skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If a bad database structure hurts and there's no easy way to finetune it, you can still just denormalize and carry on for quite a while until you figure out a better solution. Bad code leads to code debt, but code debt can be paid off incrementally. Code that looked like it might scale but doesn't will usually be spotted as your user base goes up – unless your business model is predicated on exponential growth there's nothing that can't be fixed in a couple months' time. Etc.

Instead of talking about "binary roadblocks", couldn't you just say "don't obsess about performance, but that doesn't mean don't think about it at all"?
Wow, is it easier or harder to go to a conference in a different country and call out all the attendees as doing the wrong thing, being complicit in pseudo-colonialism, and needing to change their tact? Large balls, this man.

Edit: Is it just me, or is there this underlying current of hostility coming from him. He says ingratiating things the the attendees occasionally ("you're smart", "you're an organized group"), but it feels like he's mocking them somewhat.
That summary's no longer quite accurate, there were some last-minute tweaks to strengthen the defences. In particular:

- The "responsible publication on matters of public interest" defence is now just "publication on matters of public interest", the requirement of responsibility is replaced by one that "the defendant reasonably believed that publishing the statement complained of was in the public interest". This is good - the new requirement is conceptually simpler and easier to satisfy.

- There's now another new defence: "Peer-reviewed statement in scientific or academic journal etc." are now privileged.
After suing Twitter, PeopleBrowsr wins data access back in settlement
I guess my expectation was that the older the recording, the goofier the accents would sound, due to changes over time. For example, the recordings of Edison have him sounding like no American alive today.
Hm...where have I heard this story before...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management
Ya, hardly anybody tweaks Emacs.
Is this the democrat sponsored version of the bill? From what I understand, it's even worse from a privacy standpoint, but I haven't read it myself. Any insight?
"The Prison Service has been forced to spend £250,000 on changing every lock and key in Feltham young offenders' institution after a TV news crew filmed a prison key during a media visit last week."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jul/05/broadcasting.you...
No. The judge signature is basically the other part of the 4th amendment, about warrants. That is what makes an otherwise unreasonable search, reasonable: it was reviewed by a neutral magistrate, and the neutral magistrate determined they had probable cause.

If the search is reasonable, you don't need anything from a judge.

This doesn't mean you can go busting into places, but ...
Sometimes known as data dredging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging
This is my gut reaction. And yet time and again you hear from the likes of patio11 et al that one should leverage email as an engagement tool.

For anyone with experience in this, does it just come down to weighing the benefit of gaining a customer against the risk of losing two?
The only tricky part would be writing a quadratic solver. Alternatives: either solve a linear SVM using gradient descent (simpler to write), or offload the core of the algorithm to an existing solver like cvxopt.

edit: For an example of using cvxopt, check out http://www.mblondel.org/journal/2010/09/19/support-vector-ma...
awesome find. thanks
Just eyeballing, but I don't think there's enough data to call that exponential growth. And the log plot doesn't look like it's fitting a straight line -- it's curving down a bit at the end.
Partite in diretta streaming del week-end
heh, i was gonna add the clause *unless you're the NSA or have some deep pockets

i think as long as launches are limited, the asking price will be kept artificially high anyways to render the cost of the actual satellite minimal compared to the launch expenses, regardless if it's $300 or $300,000 going up.
I have noticed that Ubuntu haters are not Linux haters at all, they are previous Ubuntu users, or simply fans of other distributions.

P.S.: RedHat is selling server versions and support for millions of dollars. Ubuntu still is not profitable despite all they have done for the community. It's unfair to me.
> If every store tripled the price of bottled water you would have truckloads of water arriving within 24 hours with absolutely no government intervention at all

You mean "According to my preferred economic ideology if every store tripled the price of bottled water you should have ...", because it's fairly easy to check the historical records and see that this is definitely not what actually happens.

But by all means, don't let facts get in the way of your faith.
Section 5 looks interesting for website operators.

Namely that it's a defence to show that the website operators did not make the (defamation) statement.

But, the defence is defeated if the complainant (defamed party) cannot identify the person who did defame, and then notified the website operator who then failed to respond.

Basically: If you are in the UK and you run a website, you should now change your policies to ensure that if you have user generated content you can accept and handle notifications of slander and defamation.

Not doing so may see you end up being liable for the statement.

Which was always the case under the EU E-Commerce Act, but this is now reinforced by this act.
Remember: orbit isn't just altitude, it's sideways motion too. In any case, there isn't enough atmosphere to get any buoyancy at that height.
Terrible review - claims "map reduce is dead" etc without any good reason as to why. Claims hive is a terrible idea because "it takes a long time to do a simple query on a 20MB dataset". Of course it does! Hive is meant to make it possible to work with gigantic datasets, not make it fast to work with a tiny 20MB dataset!

Shouldn't have made the HN frontpage - must be a light day.
I knew exactly how she felt
MangoPay: Payment for Marketplaces – Accept online payments and manage e-money
Yes. There are companies, and management structures, that are much more about conformity than excellence.
The Humanoid Robots Start Arriving
I despise the term "defamation". It's almost always used in the context of propagating censorship. Libel itself is troubling. Unless you're telling disparaging and outright lies about somebody in an absolute manner, the legal system should be nowhere near your freedom of speech.
Emacs itself (as in the distribution) is extremely conservative. It's probably for the best it stay that way, precisely because it's so simple to hack on the software.
So I'm thinking that one could start a "journal of obscene and salacious comments, potentially defamatory remarks, flames &c." in which we review statements academically for their values - offensiveness and such. The Journal will of course be electronic enabling any person to submit for review a remark of their choosing.

Once submitted Section 6(5) gives anyone the right to "the publication of a fair and accurate copy of, extract from or summary of the statement or assessment" and this duplication of the a reviewed submission to our journal receives privilege.

S.6(6) obviously stands against the actions of the Journal but proving malice in a statement seems difficult especially when it has been submitted for academic reasons.

Or maybe not ...
That is the idea. We all hope that it works.
I'm (and economists) aren't saying that there are never $10 bills on the sidewalk, just that they don't stay there for long after someone notices them. Stock prices went down on the weekends for decades before someone noticed. But once it was noticed it stopped pretty quickly.
Nice illustration. But the x-axis scaling seems a bit wrong to me. Like there's only 8 or 9 years in each decade.
Probably steered through thrust vectoring. Liquid fuel rocket engines are often built to gimbal, typically 1...2 degrees to each side. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_engine#Thrust_vectoring

Another possible method of steering is to build four or more reaction jets around the rocket; could be fed with a monopropellant or exhaust from the main engine or its turbopump.
Charity Auction Bids for Coffee With Tim Cook Pass $500,000
Dutchman arrested over huge web attack
AKA "signalling". And it can and does go beyond "a suit" to include "the right suit / tailoring / etc".

Wearing "the wrong suit" can be about as bad as wearing no suit, from this perspective.
Cool / "good" projects get attacked all the time. I suspect this is because the attacker is guaranteed an audience on HN to marvel in the results of their work. I think this is probably simpler and more likely than the tinfoil hat theory.
Yes I think It is possible to use the library as a standalone process. It will introduce some little overhead. More importantly the code will be harder to debug and maintain.
The other possibility (besides direct imaging) that's worth calling out is retrieving spectra that will establish atmosphere content. Also very much within our lifetimes.
The banks could do this, but in general they don't seem to - it's too annoying for their customers when the chip is covered in dirt, a bit damaged, whatever.
Neat! It might be interesting to have a tag for 'replace-with-edited-text-if-available'. (This falls somewhere between the editable-model-fields and alternate-translations cases.) For example:

{% replaceable %}
<h1>Hello</h1>
<p>This text might not appear, <i>if</i> it
is ever edited-in-place.</p>
{% endreplaceable %}

When edited, the module would derive a deterministic unique key for the modified HTML and store in the database. Future redisplays would use the edited text. (Optional parameters might help control how the unique key is derived, from either actual access URI or template name, to affect the range of pages over which one edited-replacement-text appears.)
Relevant technical terms: 'look-elsewhere effect' and 'false alarm rate'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_rate

There are more similar considerations. Statisticians have been very busy for the last century or so.
Another approach is to implement Platt's SMO:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_minimal_optimization
People need to realize that the shape of your key is pretty much a "password". Letting your keys lay on a table in open view is akin to leaving a piece of paper with your password out in open view.
Nate Gross is disrupting the 17 years it takes to implement medical discoveries
> Instead, they are going on the record and saying its not true.

It's not like "going on record" means anything; truth is an oddly malleable thing. What's true today might not be tomorrow, what is said to be true may only be what the speaker needs you to believe is true, or it may be the speaker only believes it to be true.

The best predictor of what's to come is past experience and objective observation, not the words of people who have both incentive and ego wrapped up in propagating a particular narrative.

[edit] From another comment, here's an e-mail from the Parse team, from 1/15/2013 -- only 3 months ago:

"Being acquired isn't part of our game plan for now. We want to build a viable business that people can use and enjoy. We have 50k apps built on our infrastructure and a huge customer base that is growing rapidly. Everyday we have more and more Basic, Pro, and Enterprise users paying us for our awesome services."

https://gist.github.com/brianpattison/5463282

When you're dealing with venture capitalists, the truth is whatever they need the audience to believe.
One thing we do at work is offer a single 30 day extension to trials that haven't converted. Definitely helps conversions.
Friday SEO Share: Usability is STILL Best Practices
"This is short, so pay attention…"
Words of wisdom from my calculus teacher (and dad).
Feels like a filler post to hop on a trend. Also, I just can't agree that MapReduce was a bad idea in the first place. Especially when the author goes on to laud the ecosystem built on top of MR/HDFS.
HTTP is over tcp though so it should be Hard to convince vlc's servers to reply to a third party. Seems like a silly ddos actually but what do I know.
It's a big problem with marketplaces and social sites.

The Reddit guys also had a lot of sockpuppets, and you see similar stuff on many success stories :)

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/reddit-founders-made...
> those followers will see the favorite and might retweet or favorite it themselves

Um, no they won't. Things you favorite don't show up to others unless they specifically go and look at things you have favorited.
This is not what CISPA proposes.
It really isn't.

There are a lot of advocacy organizations (EPIC, etc) that like to bluster about what it does. Right now EPIC is blustering that it's part of authorizing a secret program.

What they didn't tell you is that this is their real goal is to gain possible congressional support for the FOIA request they filed, they are just trying to tie it all together so they can gain support from CISPA haters.

A lot of these advocacy orgs that lobby are good in the sense of trying to do what they think is right but they often present pretty extreme (IMHO) interpretations of bills/laws and viewpoints to support this.

Full disclosure: I have interned at one of these advocacy orgs before (CDT).

It's true the government would be happy if they could monitor everyone's activity, but that isn't CISPA, and crying wolf repeatedly about every bill just makes people less likely to care. If they really wanted to monitor everyone's activity, they'd just do it, and clean up the mess later.
How I served 100k users without breaking the server or a dollar bill
I agree. I furiously kept trying for 45 minutes for IO and finally failed to acquire one. It was frustrating. Apple on the other hand closed it in 2 mins but reaching out after the failed attempt was nice serendipity.
> "Those keys were a dead-set copy of the keys that we had. The key he copied was in the shape of a figure E, which was the master key."

> The officer said it was Heiss's fellow inmate - fellow murderer Shane Baker - who made the key. He said Baker was a jeweller who had jewellery-making equipment in his cell, and used this to work on the key.

This has "I don't know what I expected" written all over it
Municipal Debt Threatens US Economy
"This is very weird for a DDoS, to be honest."

Maybe it was aimed at bandwidth costs?
"Before, it was effectively merit-based: whoever cared the most (and had the money and ability) to get a ticket could get one."

I'm not sure Marco understands what "merit-based" means.
You not accepting it doesn't mean it's not true. When you say "we should regulate taxi industry because we want higher standards of safety" you have to remember that those standards are by no means universal. Every person has his own set of standards. If 60% of people accept your standards and 40% do not, that means that those 40% would be forced to follow them. If they don't - meaning if they decide to start a business that doesn't comply with those standards to serve customers who don't agree with these same standards - they will pay fines or go to jail. It's a fact, not a perspective.

Thus you saying you don't accept that government and taxes are immoral is actually the same as saying you don't accept to call it theft and force when governments do something to the rest of the people who disagree with you.
Far from it. Uber is a remarkably professionally run company that has transformed transportation in the US cities where it operates.

I'm surprised (or more precisely, dismayed) that a comment with such comically excessive language received so many upvotes. This is how a forum turns into a self-caricature.
The Nexus One had removable storage. You connected it, Android unmounted the SD card, and the desktop mounted it - boom no worries.

The Nexus 4 cannot unmount its internal storage, so something like MTP is required.
But you haven't explained why it is incompatible.
It looks perfectly compatible to me.
This is a valid point and I should have been more precise. But AFAICT all those interconnects are single duplex point-to-point links, and thus not subject to the CSMA issues of asymmetric collision detection detailed in the linked article.
Embedly is hiring an Account Executive in Boston
Embedly is a 3 year startup based in Boston. We are a team of 7 and growing.

Embedly builds front-end tools that help web and app developers create better user experiences. We believe that the best tools are simple, easy to use, and perfectly suited to their task. You'll find that embodied in our products that provide ultra-fast ways to present richer content, more effectively.

We are looking for an Account Executive to help grow the service.

Role

* Manage deals throughout the pipeline.

* Meet or exceed monthly sales goals

* Become an Embedly expert, making sure the right client gets the right solution

You

* Are nothing like Glengarry Glen Ross.

* Demonstrated success selling a software or SaaS solution.

* Understand how to sell to developers and designers

* We would prefer someone that has written code before.

* Listen well and respond effectively

We offer a Competitive Salary, medical, dental and meaningful equity.

To apply send a resume to jobs@embed.ly.
Windows Phone Beating iPhone In 7 Countries
EcoGrader scores your website on sustainability
The use of the animated gif as part of the github readme seems quite ingenious to me. I don't think I have seen that idea in other github repos. And for a project like this its the perfect introduction. I wonder what tool did he use for this.
Yes, Eclipse.

You know, Sublime Text integration might be possible. But Eclipse is, as near as I can tell, the canonical mainstream GUI IDE. I think getting Swank(SLIME) integrated into a mainstream IDE would add to Common Lisp's usability for the non-command-line crowd by leaps and bounds.

I see the computing world as fundamentally bimodal: people trend hard towards GUIs and mice or they trend hard towards CLIs and keyboards. Common Lisp's development environment is built by and for the second crowd. You might call them... hackers. :-) But I would dearly love to see the non-hacker computing world walk in the wonders of Lisp. I've attempted to teach several people Lisp, and the development environment is, hands down, the major stumbling point (after the parentheses whining is finished with). This is a major barrier to getting people onboarded. I suppose that means I should try to get Cusp/lispdev compiling this weekend and see what state its in. :-)

Other barriers include no modern GUI library[1]; no popular webapp framework[2], no single point of contact for the language, and a lack of a flagship thing to raise the flag around (Ruby/Rails, Python/NumPy|Django, Clojure/not-java, etc).

[1] The libraries that exist are fairly thin bindings over QT, SDL, and TK. They are far behind the sleek usability of, say, Clojure's seesaw or the even clunkiness of C# autogenerated code.

[2] Clack and children are getting there
This concept is very similar to the "Twitter can predict the stock market" from a long time back: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/twitter-crystal-ba...

See also, a collection of other related links (helpful if you want to try your hand at making something like this):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2055857
When Maven Dependencies Lie
> Unless you're telling disparaging and outright lies about somebody in an absolute manner ...

That... seems like a pretty accurate, if brief, summary of when defamation is actionable under this Act. (Disparaging - yup, s.1; outright lies - yup, s.2; etc.). Do you come to bury the act or to praise it?
Good thought, but source spoofing for an amplification attack wouldn't work here; from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5613529 :

> The actual number of requests was not that high (400 req/s), but the botnet was downloading the whole vlc.exe, aka 22MB. So, we were at around 70Gbps during the night, in average.

Source spoofing would not allow downloading the whole file; the spoofed source address would get the first response packet and send an RST ("stop, no connection associated with this packet, go away") long before that point.
Reminds me of http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+worst+program+I+ever+worked+o...:

> Some bug had popped up in this program and the guy assigned to fix it had come back alternatively laughing and crying babbling nonsense about ‘pizzas calling hamburgers and passing booze’.... The software this guy left behind did not have any logic bombs or other nasty tricks in it, it compiled just fine, and besides that one bug it seemed to work fine as well. Imagine this though: every function and variable name in the program was named after food.
[Citation Needed].

Reality is, as far as i can tell, tech oriented folks care a lot. "Most of the US" probably doesn't give a shit one way or the other, or worse, would be okay with it.

In a US where a significant percentage of people believe we should be throwing the constitution out the window to 'fight terrorism', you are going to need a bit of evidence to suppor the idea that it's 'most of the US except for a few industries with powerful lobbyists'.
This isn't analysis. This is shallow punditry/executive summary bullet point repetition.
Every time I've installed Cinnamon on Ubuntu (the main one, not a different flavor) there have been integration problems because Ubuntu has a bunch of patches on regular GTK stuff and hooks into it.
Flame Suit On / Rant Mode On

I actually really don't understand why anyone uses GPL for a library. I've been doing open source for a long long time, and love the GPL. I have code in the Linux kernel, and believe free software AND open source software are great solutions to very real problems in software engineering. Having open code just gives people more options, and I firmly believe it will win over time as far as quality is concerned.

I just think only providing libraries to other GPL code is stupid. It just limits the usefulness of the software. LGPL is great here, you get the core changes contributed back to your library from a greater group of people and everyone wins. Limiting a library to GPL means a large population can not use your code, those writing applications that can't be licensed under the GPL. Limiting choice is BAD. The whole reason you should be creating and using free software and OSS is to not weld the hood shut. GPL should be for applications, LGPL just limits choices for libraries. Down with the GPL for libraries!!!

Flame Suit Off / Rant Mode Off
Show HN: Who is the BESt Baseball Player?
Of course I don't do the smell test myself, to be absolutely sure not to be a nuisance to anyone. Besides, sweat is absorbed by underwear like t-shirts, which I obviously change and wash much more frequently. In any case, use your best judgement and be respectful to others.
PCLinuxOS "So Cool Ice Cubes are Jealous"
No, but it would still be a pain in the ass. Dryers were invented for a reason.
Maybe. Seriously, no idea.
I assume the engines are gimbal mounted and can direct their thrust.
This:

Most martial artists have done knife-defense drills where their partners attack in a very stereotyped way--lunging forward with a single thrust and leaving their arm out there so that you can perform the technique. This is just a pantomime of combat, and it is dangerously misleading.

This was why I found traditional martial arts like karate to be daft. They only seemed to teach you defence against someone else who punches like a karateka.