skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Constant demands for government intervention don't mesh very well with the libertarian ideals surrounding open source. The government telling Microsoft how to design its software isn't good for the industry. And, it is just a small step away from regulating what end-users do on their own computers. We don't want to go there.

With the popularity of Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, the success of Mac OS X, and the widespread availability of Linux, does anybody really think Microsoft is illegally leveraging a monopoly? I don't.

Should the final version of Windows 7 switch your default browser to IE? No. But, even if does, is that something that we should go crying to governments about? Absolutely not.

Keep the government as far away from our industry as possible, or we'll all regret it later.
So you're suggesting deading the people that respond to spam email?

That would also works for me.
sorry i think it is a service not a free software
Agreed. I've seen people in both linguistics and bio looking for CS RAs in the past few months. If you have a BA in Software Engineering then I agree it's probably useless for anything but programming, but a good BS in CS can get you a job in finance or a spot in law school (and some of my fellow CS majors from undergrad are doing those very things right now). It's definitely not a limiting degree.
And that's why I said education, not degree. Every person graduating with a Bachelor's in CS has holes in their CS education; different departments stress different parts of CS, and even inside a department, two people can often get very different educations.

Although the attitude "the bits that I don't know are the bits that I haven't needed to use" is dangerous, since you never really know if you need something until you understand it.

Anyway, your point seems to be if you're going to learn CS concepts anyway, then don't choose CS as a major. You're taking "going to learn CS concepts" as a given. The author did not.
>> "Rails is already great on performance and is much faster than PHP, but there is work we can do to make it even faster," Katz said.

Rails is faster than PHP. Interesting. I wonder how Rails compares to Python, or Java, or... Ruby?

I'm gonna assume that was a misquote.
I've been wondering about Django as a MS Access replacement as of late. I currently use either Rails or Sinatra, but Ruby has one major flaw as an MS Access replacement: it has lousy _native_ libraries for generating MS Excel files. You can get around this by using JRuby via the Apache POI library. I'm finding that setting up a JRuby stack is currently more complex than an plain old Ruby stack.

My understanding is that there are much better libraries for doing MS Excel generation and manipulation with Python.
Test-Marketing
Bigot Map
Standard self-righteous anti-advertising screed being used to justify vandalism. Nothing interesting to see here. Move along.
That choice seems more obviously between two evils than the climate change issue. :)

I do acknowledge, as the other commenter suggested, that my view may be warped by being from the USA, where the battle is still about whether it exists at all.
Statistically speaking, that is true of nearly all fields. Only 5% of people can be in the top 5%.

Some data points (hey, the singular of data is "anecdote"):

My sister's boyfriend has a Ph.D in biomedical engineering. He makes less than half what she does, post-doccing. His day job consists of writing papers that the tenured professors get credit for.

My roommate has a degree from Cornell, also in biomedical engineering. She runs community outreach (i.e. posting on FaceBook) for a youth soccer nonprofit.

One of my best friends from college is working on his Ph.D in physics. He is planning to become a baker afterwards, because there are very few jobs for physics Ph.Ds.

Another of my college friends has a masters in mathematics after dropping out of the Ph.D program. He teaches math to high school girls at an elite private school.

My dad has an MIT Ph.D in nuclear chemistry. He became a househusband when I was born after finding the corporate world a soul-crushing mess of office politics.

One of my netfriends has a degree in biology. She kills rats for $30k/year and considers herself lucky.

Another netfriend has a degree in biochem. She works as community manager for a Web 2.0 fashion site after a stint as a UPS store manager.

It's necessarily true that professions will seem more glamorous as a kid than they are in real life, because you only hear about the glamorous ones. They wouldn't be noteworthy if they were just like what your parents did. But most people still manage to be happy in their job, even if its nowhere near as exciting as they imagined when they were young.

Heck, I work in what most people would consider a fairly glamorous programming job (Google Search, as a UI engineer writing new features for the search results page). Y'know what the majority of my workweek consists of? Tweaking CSS so an element is no longer off by 1 pixel in WebKit. Writing tools to automate 5-step long build processes. Getting things to work with other teams' features that basically invalidated all my design assumptions. Figuring out why my new feature is suddenly broken in IE8. Getting yelled at (metaphorically) for breaking the build.

This really isn't all that different from what any other web developer does for a living. Everybody's doomed to the salt mines: it's whether you enjoy mining salt that matters.
it says i have my e-mail address there ..

in either case, dusklight@gmail.com
Or when at work: see if your company has a department for such problem. (SAP had one, when I was an intern there. They adjusted my desk and chair.)
Promotional Cufflinks
Although it's not on the mind of most fashionistas, could promotional cufflinks work as fashion items? I think yes.
Remind HN: Hacker News Chicago Meetup at Hopleaf tonight at 7pm
I posted a thread last week and a few folks said Thursday at Hopleaf would work. I posted earlier this week and a few folks said 7pm would work. If you're in Chicago and want to meet up for a beer tonight, see you there.
I'd be happy to hear if there are further suggestions on how to create an audience for an auction.
Using the international standard for date formats that's been and gone nearly 4 years ago. 13th August 2005.
Ask HN: How would you implement a threaded forum?
How would you go about making a threaded forum, like on HN assuming that you want it to be efficient and deal well with edge cases? And also assuming that you want to load entries from a database, as opposed to having the information in a flat file (As I believe HN does)

The obvious and easy way would be to write a small recursive function that loads posts from the database where the parent is the current post. There are two disadvantages to this approach as I see it:

1) It doesn't deal well with posts that have children being deleted.

2) You would need to make a DB call every time you call the recursive function, resulting in a large number of DB calls to show a thread.

The first problem could be solved by not actually deleting the DB entry when an entry is deleted, but merely deleting the text. When you display the post you can check whether the textfield is empty and display [deleted] or something similar.

The second problem is a bit more hairy, I think. You could load all the entries of a thread into an array in one DB call and have your recursive function look through the array every time it runs. The problem is that this would be using a Shlemiel the painter's algorithm[1]. So maybe the solution is to delete entries from the array as the recursive function uses them.

How would you do it?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlemiel_the_painter%27s_Algorithm and http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/fog0000000319.html
We used a combination of cheap ($20) webcams, motion, cron, nagios, and cfengine at Drexel to provide 24/7 monitoring of our CS labs.

It isn't streaming video but it's good enough (several pictures per second while there is motion in the room).

Since installation is has been used to solve exactly 0 crimes, which was in line with our intent.
Give me the art over the ads any day. In large cities, our vision is violated by garish sprawling advertisements from public places, so even if the property is private, it still infringes on the individual.

Billboard advertising can be oppressive, because people are exposed to the ads without consent, and they are, well, big. The very root of advertising is that companies seek to "create" a need/desire in the individual, which can ultimately exacerbate the worst aspects of consumerism - loss of community values, commercialisation of childhood etc.

Maybe the action of these artists isn’t "the answer" but it's definitely an effective way of making people think.
The problem feature "allows users to quickly find out whether people they know are on Facebook and invite them to become a friend by uploading a .txt or .csv file of email addresses."

Facebook would reveal alternate email addresses of a user if at least one matched the .txt list. This bug was fixed.

The feature can still be used to validate email addresses, for example by spammers. Further, many social networks display limited information about the user, which can be useful demographic information to a spammer, if the email address is known (guessed correctly).

This feature is very useful and is critical in quickly expanding one's social network. Unfortunately, it seems it can be easily exploited. How would one prevent misuse? Limiting the number of email addresses checked in the .txt file may be one partial solution.
I find when I move across languages (which happens frequently) or even tools (like grep), regexp implementation often differs enough to throw me off and introduce subtle bugs.

Is there a page that shows a mapping between different implementations of regular expressions and which languages and applications they're used in? Is there a better way to figure these things out than hunt for documentation every time?
In a Sour Economy, What Happens to the American Dream?
I am religious about ergonomics.

1. I spent $300 on a herman miller ergonomic chair that forces you to sit up-right.

2. Use a keyboard tray to force you to lean back against your chair when you're coding.

3. Stretch and walk around once an hour.

4. Do back exercises at the gym everytime you go.
I was a physics major for 6 semesters, and up until my last semester had more courses in both physics and math than in CS. I think they're both definitely worth learning, but I would not call them a "more robust, equally versatile scientific field". A bachelor's in physics is fairly specific to giving you the foundations you need to do well in grad school. You can do a lot with it because workplaces use it as a signalling device for "I can think quantitatively", and so are more likely to hire a physics major than a random liberal arts major. But other than a general respect for data (which you'll get in any scientific degree), I haven't used any skill I learned in my physics courses. I've heard many non-programmers wish that they took at least an intro CS course, though.
Just wanted to point out: the appeal to authority argument is only a fallacy when the cited source is not a legitimate authority.

Theologians would want to disagree, but I would argue that an overwhelming number of scientists does constitute a legitimate authority on whether or not something (god or otherwise) does or does not exist.
I agree that anti-advertising screeds are annoying, but surely you agree that the works are more aesthetically pleasing than a movie poster?
I think that quotation by itself refers just to the Great Silence, and there seem to be two essential possibilities concerning this silence, both of which the author addresses:

Either there is a sterilizing filter which lies ahead of planet bound species such as ours, preventing explosive colonization;

Or, there is a psychological filter which "prevents" higher civilizations from making their existence visible - the author addresses this when discussing the Common Zoo hypothesis.

Within a single galaxy you might entertain the possibility that we are just the first occurrence of intelligence to emerge. However:

"Consider, for example, that the energy of a single star might power an intermittent very narrow-band signal detectable to pre-explosive life like ours across the entire universe [Gott 82]."

So we would have to be a cosmically nascent intelligence. That makes the absence of both a biological and psychological filter exceedingly improbable.
If I had that kind of experience I would go and see my doctor...

:-)
Xerox launches solid-ink printing (VentureBeat)
Xerox still got it!
That Anscombe example sheds light on the misuse of r^2. All of those examples have the same r^2 value.
The complete statement should have read "impassioned pleas for one side ... for government action"

Strong opinions are healthy. Strong opinions mandating an end to discussion in order to take collectivist action are not.
I Want My Memory, Apple
Fibonacci Minute at 11:23.
Someone posted a thread the other day about good ways to store threaded discussions.

Store it like:

1

1.1

1.1.1

1.2

2

2.1

2.2

etc.

And load it in one database query ( id > x AND id < y or w/e) then traverse through it. easy.

EDIT: I would handle deleted like you suggest.
"Unorganized private action can easily outweigh government action.

With easily provable externalities like toxic waste, private lawsuits can take care of the problem. Other issues like CFCs are easily regulated."

This seems to be a contradiction.
Again, have you read anything by Lee Smolin or Peter Woit?:)
nice way to push your agenda in sheep's clothing.

python = order and rightness

ruby = chaos

"It's not a zero sum game people. You can praise the things you like without having to deride the alternatives."

you seem to be contradicting your own argument.
Nice idea... I learned a lot of Spanish early on from telenovelas. You should talk up the startup instead of defending the tech.
Exercise - it works.
The few billion people bit refers to the sentence before. This bit: "no testimony could possibly convince you, without observable, repeatable evidence." That is, the few billion can be convinced, not they have had a direct personal experience.

You read wrong.
Just because a large group of people hold a certain unverifiable opinion does not mean it has any more authority or validity than another unverifiable opinion. Even if it did, you've lost that argument already on the basic fact that there are far, far more "theists" than "atheists".

Example:
Scientists would want to disagree, but I would argue that the overwhelming number of people in the world who believe in a god (of some form) does constitute a legitimate authority on whether or not something (god or otherwise) does or does not exist.

See how that works?
> And if you simply want to work on your own creative ideas

I think that it's more a question of redefining "your own creative ideas" to have a narrower scope. There're plenty of opportunities for creativity even in large organizations, they just have to fit into the overall framework of the organization's goals.

If you look at truly world-changing, creative "big ideas", they often grew out of very limited, narrowly-scoped ideas that someone started exploring. Microsoft came from a BASIC interpreter for the Altair. Google Search came from the idea of downloading the web and just keeping the links - they weren't even thinking of a search engine at that point. GMail came from sticking PB's email into the groups indexing engine. Linux came from printing out ABABA on the terminal. Then they attracted lots of people interested in ironing out the details, and that's what made them world-changing products.

I'd wager that about 99% of the people working on their own creative ideas in big research labs or tenured professorships will never have anything come of those ideas. That's the nature of research: almost all new ideas are crap. But in the process, they explore lots of little ideas in related spaces, and some of those may prove useful.
Generating Giant Sandstone Walls to Fight Desertification
Why is he still running Windows?
There are a few problems with this approach IMHO:

- If the discussion is sorted by something else than the counter, karma for instance, it isn't quite as easy.

- When you're moving posts you need to look at all the children and make changes ccordingly. This might not be a huge problem in itself, but there are problematic edge cases. What if someone makes a rely to a thread that has just been moved for instance? It would get archived wrong.

- If you want to encapsulate a post and it's children (if for instance you want to be able to hide children w. javascript) you need to write out the HTML using a recursive algorithm.

Besides, it doesn't seem like a very elegant solution ;-)
Facebook’s E-mail Censorship is Legally Dubious, Experts Say
Your still doing CS - not biology and that was my point. The article seemed to be saying if you are not sure about what to do choose CS. I think that is the wrong choice.

I love software and can't imagine doing anything else but if I had a CS and didn't like it I would need to go back to school and get another degree to do something else. That isn't true with say a math degree.
I wish it wasn't so hard to quit. When I try, I feel like I've lost a friend.
I recommend the StrongLifts 5x5 program. It's 5 exercises per workout (45 mins), 3x a week.

http://stronglifts.com/stronglifts-5x5-beginner-strength-tra...
this is why on a previous post about bioinformatics, i suggested that although this field is highly interesting, if you get involved, please, don't kill us all. the potential for disaster here is much larger than a nuclear disaster, caution needs to be very important as our species marches on, especially when it comes to coupling nanotech with biotech, specifically nanotech that alters biologies.
This is good advice, but it needs to be followed only after you know EXACTLY how to perform these exercises. Doing them improperly is just asking for trouble.

You can start by reading "Starting Strength" by Mark Rippetoe. If you don't feel confident that your form is correct, you can join a forum like the one over at stronglifts.com. They will probably be happy to review a video of you doing the lifts to let you know if you're doing things right or wrong (and what to fix, if it's not right).

Although, if you can swing it, I'd recommend finding a trainer to start you off.
Apparently, since Christianity is alive and well.
a lot of back pain is caused by weakness in other areas and your posture muscles trying to make up for it. do an ab routine and hyper extensions for a strong core and most problems should go away.
But pharma research is expensive, so what incentive does a company have to fund research if it isn't granted a (temporary) monopoly on the results? They would end up protecting their innovation through trade secrets, which essentially gives them a monopoly until someone duplicated their efforts. This is the situation patents exist to avoid.

Even if a bunch of companies are collaborating to create a new drug, the dominant strategy for a company is to not be involved in the collaboration, since you get the IP without the cost. (Ignoring the possibility of trade secrets)
Why Antidepressants Don't Live Up to the Hype
Unix To PowerShell - Touch
iPods destroy my productivity because all I have on them are audiobooks and NPR podcasts. It's very hard to listen to a good episode of This American Life and get anything done.
Improve your hip mobility and the strength/activation of your _glutes_.

It takes a bit of reading to understand whats happening to your body but essentially sitting for long periods of time weakens your glutes and also the mobility of your hip.
This in turn causes your lower back to compensate (flexion) in any movement requiring glutes/hip movement. Since the back wasnt designed for that movement, you tend to get hurt.

Start with these 2 articles and you'll understand what I mean:

http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/sports_body_trai...

http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/sports_body_trai...

I'm a programmer too but I've had no back problems as soon as I started fixing my glutes/hip-mobility.
If a stranger (carefully) picked the lock to your home, then proceeded to vacuum-clean your carpets, mop your floors, and wash your windows, would you not call that breaking and entering?

(I'm assuming here that the original advertisements were placed with the permission of the property owners. Otherwise the placing of the initial advertisements was vandalism, as is replacing them with something else.)
This is a repost of some advice I've offered here before, but doing them really helped me out.

Outside of seeing a doctor to see if there's something seriously screwed up with your back, I'd offer these 3 pieces of advice I had to learn about the hard way.

1.) Massage.

You may not think it's the manliest thing ever, but if you can afford it you should find a good local masseuse and get yourself an hour session. Even if you go once and never go again, you'll get an education in just how kinked up your back and shoulders probably are.

I tweaked my back lifting a lawn mower out of my car a few years ago and didn't think much of it at the time. Over the next few weeks I started to have all kinds of shoulder problems and other various pain to the point where my arms were getting tingly and I couldn't sit and code for more than 30 minutes at a time.

Long story short, I went through a few doctors before I finally just decided to see a masseuse and see if it helped. I was lucky to find someone that knew what they were doing and helped get me straightened out. It took about 5 sessions over 5 weeks, but I've never had problems since.

2.) Trigger points.

Learn what they are and how you can fix them. This was my problem that the masseuse turned me on to. Trigger points are essentially little micro-knots in your muscle fibers that can add up to cause big problems for you. For me, lifting that mower was really just the straw that broke the camel's back. It just exacerbated all the trigger point problems I'd been creating over years of coding and not stretching out my back and shoulders properly.

If you know where the common trigger points creep up and how to get rid of them you can save yourself a lot of pain and downtime (not to mention massage bills).

Buy these two things: The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook (http://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Point-Therapy-Workbook-Self-Tr...) and a TheraCane (http://www.amazon.com/Thera-Cane-Theracane-TheraCane/dp/B000...)

The book will show you how to identify and treat the trigger points all over your body, and the TheraCane will help you reach the places on your back that you can't reach yourself.

3.) Yoga.

Once you get all your issues straightened out, yoga and/or a good daily stretching regimen can help keep you kink free.

Hopefully some of this advice is helpful. I was really messed up for a while until I figured all this out.
We've had one of the smaller predecessors to this printer at my university for a couple of years now. They're great! The prints look beautiful and the printer is blazingly fast. So easy to service, too.
It's good he didn't get pulled over.
Including the ability to support the colors available in modern terminals (ie, Linux, OS X). I needed to do a subtle zebra striping for an analysis tool and ncurses couldn't do the job. urwid, however, can.
I've written an automated tool to convert Vim-style regexes to Perl-style. This is kind of a dramatic case as the dialect is very different, but it was a fun thing to write.
Trimming the FAT: Linux and Patents
I can't even concentrate with Hacker News on my RSS feed... I don't know how I could cope with an iPod!