing me off, but then I would have to put sim card somewhere else, and this Android phone I have is kinda horrid, plus I will loose my contacts. I have an old iPhone 3G, but you can't sync iCloud contacts to it either. And then I have to pay for what I believe is a manufacturer's defect. So I am just slowly working through a bottle of alcohol.
"Startup wisdom holds that startup ideas don't matter too much because execution is everything."

Boy I hope that's not what people really think.

Ideas are everything. Execution is everything. You get one wrong, you get everything wrong.

You have to think holistically top to bottom. I like his overall point, which is basically that ideas about execution are the ones that matter. But the ideas at the beginning matter too.
It says he no longer works on Mathics since being hired by Wolfram. Alas often a way to try to weakene open source competition...
Get way more out of Netflix with three simple steps
My relatives' Windows PCs always break and it is always a real pain to fix them. There are also problems on the Macs in the family, but they are generally more wrt. 3rd party software. It is far from perfect in Mac-land, but definitely much better than Windows. It is not a "just works" platform!
Okay, maybe 90%, all my friends who had iPhone 4, and most of the people I see around with iPhone 4 have the problem. How can I tell? They have accessibility thing on the screen.
Agreed. There's a big difference between "I don't know" and "I don't know, therefore...". People jump to therefore based on assumptions and that's not science.

The next step after "I don't know" should be "let's investigate objectively".
Reminds me of this approach to conditionals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus#Boolea...
Copy infringement of movies is your choice. You could just watch it and not redistribute it.

Copy infringement of seeds is by design. You cannot plant, grow, sell or process your crop without the basic operation of replicating the original.
I'm not sure I understand the purpose of this really. If it was just a thought experiment then cool, I guess.
Glyphosphate (Roundup) is a now off-patent general herbicide that will pretty much kill everything (even your crop) unless it is genetically modified a la Monsanto's RoundUp ready crops. This is often how Monsanto finds people to sue; people that buy Roundup without buying the seeds.
What device are you using to read it?

Middle-click should open in a new tab. Looks like a difference of behavior between Firefox and Chrome though. Firefox apparently isn't sending a middle click to the click handler on the anchor tag and I incorrectly assumed that would be the case for all browsers. I'll get that fixed up.

Scrolling though?

And all the griping about the background is nearly convincing me to turn it off by default.
The ARM Chromebook looks to be a much nicer piece of hardware than anything under $250 on Amazon's top 20 list of netbooks[0]; bigger screen, dead silent (no spinning HDD, no fans), great battery life, and a keyboard/touchpad better than nearly every low/mid-end PC laptop I've used.

And you lose this benefit if you go outside CrOS as described in the article (I'm fine using it as a SSH terminal myself), but they're more or less disposable. I could chuck mine out the window, watch it get trampled in a conveniently timed parade, run out to Best Buy and pick up another one, and I'm right back where I was minus only $250 and an hour (incl. drive time and re-syncing).

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computer-Accessories-Netb...
Ask: UK Law and Twitter
Has anyone successfully been sued for libel regarding Direct Messages to third parties? Or has there been any UK legal precedents about Direct Messages?

Thanks in advance.
please consider adding an 'fsm-trace' or some such, which is basically an array of values, each having time, input-msg, current-state and next-state (at the very least), so that debugging these becomes easier...
Nothing wrong with black suits, in London theyre very common among business people.
Not everyone has the luxury of wearing t-shirts and jeans to the office.
> As soon as I stopped building computers from off-the-shelf parts

The most stable computers I've ever owned have been those that I've built myself, while 90% of my repair work comes from Dell and HP computers that barely last 2 years.
Opinion: An Explosion of Devices
I know about the Radar, yes you can submit, but then what do you see? http://d.pr/i/8bto 0 problems! Great. I am talking about an Open bug tracker, not this.
False dichotomy.
If you use RAII, exceptions, and smart pointers in C++ there will be no leaks, no double-free, and not even a need for a GC.
I know it is difficult to make a point on the Internet, but resource leaks really are a solved problem in C++.
Before Facebook there was “Surfbook”—now pay up
> they're frustrated that it frequently feels like leading them by the nose and making them drink.

And aren't they? I mean, isn't that exactly what we are talking about?

> Watch children at play

This also cuts to the core of the issue. It seems to me like children are curious all the time, and they don't seem to occupy states like "playing" and "working". That's basically what our industrial-age public school system is supposed to teach, right? Number one lesson, sit down and be quiet-- you're not playing, you're learning, and it's serious.
You can read PDFs on a Kindle, too. That's how I read all of my programming books.
Those exams required minimal time (for Einstein -- a student of average intelligence might have a different experience).

If passing the exams requires spending most of your school time preparing for them, it's a very different situation.
While Monsanto does sell seed under the Dekalb brand, they also license to the technology to other seed companies, so it is not simply a matter of buying Monsanto seeds.

Additionally, I don't have my contract with me at the moment, but I seem to recall the requirement of planting a percentage of non-GM crops as part of the agreement of using said seed. Planting RR crops year after year on the same ground doesn't work very well.
Everything except Chrome works. I think it is also related to CloudFlare, but I am not alone in this world of pain: http://google.com/search?q=chrome+error+324
Can you get 6h battery life for $250? I have the Samsung one and it delivers on the battery life promise.
LLVM is also useful for runtime code generation (e.g., in rubinius, a Ruby implementtion), and as a prepackaged optimizer for other compilers (e.g., GHC, the Glasgow Haskell compiler). Both those packages have users outside the compiler research community...
A month after switching to Macs
Sure they do. Right here. :-)
I would be surprised if the built-in firewall even blocks any outgoing connections by default. I'm not on my MBP at the moment so I can't check for sure.
Interesting to mention that I don't have this problem. Chrome displays a listing of the root folder on my hard drive and Safari opens Finder.
If you are interested in ideas that can arise from putting some hard restrictions in the same vein, see "programming with nothing"[1]. SICP also explores this topic slightly in the exercise about Church numerals and thought experiments on how you could try to reimplement special forms using functions.

[1] http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing
Sexpr parser in Go
Everything else is even worse.
Are you still running Curvio? I couldn't find anything newer than November 2012 on the web site.
The N4 is the fastest phone I've ever owned. 4 cores running @ 1.7Ghz + a GPU. Stunning performance.
I think ACLU was basically protesting the absurdity of DHS's claim.
But it has a smaller screen, so I am not bothering.
Chicago too. And the landowner can also be be ticketed by the police for not clearing his snow.

It seems like the OP is from Scotland, where snow rarely falls and when it does, it doesn't stick around. I wonder if snow removal laws are more a matter of climate than culture.
If you're interested in this kind of stuff, you might like the paper "A survey of procedural methods for terrain modelling": http://www.cg.its.tudelft.nl/~rafa/myPapers/bidarra.3AMIGAS....
Ummmm. It is possible to run a full-blown Ubuntu including arbitrary kernels etc. Some are doing it.

This is just an easier method if all you want is access to a powerful Debian userland: it turns out that Debian already solved the problem of creating a self-consistent cross-compiled directory tree ages ago so it makes sense to reuse that solution here.
Exactly. Just sit straight on the chair, don't move too much, don't look funny, bored, don't yawn, don't chew gum, don't drink, don't eat, don't look at that bug that's flying by, don't draw, don't chew on your pencil don't talk back. Heck, don't even talk unless the you're talked to!
I never memorized the tables, I either had a calculator, or on the SAT and GRE or other times I don't have a calculator and need to multiply, I just draw dots and then count them up.
Yes I mean Digital Color Meter. You're right, I was unable to find this option. But since then I moved to a better solution anyway.
Yes, but then you're stuck using C++, RAII, and exceptions. Let's not even get into which smart pointer you should use--a Googler I know has recounted stories of massive internal mailing list arguments over exactly which of the half-dozen smart pointer implementations they should be using.
I got honked at several times in Hamburg for riding my bike in the street instead of the horrible sidewalk bike lane next to it. But I get that occasionally here in the US where the street is the lawful place for the bicyclist to be, so maybe it's more a matter of road rage than a Teutonic sense of order.
But the process I assume you're referring to (farmers saving seeds) has changed, and just in the past 50-75 years. Now farms are massive monocultures and are susceptible to pests so they require pesticide resistent crops.

Whether you think that's a good thing or not is another story. Or maybe you think farmers should be able to save GMO seeds. I won't argue with you there, but the process of farming most definitely has changed, and it's not the same as it was thousands of years go.
Good enough isn't good in crypto when people are trusting it for secure communications. Also why what's the difference (functionally) between cryptocat and pidgin/adium with OTR turned on? In the latter case I believe you can even use gtalk securely.
New 'The Private Bay' documentary released for free on YouTube
You aren't seeing the distinction between a patented process for producing roundup ready seed and a patent on the lifeform and all of it's descendants in perpetuity.

The owner of the Haber Process patent has no say in what the ammonia gets used for after they have sold said ammonia. Nor should they.