skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being read your Miranda rights also serves as an explicit acknowledgement by the state that you have those rights. Most of the time, this isn't really important, but in this case it would have served a very important purpose.

The Bush administration systematically created a legal netherworld for people they captured on suspicion of terrorism -- people usually referred to as "enemy combatants". They weren't arrested per se, so they weren't entitled to a trial, lawyers, or even the basic rights we associate with a criminal trial such as protection against self-incrimination (i.e. the right to remain silent). On the other hand, the administration argued they weren't prisoners of war either, so the Geneva Convention didn't apply to them.

By defining enemy combatants in this negative way -- in terms of what they are not -- the Bush administration pushed enemy combatant status into a grey area where no pre-existing legal rules seemed to apply. That's how they argued that torture was legal: they said that laws prohibiting torture only applied to prisoners of war or people charged with crimes, and that because enemy combatants weren't either of those things, they could legally be tortured.

If they had read this guy his Miranda rights, the Obama administration would have made it clear that they would treat his future as a police matter and that they were rejecting the enemy combatant framework in this case. They failed to do that, and I think it's a wasted opportunity.

(By the way, when justifying drone strikes and the courtroom procedures at Guantanamo Bay, the Obama administration has continued the enemy combatant framework that Bush's lawyers established.)
> But Yahoo's security makes scraping a challenge. Every time I've tried to back up pages, I can only grab a few files with curl or httrack before Yahoo starts serving blank responses. (...) If you have any idea how to scrape Upcoming's events

A way to bypass security is to distribute scraping over many, many clients.

For example, one could write a browser extension and have many people use it at once; this would have the added benefit of being able to scrape information generated by JavaScript (just do the scraping after the page is completely rendered).

If needed, I can help write such an extension for Chrome (I had written one for del.icio.us some time ago that did exactly that, and another one for IMDb).

(There would be a public server that would serve the ids of events yet to scrape, and that would receive the data that has been scraped).

But for this strategy to work, you need a big community of people willing to help (people who will download the extension and let it run).

Also, 11 days is a very short time...
I don't see this as being an Apple issue because a lot of apps should be offering a lite version as well as a premium version with no ads and additional features.
Their market changed. NPR used to be your only option when stuck in the car (for that kind of content), now you can listen to podcasts on any topic you can think of.
There seems to be a strong emphasis in search results on domain name match, similar to Google several years back. e.g., search "dog training" and examine the results - there's a much higher mix of spammier content mixed in with helpful content than you'll see in the other big name search engines' results.

Anyway, keep cracking at it; I'm sure you'll get it sharper as you go.
I'm no expert in either physics or cog neuroscience, but it sounds similar by name to the Free Energy Principle of brain function.

http://neuroticthought.tumblr.com/post/9044776197/is-this-a-...
It does not, however it makes writing your own doable with not much work. Writing one as good as the JVM's, though, would be a sizable effort.
We will as more people use us. We think that because we provide a summary of your page rather than a snippet that we drive more traffic if you are deserving of it. Snippets don't really "sell" your content or your writing style. Summaries do. We think that by giving people more insight in to what to expect rather than part of a few sentences with the keywords you searched for in them, that we help users make better decisions about what to read.
The Site has an almost unreadable font for me. Its ugly when in normal size:

http://browsershots.org/http://www.marco.org/

(Check the Firefox 22 shots)

And gets worse when I increase the font size:

http://i.imgur.com/jU1swoq.png

Why is that?
> Crick, Hodgkin and Huxley were all physicists poaching in other fields.

And Fisher was a statistician.
Improving the Fedora boot experience
I will happily concede that you and your colleagues know more about search than I will ever know, and so I find it strange that we're having this argument...your perception of Google's limitations seems so far off that it's as if you've mistakenly referred to them instead of AltaVista.

To answer your questions, yes and yes, Google can derive the meaning of my search without relying on literal interpretation of the search terms. In fact, Google can return what I want even if I deliberately spell every word in the query incorrectly:

"couk besr ribz" instead of "cook best ribs" brings up recipes of how to do good ribs:

https://www.google.com/search?q=couk+besr+ribz

I'm willing to take you at your word, that there is a better way to interpret context and meaning from a search query than however Google does it...but if that is the entire raison d'etre for your search engine, can you come up with at least a few case examples where this is the case? The "cupcakes" you've contrived is clearly hypothetical (and not at all close to what happens in reality), and the ones that I've tried don't seem to show any improvement on human-friendly results. Which is not to say that samuru is a bad product...what you claim to do is incredibly difficult and is exactly the feature that makes Google such a useful, ubiquitous engine...I would love to be surprised but I'm skeptical that a new engine with a fraction of Google's processing power, nevermind the resources for test engineering and algorithm design, can compete with Google here...this isn't a "well, why hasn't anyone ranked search queries in this way before?" in the same way that PageRank/BackRub was 15 years ago...Search engines have been analyzing queries for intent, and their shortcomings in this area are due to it being a very hard problem, and not for lack of desire.
There is a similar project named Coffee-Physics [1] by Soulwire.

[1] https://github.com/soulwire/Coffee-Physics
Chome does address bar perfectly fine in full-screen mode. http://i.imgur.com/YOdp2gP.png

Presentation mode (pictured in article) hide away all window chrome for... presentation
How do I teach 2nd graders, their 62 year old teacher, and my mom to do those things?

We are focused on making interfaces that are Zero Learning Curve. Our goal is to allow you to ask for what you want and get it with out having to know how to ask.
> Unfortunately the all-too-brief article doesn't really answer this question ...

I think that was intentional, and that the answer is either "no one knows" or "caveat emptor". Or both.
I was surprised you didn't have one. You still have one in the German Wikipedia.
Google play lets you return apps within 15 minutes. Does the app store not have anything similar?

http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&...
> No, I didn't misunderstand. 'Nothing' and 0 are not interchangeable.

Nobody said they were. That's idiomatic Haskell for something like this in Java when unboxing Integers:

return (a != null ? a : 0) + (b != null ? b : 0);

As you can see, there is no adding Nothing to integers.
This leads to another question. Do they (in space) have standard 50Hz/60Hz CFLs? That might be unsafe because of the flicker, right?
I need to look why you didn't get a message saying we don't do those kinds of searches.

Disabling ads is actually pretty hard. We had Adsense running until we got kicked for having results on "Jail Bait" those two words alone are not dirty. But I didn't focus on building long lists of dirty topics so we were returning results on that.
Selling your own ads is hard. Especially at low volumes getting started. So your choices are basically Google and Microsoft. (Chitika doesn't pay anything)
> They definitely have gone down in quality from 1998 to now. What caused this?

A gradual decline in public interest in public television and radio. That, in turn, has been caused by the increasing diversity of offerings on cable and satellite TV and radio, compared to 30 years ago. There was a time when the only way to see anything resembling scientific or educational programming was to tune into public TV or radio. Not any more -- there are dozens of channels offering this kind of content now, of widely varying quality, but certainly competing with public TV.

As the number of advertisements and pledge drives on public TV has increased, the public has begun to see public TV as just another commercial-supported TV offering, nothing special. And guess what? They're right -- there's no difference.
You don't have to submit we will find you. He have a bot, I apologize I don't recall the user Agent at the moment... It comes from a Google IP address since we are running on Google AppEngine. So we have less control over the bot's user agent than I would like.
I think though perhaps the opposite was part of it too. They became comfortable in their baby boomer audience (every pledge drive featuring Joan Baez being the giveaway) and they haven't really groomed a younger audience coming up. A certain smugness and belief that they were just naturally a superior option to the mainstream garbage meant they didn't put the effort in to innovate and improve their product. Where they did innovate is in sponsorships which are no different to ads nowadays - often npr-washing unsavory companies through extended "brought to you by..." then a bunch of copy worse than any ad, stated unchallenged.

I stopped listening partly because I was getting really offended by some of that stuff, and as stated above this brain science stuff really got on my wick. But also because the quality of the news in the morning was garbage. Firstly very little news, way too much human interest story. Secondly the reportage was pretty shoddy. Thirdly the analysis was facile, ill-informed and wrong way too often. Certainly not as bad as something like CNN, Fox etc. but not the quality they boast about. And when you can now get the BBC news anywhere in the world you can easily see what a poor product the NPR news has become.

I guess finally the talking heads are just so outdated. They represent a washington-insider-y worldview that has little or no bearing on reality. They're an aging media corps which still thinks things run the way they do at their cozy DC cocktail parties, genteel disagreements but we all get along. They have little to say that matches the bitter corrupt partisan nature of things in the US today. It's not that I want them to perpetuate that, but denying it exists helps no-one. Describing debates as though they're these deep seated points of principle and taking every statement at face value benefits no-one when it's easily determined, and apparent to anyone listening what's really going on.

IMNSHO
The Miranda Warning reminds people that they don't have to say anything and that there's no real benefit to doing so anyway. If you want maximum information out of someone, then it runs counter to that, so you would prefer not to say it if possible. There's a great two-part youtube video on the benefits of the 5th Amendment, the second part is with a 30-year veteran police officer who talks about strategies around the Miranda warning [1]

Here in Australia, things are a little different - not talking to the police can be held against you in a court of law, as you've hindered them in their duties. I'm not sure of the details, just that the local law advice sites say "It's not like in the US on TV".

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik
There is, but the bonus goes down as we get deep indexing. So if you check back in a minute most the time the spam will have moved down.
Don't forget this as well: http://reason.com/archives/2012/11/21/drug-dealing-and-legal...
"I'm skeptical you'll achieve what you aim for if you're way off the mark in understanding how Google is so successful."

Considering his comment drew out Matt Cutts, I'd bet he understands Google pretty well.
Also

Box2D JS and Box2Dweb

http://box2d-js.sourceforge.net/

https://code.google.com/p/box2dweb/

Bullet JS

https://github.com/adambom/bullet.js/

Cannon.js

https://github.com/schteppe/cannon.js

Ammo.js

https://github.com/kripken/ammo.js/

Physijs

http://chandlerprall.github.io/Physijs/

JigLibJS

https://github.com/supereggbert/JigLibJS
Your Google link gives me "Searching for couk best ribs".

The 10 results give me:

2 hits for boat related stuff, with no food.

4 hits for restaurants, with no recipes.

1 hit about cervical ribs.

And then, in positions 5, 8, and 9 there are recipes.

So, even with all the smart people and computing power at Google this is still a very hard problem.

It's great to have different people trying different approaches.
I see this statistic and I'm reminded at how much of a disingenuous uproar the policy change caused.

Yup. This.

It's also interesting to see how much of the uproar comes from folk who work at Yahoo (as far as I can tell - none of it.)

The two folk I know who work there, who would both love to telecommute, think the move to ban telecommuting was a really, really good one. They're both smart, driven techie folk who could get a job anywhere. Jobs that would probably pay more than they're getting at Yahoo. They've gone from polishing their resumes and considering resignation a few months back, to totally enthusiasm now.

Whatever Mayer is doing internally from what I can see, from talking to folk who actually work there, it seems to be working.
You used to be able to test drive for 24 hours with Android and get a refund within that time period. Some people abused it such as playing games and completing them within 24 hours and getting the refund.

Google then changed the period to 15 minutes which is far too short. Many games start off with large downloads that won't have finished in that time. I'm currently looking for a podcasting app and there is no way you can evaluate one within that time (little details matter).

Some try to solve this problem by having separate free versions that have less functionality, or various complex schemes involving paid unlocks, but neither solution is perfect.
This is correct. However, as I understand it, a defense attorney can throw holy hell to prevent the admission of such statements in court and has a decent chance of winning.

They don't need him to say a word to convict him of a staggering number and severity of crimes. I would be surprised if they even bother trying to admit as evidence anything he says during interrogation, and after chatting with a couple of con-law lawyers who all concurred I feel that's a pretty fair guess.
> Why don't these companies have a scientific strategy running alongside your product/customer/marketing/financial strategies?

Because the two possible sources for such science are neuroscience and psychology. Neuroscience hasn't evolved far enough to offer any meaningful evidence for or against the claims, and psychology isn't even a science as the term is defined (a discipline that supports or discards its theories based on experimental evidence).

That doesn't stop outfits like Luminosity, in fact it helps their marketing to be able to offer hand-waving claims that can't be meaningfully refuted.

> From a company making bold claims like this I want to see a continual string of increasingly sophisticated trials, each one giving increasingly robust indications of success.

Why would they do that? The drug industry doesn't do that, and they have a much higher chance to conclusively prove or disprove the value of their products. But they know better.
I am well aware of the definition. I reject the idea that you can be imposing on another's beliefs by doing something that has no impact upon them. And I find that characterization inhuman and stupid.
Not quite. They are not restricted to error handling. You can have methods returning a Maybe something without it being an error (just like there are plenty of valid reasons for returning null instead of throwing an exception). You can also use Maybe in a data structure:

data Employee = Employee { name : Text, spouse : Maybe Text }

You may also want to use Either to store two possible outcomes of an operation, though I would recommend using your own sum type for clarity:

data MyOwnEither a b = MyLeft a | MyRight b
Great to hear a real-world example of the concrete benefits, thanks!
You can force Maybe in Haskell, and get a bad surprise at runtime as well.
That's strange, I get links from amazingribs.com and food.com, which is more or less what I expect

http://www.amazingribs.com/recipes/porknography/best_BBQ_rib...

Either way, it's a deliberately contrived example to show that Google was more sophisticated than the GP indicates...I have no comment on whether amazingribs.com really does have the best ribs preparation tips
Here's one. DMCA claim is bullshit. This is fair use: http://static.rubbingalcoholic.com/images/temp/ciphercloud.p...
Not to mention that it does not make Java magically sprout pattern-matching abilities, which makes dealing with Maybes much more pleasant and natural.
Anyone who's read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science book will realise that you can sell anything and the science of whether it works or not is irrelevant.

See, for a particularly bad example, "Brain Gym". This is a set of nonsense exercises that children are forced to do to increase mental alertness. It has some bizarre statements ('processed food does not contain water'; breathing through the nose gets oxygen to the brain faster, etc).

This nonsense is depressingly common in UK schools.
Well their move to semantic technologies e.g. Schema.org is a step in the direction of understanding these things better. Like if you mark up the page with http://schema.org/Review wouldn't you agree that they know it's a review?

Are you using semantic web btw?
I am a postdoc working on planetary habitability. This arxiv paper is a mesh sieve masquerading as a boat.

Complexity's rise is a messy business [1]. There's some evidence for steady progress, easy steps [2]. At the other extreme, the machinery of oxygenic photosynthesis came together once after an inexplicable billion-year delay and completely reset the biosphere. No oxygen, no complex-eukaryotes-with-twisty-genomes like you and me. Inference: that was an very improbable, difficult step, and we got lucky. Survivorship (as conscious, therefore complex creatures) biases everything we see on Earth. Nobody knows whether the origin of life was an easy or a difficult step. We don't have a geologic record of the origin of life. But the existence of even one difficult step is enough to prevent you from playing Moore's Law games.

There ARE good papers in this field that get traction out of very little data [3].

There are also reasons to think that Earth life may have originated on Mars. Joe Kirschvink (Caltech) is the big advocate of this [4]. Continued Mars exploration could test this.

Interstellar panspermia, on the other hand, is vastly improbable.

--

[1] good (2001) review: http://wwworm.biology.uh.edu/evodevo/lecture26/carroll02.pdf

[2] opinionated summary by Simon Conway Morris: http://www.amazon.com/Lifes-Solution-Inevitable-Humans-Unive...)

[3] my favorite is Brandon Carter's argument about the number of difficult steps in our evolution: http://www.jstor.org/stable/37419

[4] Kirschvink's argument: http://www.gps.caltech.edu/users/jkirschvink/pdfs/MarsOrigin...
The front page is just a collection of the most popular submissions from the default subreddits if you're a new user or not logged in, so yeah, it will be a worse source of news because it's not intended to be a source of news. However, the news subreddits do a really good job at linking to popular news stories and providing rapid updates to "breaking" situations, e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1cnwms/mods_removed_th... The comments on submissions can provide a lot of value too, where there's value to be had.
EDIT: I quickly misread the question and referred mostly to the book, but the same things applied to the "culture" as well

Ok, biting the troll bate and here we go :)...

1. Lack of focus on "just making (cool) stuff" (compare it with "Dive Into Python" and other Python or Perl tutorials) - it didn't feel "hacker/maker spirit" at all

2. Too many words, too little code - I think in code, pictures and occasionally equations: words are ok too, but not when their only purpose is making "opinionated" jokes. And the illustrations literally hurt my brain - I expect nicely crafted images that explain concepts, not weird jokes that have nothing to do with them!

3. Not many interesting concepts - I'm ok with not focusing on making "coll stuff" with a piece of technology you're just learning and with not being "hacker spirited", but if you don't do it this way, at least present interesting mind-opening concepts to the reader (just compare it with "Practical Common Lisp" or a Haskell tutorial - they give you so much tasty mindfood that the style doesn't even matter anymore, they could've been written in the style of a medical research article and still be enjoyable to read). Ruby didn't bring any interesting new concepts to me - it was Smalltalky OOP and the coolness of blocks that could've been just lambdas anyway...

4. Lots of stupid jokes that I didn't find funny at all, and made me feel stupid that maybe there was something I didn't understand but was supposed to, and cultural references that were very "WTF" (I'm European, but I've been pretty well exposed to US culture and I like "american style humor" but this felt like totally from a different planet).

5. This one is subjective don't mean to offend, just to be honest: I hate the whole gay (not necessarily in a sexual way), touchy, feely, friendly way of presenting technical things - I'm more of a "cold British humor", occasional "mildly offensive jokes" and a touch of "mental testosterone" kind of guy (this is the king of attitude that, for example, appeals to me in an aesthetic way: http://programming-motherfucker.com/ )

6. Despite being clear that learning resources like WPGR were opinionated and would only appear to people whose minds work in a certain way, they were recommended to all newbies. I like a culture that doesn't shove opinionated stuff in the face of new guys - first let them find "their own way", then show them the "opinionated ways".

7. There was a "split personality" thing that annoyed me: Ruby as a language appealed to the "hacker spirited" a lot, but the community was pulling in different direction that I couldn't really comprehend - a weird lust for a code-aesthetic-nirvana or something...
Thanks! And I'll make a note for myself to put CoffeeScript in there too.
Penny Roll Puzzle
The public safety exception strikes me as equivalent to the enemy combatant exception - a way to just skirt civil liberties when it seems relevant.