skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the video, this looks like a graphical spreadsheet debugger. That is a fucking fantastic idea. It's been a while sine I used a lot of excel, but this would have been great.

I think you'd want to target non-programmers who use a lot of excel (so people in "business") and just bring them more debugging features. An excel IDE would be an ambitious potential next step.
So the descriptive domainname is probably only to influence Google's ranking methodology? The domainname itself being a factor in the inferred "relevancy" of the content.

Your explanation of this scam shows some of the flaws in relying on Google's methodology and ranking system to (re)"organize the world's information".

Imagine if the world's libraries worked this way.

The flaws should not simply be opportunity for scammers, they should be a signal to entrepreneurial innovators.

In the same way that the flaws in first generation search engines like AltaVista (e.g., blurring of the line between commercial and non-commercial content in search results) were a signal to the entrepreneurs who created Google.
Ask HN: Recommendation for a Groovy book?
Hi,

I want to learn Groovy on Grails. I have some experience with ASP.NET MVC, but I know next to nothing about the whole JVM world. It would be cool if it included also something about deployment.
This guy clearly has allies and enemies in Silicon Valley and we can only guess what his beef with Microsoft really is.
General Fusion: A miniature sun rises in the west
Not really. As far as I know, Windows RT is essentially a port of the NT kernel, most Windows APIs and the new Metro/RT APIs to ARM.
You can't download and build what consumers think of as Android.
The one that comes to mind is the FuzziBunz brand of reusable diapers. If you follow Shark Tank, you may have seen the owner on there lamenting about patent infringement -- an employee of hers that was responsible for coordinating the outsourcing of her product to China then abruptly left the company and started her own line of FuzziBunz clones using the same factory.
Behind the Best Innovations: Obvious, Annoying Problems
> It's obvious that this ideal society of yours is modelled for a rather small group.

Why is that?

> Complete lack of delegation can't possibly scale very far at all.
I have not said anything about a complete lack of delegation. I think representation voted from the bottom up is a rational way of representing a group of people. However, this kind of representation differ much from one would call representation today, eg:

* The members of an organisation (e.g a workplace or a community) would either vote for someone to be a representative or that status would be rotated among the members.

* A representative's task would be to forward the issues or votes that the members have voted on.

* A representative's status would be revocable at any time.

* Being a representative would not in anyway be a full-time occupation, rather a very limited part.

> But to me it seems a society has to grow and specialize to become more effective. If for not other reason than because there will be competition from external groups.

I'm not sure I follow here, what do you mean by the need to become more effective. To what end?

> If you have two or more of these decentralized groups, how would conflicts be handled between them? If two or more wants to trade or create an alliance, some kind of organizing unit has to formed to ensure all parties play by the rules. Voila, a government.

I have no reason to belive people can't organise rationally without a government, rather the opposite. A highly organised society - from the bottom up - is not a government. Additionally, I don't think one can argue in favour of government in the realm of conflict handling as governments have quite a poor track record regarding this.

> I assume you're not advocating for going back to some tribal farming-style society? If so, can you explain how the anarchist society you're proposing would perform more complex tasks such as trade, or just large-scale manufacturing, without a government?

That's correct. I'm not advocating for a "back-to-the-roots" society. Naturally the exchange of goods in one way or another will occur, however I would like to emphasize that large-scale manufacturing per se, and perhaps the concept of perpetual growth, is no goal of an anarchist society compared to todays growth-based economy. Basically, if there's a need for large scale industries, it would be organised, otherwise not.

This is a very broad and complex subject, and many people (and various anarchist writings) is better than me to answer this, but maybe you could be a bit more specific in your questions to make them more answerable?
Also interested in this question. I've used rfpdb.com for a while with somewhat decent success

EDIT: Also, look for your local city's purchasing departments. Often times they release RFP's through their own website portal.

For example, San Francisco's purchasing department has a db here http://mission.sfgov.org/OCABidPublication/
We would certainly use this at our company...In the real estate finance world we exclusively use Excel for financial underwriting, and at times, cells and formulas get lost in the fray. As the analyst around here, I know how to audit a spreadsheet just looking at the formula (if I built it...), but the guys in the field using our models have no clue how cell A links to cell B.
I vote for online solution, as us corporate types have no ability to download or add software (even as Excel add-ins...) Ugh.
Chrome support for XP to continue - helpful, or dangerous?
Great point. I didn't mention findability but that's a struggle in dynamic languages since you must resort to searching for strings. Thus in dynamic languages similar/duplicate function names hinder refactoring and navigation.
This headline made me chuckle. One of my biggest disappointments while working at NYT Digital in the late 00s was that there were so many engineers. To organize them all, technologies and staff were piled into silos (eg the database team, the platform team, the frontend team), requiring painfully complicated communication for significant projects. Things moved very slowly there.

It was so bad that my department director jokingly recommended hastening a small, public-facing project by using Google Spreadsheets as a datastore, rather than deal with the overhead of involving the database team. I took his advice at face value and shipped the app quickly. He grinned, and said in a congratulatory tone, "you actually used Google Spreadsheets!" It was like a subversive victory.
There are two main issues with that argument (they don't completely invalidate the argument, but you should be aware of them):

1 - Most of that R&D cost is created because companies must create small differences between their products, requiring new tests. That is, if patents were absent, the society would need to spend a much smaller sum for the same gain.

2 - The pharmaceutical industry isn't an unbiased party of that research (quite obviously) and thus it isn't the ideal party for administrating it.

But, like I said, it does not invalidate the argument. Those issues also don't have an obvious solution (as far as I can see), but they exist.
She doesn't get anything in lieu of benefits, but she gets a full 1/180th of the annual salary per day she works (there are 180 teaching days in the year). On top of that, she still contributes to the pension and can claim unemployment during the summer.

She does occasionally get longer-term assignments for teachers who are away for a couple weeks at a time, so there's a bit of relationship-building and long-term-teaching here and there. She also likes that she has a less authoritative role and can relate to the students on a friendlier level.
Your reply got me curious, so I tried searching the USPTO TESS [1] to match your results for the EU and the UK. With what appears to me to be the correct query, "(mario)[COMB] AND (nintendo)[OW]" [2], I found 39 results total and of which one was for the word "Mario" on its own [3] but that trademark was dead "because the applicant failed to respond or filed a late response to an Office action". According to what [4] says and given the time frame (filing date: Sep. 30, 1982; date abandoned: Dec. 23, 1983) this seems to imply that the trademark "Mario" was never granted. However, there are 22 trademarks that contain the word "Mario" and at least one other word that are live.

Why did Nintendo let the application for "Mario" lapse? I can think of least three options: 1) it was by chance; 2) their lawyers decided the trademark won't be granted; 3) they thought it was somehow undesirable to own the trademark for the word "Mario"; I wonder what it really was.

Anyway, you're right. The GP was mistaken that you cannot trademark common names [5]. Looks like he was right that "Mario" isn't a trademark of Nintendo's but for the wrong reason.

[1] Trademark Electronic Search System, http://tmsearch.uspto.gov.

[2] You can paste it into their "Free Form" search form. Unfortunately, it looks like you cannot link to search results directly.

[3] http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=73397991&caseType=SERIAL_N...

[4] http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/abandon.jsp

[5] For US examples see, e.g., http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=74259941&caseType=SERIAL_N... and http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85026053&caseType=SERIAL_N....
Carl Sagan - The Pale Blue Dot
[In the far future] any plans to hook people up with e.g. a Kinect so you can capture point clouds and allow people to rotate the signs / see them from different perspectives? Or is this completely unnecessary?

As someone who hasn't learnt sign language myself, I'm not sure, but I think I'd find it easier to mirror a sign by seeing it from the person's point of view (i.e. "over the shoulder") rather than looking from a camera's point-of-view in front.

Also, what's the current state of the art like for detecting sign language? Could you use similar tech to test people and make sure they're performing signs correctly?
Doesn't seem to work for WYSIWYG fields in Chrome:

ALSO NOTE: Lazarus 3 doesn't save WYSIWYG editors yet, this is due to a Chrome bug (http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=20773) which prevents us from accessing the iframe that is used to display the editor. There's little I can do until this bug is fixed, sorry.
Like generic macros bundled in C++ compilers around 1993.
Paste buffer fail or something. Fixed now.
Yes, it works from signup to store launch, I guess it would be a good idea to set up a demo store to play with (thanks!)

Once you drop the code in you get a floating button on your site when logged in:
http://i.imgur.com/asXjdiv.png

There isn't a whole lot of screen to show you, but I think a demo store would show all of that off really well.
Nope. Windows RT is ARM compiled Windows 8 with a little flag that prevents the installation of 3rd party desktop apps. It's not even a little bit different.
This is interesting... I'm intrigued to write something.

One thing, though--would it be possible to have it sign you in after completing activation? :)
Yes, please. I'm cobbling together pfsense-on-aws for my own use and an actual pfsense-created AMI would be much nicer...
There's a ton of those that are fully aboveboard, you just don't hear about them. One exists for return tracking, one exists for how many applications you've filed for credit cards, one exists for landlord/tenant court entries that saves them forever (they insist they aren't a CRA but under the law they clearly are) -- there's a ton of them other than the Big 3 and there's almost no effective regulation around them.
This is a browser built on Chromium. Where is its source code? Is this a closed-source wrapper around Chromium?

Later: Answer: Yes. https://twitter.com/jeremiahg/status/392335814048247808
That bill was DOA, posturing by a politician to appease his left flank. Nobody took it seriously and his party is no longer in power.
What makes you think "I work at Google" provides sufficient data to an interviewer such that they should exempt you from their interviewing process? The fact that you have a job somewhere else says very little.
It wasn't that easy for Paypal :) http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1028
> First, the name merely combines two values. What will happen when requirements change and we need to ensure that the provided experience includes at least 3 years of activity? The meaning of has_public_experience? will change along with its behavior and lead to surprises for developers unfamiliar with these particular details. It will no longer merely be existince of experience allowed for the public.

The problem is not the boolean, it's that we're using the wrong name for the method. Just choose a better name:

class ProfilePresenter < ::Presenter
def display_experience?
profile.has_experience? && profile.experience_public?
end
end

The advantage of this over a block is that you can use this in more than one spot on the page. What if you wanted to show a special badge for users with experience in a different place? You'll end up extracting out this logic anyways -- it will just be hidden by another layer.

> This leads us to the second problem: the intent of the method is to display features, not query for values. Were we to stick with a query method like has_public_experience? we would end up considering the content inside the view along with the meaning of the method every time we read this code.

When you move up and down the ladder of abstraction[1], make it clear. When you're talking about "has_experience? && experience_public?", the new name "with_experience" does not communicate that we're hiding details, nor does "block.call" when you look at the new method. The name "display_experience?" makes it clearer that we're now moving to a higher rung, the view.

[1] http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
Show HN: Pollse, our weekend Rails Rumble submission
Not sure - if it's a hobby, then it's a hobby with fair potential to become a passive income or a lifestyle business (or more).

Just because the parent has reduced the risk of setting up a business doesn't mean he isn't setting up a business. There's no compelling reason to believe that the parent commenter has any smaller chance of success than any other business - but he surely has a smaller chance of making a significant loss.
Given the obviously appalling management "these schmucks" were subjected to, per the article "In the last 10 months alone, government documents show, officials modified hardware and software requirements for the exchange seven times.", plus our hearing from multiple sources that there were getting change orders through the beginning of the week per launch, can you honestly say they fleeced us?

I can't imagine any way the contractors could have delivered a working system under the constraints we've been hearing, including most especially the unqualified Federal HHS CMMS government bureaucrats taking upon themselves the role of integrator of the 50+ parts of this system.

For that matter many people at all levels of this have been waving red flags, which the people running the show have studiously ignored. I mean, you know someone told them "you've got to freeze the requirements and give the programmers some time to get the job finished", not to mention "it needs more than one week of testing"....

Some of the remedial steps we're hearing about, like monitors for system bottlenecks, sound to me like things the integrator should have made part of the system from the beginning....
Android doesn't affect media players directly. Also, even with biggest market share, as far as someone with smaller but still significant market share sabotages codecs adoption - there is a problem. Only if Apple will become completely irrelevant as in "can be ignored", then it won't affect the situation. But so far it didn't happen yet.

Surely Apple aren't alone in causing these kind of problems, but they are a major factor.

They managed to sabotage open codecs for audio and video tags in W3C, but now there is some hope that WebRTC will make open codecs part of the standard, and Apple will be forced either to follow the standard or admit they are jerks.
get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it.

While I don't know about 30, we use some apps in house that clients began to use for their business. We're now looking at building those apps for ourselves and our clients are on board. We'll be saving the expenses, and have some folks on board before day one. Cool.

Along the road we have had the clients ask us if we can extend the app for certain use cases they have. Since we built their web-presence and integrated those with other tools.. Lets just say things are developing.

So maybe look to your existing clients (you know, the work you do during the tim you wish you were building your app). They are a great source for us, so far...
Why VCs aren’t insanely rich
Basic Data Structures: Hash Tables
Cyrix. That's a word i didn't hear in at least a decade.
I didn't see anything that meant it was doomed from the requirements stage.

This was more of an Obama love fest and defense of ObamaCare than a technical article describing who the backend was doomed.

For what this cost to build it could have been much better, much simpler, and handled the scale gracefully.

Yes privacy concerns keep it off the elastic cloud. (not a point mentioned in the article)

Yes authenticated users limit caching and make scaling harder. (not really mentioned)

But when you are talking about everyone in the US, you only have so many combinations. Income in something like 32 ranges, number of kids 1 through 12 (greater than 12 they are all free) a bunch of ages.

We just saw a post that only 15 searches are new to google each day, so the number of combinations is much less than search which does lots of caching.

The requirements were messed up, the implementation was. Clearly not built by people who had ever done "Facebook scale" stuff.
Wikimedia Fdn Exec Dir Responds to Reports of Paid Advocacy, Sockpuppetry
The United States Supreme Court held in 1943 that school pupils may decline to participate in the pledge of allegiance.[1] Most but perhaps not all state governments in the United States make saying the pledge a routine part of the school day (at least during primary schooling), but education regulation in the United States is mostly by state law, so perhaps there are some exceptions to this general pattern. Of course homeschoolers like my family make their own decision in such matters.

[1] http://www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/sept11/16_0...

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vo...
Ditch PowerPoint: Presentation Alternatives for your next event
10 Biggest Tech Headaches
Jesus, have you had an MRI? It's bearable but not exactly an enjoyable experience.
.. and is Ögmundur still in power to follow through?
How To Fix Healthcare.gov
I myself use AOKP, although I believe the permission management feature was cherry-picked from Cyanogen, and Google searches seem to verify the functionality exists.

On AOKP, you have to enable it by going into System Settings -> Permissions, which will then let you manage your apps.

Cyanogen uses a similar system[1], you'll need to navigate to CyanogenMod Settings, then Permissions, and finally Enable Management. After that, permissions can be enabled or disabled through the Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications menu.

[1]Those instructions were pulled from a Google search, as I don't run Cyanogen myself currently. They may be old/incorrect/etc. Good luck.
After reading that slate article about how the writers brain-stormed the ending to fit their audience and get the "best" emotions out of them instead of following up on characters' development I decided not to watch any tv shows for a while.

edit: I thought that breaking bad was awesome but reading it being reduced as "drama" make me realize it was mainly drama in specific setting :(
This is actually something I'd quite like to do with CodeCube - it wouldn't be hard at all. Replace SSE with websockets, attach to the container's stdin as well as stdout, add something like term.js, and it'd work a treat.
I agree with this model where the problem are solved bottom up.
> Do you know why 3D printing is finally taking off? The patents are starting to expire.

That same history happened with almost every technology since patents existed. Some quite famous examples are the steam engines, electronic valves, and airplanes. It's an easy to spot pattern, new tech just takes off only a patent length interval after it leaves the labs.

That alone is not evidence that patents are bad. But coupled with the fact that most of those techs were concurrently invented by several people (who often got bankrupt, because they couldn't sell their inventions) it becomes very strong evidence.
They don't need magic powers. They employ hundreds of human raters to judge the quality of search results according to Google's criteria and biases.
I'm not sure if that's the deal breaker at this stage, but I added it as a bug.
Personally the 'if' conditional statement acts as a visual trigger.

It allows me to quickly recognize that something may or may not show up on the view.

I would prefer something along these lines:

class ProfilePresenter < ::Presenter
def with_experience?
profile.has_experience? && profile.experience_public?
end
end

<% if user_profile.with_experience? %>
<p><strong>Experience:</strong> <%= user_profile.experience %></p>
<% end %>
I wasn't at all suggesting disclosing a bug before it's fixed. The write-up was great, the disclosure correct. I was merely saying that the HN title should reflect the current state of affairs.
In hindsight I wish I had done more than just read this article before I submitted it.

A lesson learnt.
Digitalattackmap
Innovation 101
Not even vaguely a scam, as I reply to you elsewhere in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6586603

Unless you want to posit that the contracts were accepted by companies that knew it could not be delivered in the time required. And even then, people are optimistic, and I strongly suspect they didn't think HHS/CMMS would be so insane about the number of changes demanded during the process, going all the way through the week before launch (!!!).
Bootstrap 3: Why all the hype?
If I got an email from george@avoid416scam.com claiming to protect my bank account from 416 scams for free if I give him access to my bank account, I'd be suspicious.

Instead I got a website from whitehatsec.com claiming to provide me a more secure web browser for free, claiming it's perfectly safe to put in my bank account info into it.

Won't touch it with a barge pole. My spidey sense is tingling for one reason or another.
There may be an element of truth to that but Google/Motorola and Samsung are fighting extremely dirty by using FRAND committed standards essential patents.

It can easily be seen that a large amount of [inspiration/copying/ripping off - choose your adjective depending on viewpoint] was done of the original iPhone. There are a reasonable range of views as to whether Apple should have had the right to bring any action about that but they were clearly angered and used the available laws to try to prevent it (which due largely to the slow movement of the legal system they have largely failed to do). I can see a range of valid views on the proper protection from copying of products and I don't believe it is possible to prove one better than others (although some might be obviously bad). I don't see anything evil in one mega-corp using the legal system to try to stop another mega-corp from copying it.

From Samsung's point of view if getting their current share in smartphones costs them a couple of billion dollars in damages that would be a good deal for them.

The patent law is a mess. I would prefer patents MUCH harder to obtain but that could be normally assumed valid once granted and with a legal system able to bring injuctions fast enough to get infringing models removed before they are obselete/replaced.