skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
twitter is simply an audience. if you're trying to reach a certain demographic that is generally self aggrandizing and vapid (the american consumer) then you'll want to get your ass on twitter.

if you want to reach people who are about substance and meaningful productive dialogue, there may be a FEW who use twitter to announce their media, but really the limitations of the service and the noise of the community is detrimental to anyone trying to use it as a serious media platform.

think of it this way. if you want to explain relativity to someone or string theory, how many 140 char tweets would it take? contrast that to the usual tweetfare of "i stepped on some glass but i'm not bleeding" or "i only feel like eating 1/2 a banana, what 2 do with other 1/2?"
simshell.com
For more on this, google "smith and wesson must die", which turns up some very specific articles and interviews about it.
This tutorial was not intended to cover the styling of image buttons but to introduce HTML new comers to the basics of HTML and by the way the code is semantically correct when you use the code for its intended purpose but if are referring to always separating style from content well then you are correct.
Interesting alternative to the aeron. I have had similar chairs from staples etc... and all of them the seat cushion breaks down to the point where I am sitting on the particle board under the padding after a year or so. Does this IKEA chair do that?

I am not a heavy guy by any stretch of the imagination and these chairs all break down on me so the aeron is something that I am considering largely because of the cushion problem. (also the mesh keeps cool during a long session and the posture elements are nice too)
Neuroscientists decode brain activity related to navigation and spatial memory
In a certain online forum, I was once taken to task for saying "I assert". People criticized it because it was "just" an assertion, not backed up with facts.

The thing is, I am punctilious about labeling the various parts of my arguments: this is an incontrovertible fact, this is strongly supported by evidence, this is an assertion, and that is a wild-assed guess.

A certain kind of engineering-oriented mind (a) wants to be fair in not claiming too much; (b) wants to have a productive debate that can actually move forward.

The ironic thing about me being taken to task is that I provided far more evidence in my posts than most people in that forum (a town social / political email list), but because most participants conflated their assertions with their defensible fact-based points, they were never called on it, but because I was more intellectually honest, I was perceived as asserting facts more often, even though I did it less.

So, my point is this:

I applaud JWZ for labeling his assertions as such; agree with him or disagree with him, at least he's playing the intellectual game of debate on a fair and level playing field, and even helpfully labelled the stronger and weaker points of his argument. Win or lose, it's a lot more possible to have a constructive conversation.
Neuroscientists using high resolution fMRI brain imaging have successfully decoded signals used for spatial memory and navigation. While subjects were in a virtual environment, activity in their medial temporal lobe was decoded to accurately identify which room, and activity from their hippocampus was decoded to identify where in that room.
I'm working on a short product(license) key generation and validation framework for Mac OS X based on elliptic curve digital signatures. The goal is to write a replacement for AquanticPrime (which uses long RSA signatures). It's based on OpenSSL.

Code: http://github.com/dchest/ellipticlicense/tree/master currently in pre-alpha stage.

Would love to get code/security review!

Also I recently wrote a very simple Bayesian classificator for spam in Python: http://github.com/dchest/pybayesantispam/tree/master
how about disarm the police and legalize all now prohibited fun-time activities which the american puritanical streak requires we punish and extirpate ...funny how an ex-cop thinks the WAY cops buy guns can change the game, totally retarded
This is one of the crappiest articles I've ever read. This tripe doesn't belong on HN!

The author assumes that most people will want to use XPM to run 3d-intensive applications and games, and require access to all their peripherals. Ludicrous.

The author also assures us that there will ZERO 3d support on the VM. Maybe not, but if he were at all familiar with Parallels and VMWare Fusion, he would know that this has been done and Microsoft could do it as well.

He accuses Microsoft of "FUD" while simultaneously refusing to call Vista by its proper name, instead calling it "Broken OS". Hypocrite!

He assumes that everyone else "thinks" that XPM will be some magical transparent layer over 7 that most users won't know about and will magically run all their old applications. He also implicitly accuses Microsoft of misrepresenting XPM in this way. Bullshit! Microsoft has done no such thing. They make clear that this is just a Virtual PC with some Coherence/Unity like functionality, not some magical pixie dust integrated into 7.

Lastly, he completely ignores the potential long term ramifications of this. This is just V1; Microsoft WILL eventually move to a Hyper-V based system in which all previous version of the Windows OS will be transparently virtualized and, if possible, share the hardware. At some point, it WILL be magic pixie dust sprinkled in the operating system, in which your old apps continue to "just work" while Microsoft is finally free to do major housecleaning of the Windows internals.

So, I rest my case. This article is CRAP!
Google could have caught swine flu early
An Open Letter to Third-Party Twitter App Founders
I agree, I got a used Mikael off craigslist in 2002 for $20 when I was a grad student and it's still going strong.
That video proposed knives for guns. A less "cowardly" way to kill. I like it better than the expensive bullets bit.
>I don't know where you're getting this from. AFAIK there has been one lethality case in the US.

The lethal case in the US was of a Mexican 3 year old.

>It could also simply be that foreigners (white and of European descent) have better living conditions and healtcare systems than 80% of the population of mexico city.

Possible. But if that were the case, it would be more likely to follow the normal elderly and weak pattern than the strong and healthy.
For a copyright precedent, this strikes me as a terrible, terrible case for them. dreish is correct about the nature of Fair Use, and furher remember that underlying those court-generated criteria for Fair Use lies the fact that Free Speech actually trumps copyright law; the First Amendment is an amendment, whereas the Constitutional provision for copyright is in the Constitution proper, not an amendment. They've been harmonized, at least in theory (so no, you don't get to just claim Free Speech destroys copyright entirely), but if there is a conflict, the 1st wins.

And this is political free speech, debating how the law works. This is "copyright infringement"/Fair Use at the highest standard of education and political debate, where the courts should most fear to tread. Obviously he could take it too far, but given the fuzziness of Fair Use and how it tends to be ruled this is nowhere near egregious violation.

I favor the automated failure theory. If they were out to make a point I'm sure they could find something more clear, and a target less well defended (and funded) than a famous law professor. There's little upside for them here (even if they win, they only create a martyr) and some downside.
it sets a huge legal and cultural precedent AGAINST copyright reform, since he is the figurehead of the copyright reform movement

Um, do you not understand how the legal system works? Or are you far more breathtakingly cynical than Larry Lessig will ever be?

The US legal system is not a battle of personalities. It's not a popularity contest. It's not a political game, where lawyers campaign for votes. The judicial system is not "stacked against Larry Lessig" -- though some of his legal arguments have had more success than others, they are each judged on their merits. And beating Larry Lessig in some minor copyright suit won't magically discredit him, just as it wouldn't discredit him if he had some unpaid parking tickets.

His status as a "figurehead" won't really affect the outcome either (except to the extent that his fame is correlated with his ability to write really good legal arguments on exactly this topic -- and the fact that judges will probably tend to look with favor on a video that was used as part of an educational lecture about copyright law). Judges will not be star-struck by Lessig. They have seen famous law professors before. Even if this case went before a jury, surely both sides are bright enough to select jurors who have never heard of Lessig, thus rendering his fame relatively moot.

There have been times, of course, when these abstractions have broken down. But not very often. And if a corrupt judge or jury does decide to throw the case one way or the other, it's likely to get fixed (or, depending on your perspective, screwed up again) on appeal.

If he loses the case he might pay some damages, that's all. Those damages are likely to be insignificant, since if this isn't found to be fair use it will surely be found to be within a hair of fair use -- it's not for profit, it's for educational and critical purposes, it was done in good faith with the very reasonable expectation that it would be fair use, etc. Nothing will happen to Lessig.

And even if it did, it shouldn't hurt the cause. If Lessig is found to have violated fair use the case is boring, from a DMCA standpoint: Everyone knows that you're not allowed to copy stuff outside of fair use, so Lessig is guilty, he owes damages, the end. The possibility of an interesting precedent will only arise if the video is found to be fair use -- in which case Warner is guilty of using the DMCA to exercise prior restraint over legal content, and Lessig will go to town with his brief-writing skills.

In other words, the likely explanation is the simple one. Warner is handing out DMCA notices by the bushel, and they sent this one out without looking too carefully. Oops.
Well it seems that I submit mostly the tutorials from the given site but there is know harm in spreading free knowledge plus I do submit articles from other sites once in a while to other sites. Also if I don’t submit a tutorial how would I know if it will get voted up? I really don’t trust the voting system as I know that other users will use different user names to vote up their article.

Plus letting another potential user know that there is a tutorial out there that can help them far out ways the voting system. And if others are offended of me submitting my tutorials then they should not click them as in most cases it seems that the user that hates on the tutorials submitted have a similar site or have a friend with a similar site that they support.
Looks like a cool little project. You should, however take a look at how most Lisps do something similar. You appear to be trying to take it farther than most Lisps do, but do have a look so as to not reinvent the wheel.
Latest Firmware of Nokia 5800 XM
I've been working on K7, an extension library/framework for linking the V8 javascript engine with existing C/C++ libraries. Kind of slow going since work has gotten busier, but hoping to get back to it soon.

http://github.com/isaacs/k7
An Aspirational Twitter
Programming As a Social Activity
How Nerdist Chris Hardwick Gets Things Done
I'm working on implementing a hyperspatial text classifier in Haskell. It's conceptually similar to the hyperspace classifier in CRM114 (essentially a weighted nearest-neighbor search), but shouldn't crash as much or corrupt its data files. I've thought of some interesting problems to point a fast and effective classifier at that aren't spam detection.

I'm also working on a library/framework in Clojure for apps that process a folder full of files in some way. The idea grew out of a Clojure program I wrote to make a folder full of images greyscale (http://github.com/zakwilson/imagesieve/tree/master).
I quit school at age 14, without even completing 8th grade. Best thing I've done in my life, despite the hell my parents and family gave me for that.

I got a book published (Flash programming book in Brazilian portuguese, not that much of a big deal), still at 14, and after that I've never been unemployed. Today I'm 23, I'm living together with my fiancee and I have all the means to go to college if I want to, without getting myself into any debt. But none of my employers seem to have ever been bothered with the fact that I'm not graduated in C.S.

So at least for me, I think, quitting school pretty much defined what I am and what I do today. If I had stayed in school I would be probably still financially dependent on my parents and would not have had all the motivation I had to move forward in life.
Ask HN: If anyone could help me here, I cant find and article I read here
The article had to do with modern slavery. Cant seem to find it using searchyc.com
A Selection of Thoughts from Actual Women
This is a dupe.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=584931

And Lord knows people won't appreciate it.
Murky: A Mercurial Client App for OS X
Maybe this one, found by a site-restricted Google search:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550719
Meta comment: everyone is using github!
I largely agree with you because I'm tending towards the idea that he just got randomly picked by his DMCA bot. However, I'm also very cynical and you're right, once you get past a certain point I'm a bit foggy about how the legal system works. But wouldn't it be the case that whichever side loses the case will push to have it escalated to the next level of the legal system? And the higher up you go, the more politics DO factor into the game? If it gets to the Supreme Court, 7 of the 9 judges are the same ones who voted FOR copyright extension in Eldridge vs. Ashcroft. Would they have changed their minds?
The article refers to vi and emacs as "non-WYSIWYG". Huh?
Context Free Art - Make art from code
Current and future trends in life sciences IT
Chris Dagdigian's Bio-IT World plenary keynote
I'll eat my hat if Apple comes out with an iPad. This is just baseless rumor mongering.
Not really bubble-sort-specific; you can make any pair of loops into a single loop that way.

for (set up initial conditions for both loops;
check the outer loop termination condition;
if the inner loop is done reset the inner loop and advance the outer loop,
if the inner loop is not done advance the inner loop) {
// do the inside of the loop
}
Unity is a game engine that uses Mono as its scripting languages. You can recompile on the fly (you frequently play the game in-IDE during development). All public variables are exposed to its inspector and survive this recompilation.

It's a great engine in general: http://unity3d.com
The Pirate Party (Sweden) May Take Place in the European Parliment
Thanks, but its not that one. :P It had to do with the possibility of being able to buy a person at caribbean islands for USD $500.
Yeah that's what I was thinking about as I was reading the article, too. Maybe Spitzer should have spent a little less time with his mistresses and a little more actually understanding the firearms industry in the U.S.

First, there are a lot of companies that sell exclusively or almost-exclusively to the civilian market, or are kept alive in between periods of major government purchasing by the civilian market. E.g.: Bushmaster, who is almost certainly one of those companies that Spitzer would like to punish, doesn't shy away from military/LEO orders but is primarily a civilian arms company.

Given the choice between relatively consistent sales on the civilian market or feast-and-famine by selling to the government (who can inundate you with orders one year and leave you with nothing the next), it wouldn't surprise me if some manufacturers just turned down government orders if they came with too much red tape.

The net result of Spitzer's plan might be a decrease in the number of suppliers willing to deal with the government, rather than the civilian market; it might also cause companies to split off rough parts production and have the finish work done by separate companies -- one for the government and one for the civilian market.

Of course, if such a scheme keeps people like Spitzer occupied and from making a real mess, more power to it. Gun control isn't a vote-getter because, for a great many people anyway, it really isn't a significant or pressing problem.
> then you have a guarantee that memory management won't cause new problems for you.

Bah. Your original comment was that GC became too slow, not that it didn't work correctly. Using malloc/free, you're dependent upon the system allocator, and so you have no time or space overhead guarantees from the allocator. Chaining free coalesce, OS paging, etc. can easily make you miss a soft-realtime deadline, make your UI pause, etc.
An error has occurred, please try again later. sad face
Heh, I once made a list like that. Let it go, it doesn't work like that. You will never be able to plan your learning path exactly. Pick something, anything now, and devote to it and new topics will /naturally/ emerge over time.
I'm working on a program that renders Julia/Mandelbrot set fractals using the GPU. I know there are a few other such programs out there, but I'm trying to make gpufrac really configurable. It has a bunch of features already (normal mapping and orbit traps are my favorites).

http://github.com/emezeske/gpufrac/tree/master
and what does it say that it's probably been reachable at the same url for those 10 years?
"For HN, I think it's fair to say there are some characteristics we have in common which are not common in the wider community (say, respect for rationality and intelligence)."

I believe that at least a portion of this "respect for rationality and intelligence" comes from a lack of the constant conflict among users that you see on more mainstream websites (because they attract people of a wide variety of different opinions). Even the most imperturbable of us are only capable of maintaining a civil tone to a certain point on more controversial topics. The way I see it, the key to success for maintaining healthy discourse is to achieve a balance between homogeneity and diversity of user beliefs/viewpoints.
How "extreme" are we talking about? Some empirical data would be helpful.

I'd also be curious to see data about what % of the characters in all the strings in a typical Java program aren't in 7-bit ASCII. I wouldn't be surprised if 7-bit ASCII characters are a large majority of the total, which makes the case for UTF-16 less compelling.
Whitehouse flickr stream first 100 days
My comments were about "big" self-contained projects for which it's worth it to have their own internal infrastructure and idioms etc. An example would be a compiler or an interpreter or a web server.

For smallish programs like what you describe, I agree that manual memory management can be decent overhead.

Many "big" projects try to reduce the memory management hassles by embedding an interpreted language such as Tcl or Lua for implementing non-performance intensive tasks.

I'm not advocating writing everything in C++, but with the right tools and in the right circumstances, the benefits of C++ can outweigh the annoyance of manual memory management.

Another reason I'm skeptical of garbage collection is because I read that unless you do things in a specific way you can have references hanging around in Java resulting in memory bloat.
Git won me over when I found out that I could make all kinds of commits willy-nilly. I make a lot of small commits to my local repo throughout the day. At the end of the day I then take the time to go through them, merging related commits and removing stupid commits before I send my changes upstream. I've found that it's much easier to avoid breaking the build this way.
When I was forced to learn Ada for my current job, I was skeptical that it would be a good experience. But I must admit, I like being able to declare things in feet and meters and have the compiler complain when I try to add them.

But it's overbalanced by the sheer amount of effort necessary to make the compiler shut up when I do want to do that. Something like half my Ada code winds up as inane type conversions. I find myself very hesitant declare things in feet and square feet and milliwatts and meters because I know what a phenominal amount of work I am making for myself. Writing in Ada is a strange exercise in type engineering, trying to get exactly the amount of error-checking that I want out of the compiler without distracting myself too much from the actual problem I'm trying to solve. I'm rarely successful. I once recently spent four hours developing an algorithm in Perl, and then--with it understood and debugged--two days translating it into Ada. Most of that time was spent making reassuring gestures toward the compiler.

Then again, the extreme permissiveness of a language like Perl has its own drawbacks. I recently lost a whole day to a function I thought was expecting named parameters (but which wasn't). Ubiquitous default values and silent conversions are nice when you're expecting them and brutal when you aren't; to write efficiently, I must sprinkle die everywhere. And that's the catch: I'm not persuaded that truckloads of 'turn error-checking on' incantations are an improvement over truckloads of 'turn error-checking off'. It's inane code either way.

When you get right down to it, one size doesn't fit all, even within the same program. Ideally, I'd like a language that let me 'tag' variables and functions with types or units or associations, and let me decide when and what to check by default in what contexts. I'd love a language that stopped me from setting a variable in feet to one in meters, but also gave me a way to say "don't check units on this line--it's a formula--but please still check my pointer indirection". Alas, between building Perl up, quieting Ada down, templating C++, or simply building a baroque OO hierarchy in Java, nothing I've used seems really robust and flexible enough to serve this purpose well.
The World's Greatest Netbook is soon to be upon us.

Touch screen + OSX + mobile internet = dawn of ubiquitous computing for the masses. Be prepared.
I suspect this is Apple's response to a phenomenon originating from China. I've been reading up about the Chinese knock-off cellphone, or "shanzhai phone", industry. It has become an incredibly lucrative business. Why? Because, it's now possible for a company, comprised of a small group of 3-5 people, to design, build (or rather contract to a factory), and market phones. The technology has gotten to the point where most of the difficult technical design hurdles have been removed by the presence of a cellphone-on-a-chip so-to-speak. Sound familiar to anyone around here? So you have these tiny, agile startups being able to compete with the big boys. A lot of the big boys are still in denial, and will probably try to respond to the shanzhai phone industry by attempting to get the Chinese government to crack down on it. Not Apple; their approach will be to out-innovate these players by playing off the one weakness that they have: that they cannot design their own cellphone-on-a-chip.

I won't make any predictions about whether Apple will still be a dominant player in the cellphone market 10 years from now. However, I will say that this move almost surely guarantees they will still be in the game by then. Other companies that rely on the same logistics and supply chain that the shanzhai guys do probably won't be as lucky unless they change their strategy as well.

UPDATE: The reading I've been doing was on my iPhone and I didn't bookmark everything. But one article was definitely this one: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/technology/28cell.html
Such obvious premature hype. For something not even mentioned in the article.