skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's important to point out that doing this is a bad idea (as the author of the article notes.) The behavior specified by this plist value is meant for daemon processes. Google is using it because they run daemon processes for the window renderers in Chrome. The daemons need some of the Cocoa application stuff to render things like form inputs with native widgets, so they have to use some 'real' (NSApplication) Cocoa application stuff to get that that, which normally creates a dock icon for you (instead of just running a UNIX process.) This Info.plist value suppresses that behavior, along with the dock icon bounce and some other important stuff.

The author then goes on to ignore his own advice, and shows us demoing the trick in his own application.
This is a cute example, but the problem could probably be solved much more efficiently with standard optimization methods, like Nelder-Mead. See Numerical Recipes...
True insofar as it goes, but remember that many legal issues really boil down to a question of whether a particular _business_ risk is worth taking. Some of the most valuable legal training I've ever gotten was from being the one-lawyer law department of a 500-person software company -- for a while, I was regularly 'educated' by our business folks that sometimes you've just got to take the risk even though it might make "the lawyers" slightly nervous.

(Usual disclaimer: This isn't legal advice, consult a licensed attorney, YMMV, etc., etc.)
According to the US Copyright Office, recipes aren't generally copyrightable. Listings of ingredients certainly aren't, and the instructions can only be copyrighted if they are a "substantial literary expression". I'm guessing that "mix stuff, cook it at 350 until done" isn't going to qualify.

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html for the real info.
Developing a Minimum Viable Product
We actually met some people doing something like this in Cambridge when MagicSolver was just starting - a group called imense (http://www.imense.com/). They have an automated picture tagger. You give it a picture of a field of sunflowers, for example, and it comes up with 'flowers, nature, field, ...'. I imagine that if you made it domain-specific (your PCB example), you might be able to actually classify the objects.
Oh lame, I've been duped! I hadn't noticed it on HN prior.
+1 Do you have ideas for more features? Since the validation gets passed to W3C, the main or only added feature is saving your URL list.
So, while I’m certainly not recommending people start adding this code to their apps to provide the illusion of a faster launch

Do. I want the illusion of a faster launch almost as much as I want a faster launch.

What is it people rave about when they try SSDs? Is it the shock resistance? The power use? The noise? No. It's primarily "Wow, everything starts so much faster!".
Recipes + real pictures of the food after it's made = awesome. I am damn hungry now.
From a Forbes article on Jonney Shih, CEO of Asus:

But around that time, two low-cost notebook models were making waves. Last November tech guru Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC, program released its first batch of prototype laptops designed for children in the developing world. And Intel was getting ready to launch a competing laptop, the Classmate PC, for a similar market. So, Shih thought, why not make a small, inexpensive laptop for grown-ups?

http://members.forbes.com/global/2007/1112/024a.html

For years prior to the OLPC, we had been able to make a small laptop with a full OS... The OLPC's AMD Geode CPU was seven years old at the time they chose to use it. What none of the manufacturers realized was that there was any sort of market for a vastly underpowered, almost unusably cramped, extremely cheap laptop that attempts to run a full OS. The media buzz created by the OLPC revealed this market.
It's important to point out that doing this is a bad idea

You've explained why it's done to get Cocoa components, but you haven't pointed out why it's a bad idea. It seems faster, which is good. Does it do any harm?
The most interesting part:

"We also welcome non-JVM developers on similar technologies to attend or speak on their runtime, VM, or language of choice."

Anyone from the Arc community interested?
The idea of the technology is that boko tag reader hardware is available now. It's just your camera. It just requires software and you're done. You could do an iphone app today.

The problem is passive vs active illumination. Currently, each tag needs an LED behind it. They're still working to get them to work with your camera flash.
Amazon.com is too powerful
The Startup Pyramid - The Optimal Go-to-market Approach
I certainly hope so. We got taught by John Daugman, who's done some amazing stuff in Computer Vision. It's brilliant for us to be able to do something like Sudoku Magic in a mobile phone. And we have plenty more ideas to come!
You're right. But I actually don't think beans (or white rice) are that healthy — they're fairly good.

I left that out because I don't want to get into a "narrative war" on diet again. But I can discuss it later.
I dunno, I think Google knows the DOJ is waiting for an excuse to come after them, and it's hardly worth the risk over something that has no impact on their bottom line.
It is a cute example. It's meant to teach Pyevolve and basic genetic algorithms with an example that doesn't seem too contrived. But thank you for noting that -- I'll add it to the article as a disclaimer.
1) Simple cooking really doesn't take much hands-on time.

2) Everyone needs some downtime. TAKE A BREAK!!! You don't have to work all the time.

3) For some, cooking is relaxing. See (2) above.
Is it Politically Incorrect to Criticize Open-Source Software?
Its behavior for applications which use a GUI is unspecified by Apple (afaik) which means it could break at any time. Among other problems: Dock icon weirdness (no bouncing, status changes are strange) your app won't show up in the "Recent Applications" menu, your app won't be registered correctly in the process list, and likely some other stuff I can't name off the top of my head. Don't do it. You aren't an exception.
It makes sense for the author to use it, since he wants to emulate the behaviour of the "Recent Applications", etc. Dock folders. A bounce is unwelcome in this case, and the other benefits of the normal application startup (like being registered in the "Recent Apps" list) are useless for him.
Suggestions:

A) Be sure the agreement includes a suitable confidentiality clause obligating the other side -- see http://www.ontechnologycontracts.com/clauses-for-contracts/c... for some sample clauses and commentary.

B) Consider adding a reasonableness qualifier -- e.g., in 1): "The Incubatee shall, permit the Licensor to participate to a reasonable extent in agreed negotiations or discussions in respect of Incubatee's business activities or the financing thereof."

C) In # 2, consider asking to add an upon-request qualifier, and limit the obligation to providing copies of what you already have. Example: "The Incubatee shall, after expiry or termination of Agreement or after graduation and for five (5) years thereafter, upon the Licensor's reasonable request, provide the Licensor [STRIKE: on regular intervals agreed on,] with copies of any written reports developed by the Incubatee showing its business status ...."

Usual disclaimer: This isn't legal advice, I'm not your lawyer, consult a licensed attorney, YMMV, etc., etc.
Unsurpassed Natural Remedies For Breast Cancer
Ask HN: What would be your perfect work environment?
We all know you want to work on startups...but if you had to go work for someone else, what would be your perfect work environment?

I'm not really looking for anything specific, pretty much anything that relates to a job.

Free lunches?

Good chairs?

A single boss?

4 day work week?

Free car?

Monthly talks by leaders in the industry?

Pretty much an open field.
It does make sense in his case. It's still a hack, and he's still ignoring his own advice :)
Why not do a Y Combinator feature similar to Kiva? Members of the community can post information about their startup idea, and then people can give out micro-loans or micro-investments.

I think that would be super cool.
Good phrase there. Google search today: ... of about 10,600 for "Point-and-search"

(the hyphens force 'and' to be included, but match spaces. Plain "Point and search" was 224k hits, many with interspersed punctuation.)
I do seem to remember a Pratchett quote that conjurers amaze you twice - once with the trick and once with the trickery.
He explicitly states in his conclusion that "whether or not anyone has the right to criticize open-source software is an irrelevant distraction". Well I must say he picked a great title! It ought to be "My Complaints About Spring Batch and Some Thoughts On Sexism"
A great little introduction to using MySQL in Python. Definitely worth a look for those who are interested to see how well it actually works.
I'm familiar with Java, so I've found it easy to hook up with libraries I already understand and just crank out code. When I've tried Common Lisp before I've always struggled (probably because the barrier to understanding was higher) to find libraries to do things like Graphics and GUI work.

I've been working my way through PAIP (using Clojure instead of Lisp) and that's given me a good sense of Lisp style (I hope). I've found that just the act of typing in the code and converting it over to Clojure has helped me grok some of the functional programming concepts I was struggling with (slightly reminiscent of typing in classic arcade games on my ZX Spectrum!).

Clojure has been my catalyst to understanding Lisp-like concepts, and if I had to give one reason for that it would be just having access to all the Java libraries.
That's exactly what Sudoku Magic does (same for puzzle generation in order for them to be fun). From naked singles to X-Fish, it uses them all :-)
I'd hardly say those deaths are unexpected. And planned/unplanned deaths is another discussion entirely. They're quite normal for the most part, and in fact significantly lower than the rate of death in most other species.

Human beings benefit because of resource use and culture change. Imagine if we double the lifespan of the majority of people on earth how insane things would quickly become.

Or are we only talking about doubling the lifespan of those who can afford it? In which case wouldn't it be better to focus these research resources into raising universal quality of life (ie developing malaria drugs), rather than further raising QoL for the rich in the 1st world?
$150 to cook rice? That's ridiculous! How do you think the majority of poor people the world over do it?

I can't remember the last time I came close to burning rice: it's about the easiest thing to cook that there is.
Ask HN: Replacing hard drive platters
In a wildly improbable attept at data recovery, a friend of mine is planning to transfer the platters from one laptop hard drive to another. With the full realization that there's no realistic chance this will work, I'm looking for any tips, tricks, or expertise that might improve the odds here. Ridicule also welcome!

Thanks in advance!
"GV Mobile developer Sean Kovacs relays a phone call he had with Apple where he was notified of his app being removed from the iTunes store for duplicating built-in iPhone features."

It's worth noting that instead of actually addressing the AppStore approval process, apple is trying to get around the controversy by sending rejections by phone. The idea being that it's more difficult to show an official record of Apple saying what they said. Ironically, Google voice can help there with call recording :)

I wonder if Apple's worried about an upcoming lawsuit?
I worked at a consulting firm on a flameout .com (actbig) business that had a nearly identical model back in the late 90s; the big difference here seems to be the (smart!) focus on local businesses & services rather than generic goods like electronics and furniture, and offering only one deal at per day (rather wootlike).

Last time this happened:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=692644

I think the answer to the the question I asked then might be "yes." :)

(They still have a ways to go for profitability, though... 40 people on staff while the items are usually under $100 and have less than 1000 purchasers. Still, they've made it much further than my old client did.)
Do interviews predict job performance? How about dating for marriage?
Chicago Realty Group Sues Woman For $50,000 Over A Tweet
Fair pay and interesting work, but that's no surprise. One thing that makes or breaks a job for me is if my manager communicates well. It makes a huge difference when you know exactly what is expected of you, what you can expect from the company, and where you stand.
The patents have stayed with OLPC.

"Pixel Qi -- my new company -- is now licensing my inventions from OLPC. This isn't an OLPC employee benefit, it's a deal I created with OLPC and Pixel Qi, and the benefit will go to OLPC and to the children of the world, lowering the price of the laptops, and thus allowing more kids to get laptops."

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080107182525297
I started building this after a typo in one of my (otherwise perfectly valid) sites totally broke the layout in IE. With vldtr I now have an easier first line of defense against such breakage.

Another site I've inherited doesn't validate at all. It has lots of pages that I can now revalidate all at once after each deployment.

So indeed, the list is the main feature which distuingishes it from using the w3 validators directly. I'm considering more features, but I'm still thinking them through.
Michael Lewis: Bashing Goldman Sachs Is Simply a Game for Fools
One of the things that caused me a headache for about an hour was realising that you had to do a conn.commit() when updating or INSERTing.
Seems like a pretty agile way to do things to me(which is why I posted this)
I think my job is perfect for me (right at this moment in my life). So I'll list that (hopefully not coming across as bragging or anything :) - and also ripping off your initial list for ideas).

- Free Lunch (I swear this is the best thing, it's so easy)

- Single Boss (so important to get things done)
- Relative freedom day-to-day

- Relaxed work hours

- Fair/Good pay (I can work on personal project without worrying about money)

- Solid company revenue (so needed hardware/software is easy to come by)

- A variety of work (in diverse fields) to keep me interested :)
I probably should have mentioned that in the article, truth is it really depends on your set up, most of the mysql databases I have used are not set up for transactions.
I love it when folks from the old media, who can't figure out how to provide fact-checked news, distinguish opinions from data, disclose ideological conflicts, or CREATE PROFITS lecture the online world about how we're DOING IT WRONG.

Oh noz! Amazon has made a few small missteps over the years. The sky is falling!
The Game Changing New Abundance of Natural Gas in the US
I disagree with your use of the word "the".

What is "the" acceptable movie to watch tonight?

What is "the" acceptable website to surf?

What is "the" acceptable book to buy?

The great thing about freedom is that we can all pick our own answers.

One-size-fits-all solutions suck.
Yeah, but they shouldn't do things like this at the expense of their users. This definitely makes for a poorer user experience.
Firstly - thanks for reading the blog post.

Some of the things mentioned help to reduce CPU usage so that the CPU can do more useful things (TSO, IOAT, DCA, NIC irqs, etc). ioat moves a surprising number of bytes for the CPU. You might be surprised at how many.

I probably could have (and should have) included a bit more variety, though.

Thanks for reading.
Official spokesman: "We're a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization"

Wow.
No money from donations really went to funding the development of the LCD technology. Mary Lou invented it, and the manufacturer put in the implementation engineering effort. OLPC’s management and development budget was paid for by corporate sponsorships from Google, RedHat, and others.

Any of “your” donations were put directly into paying for laptops for children, at cost.

Your outrage is misplaced.
This article seems to be claiming that computers and text messaging are responsible for the final decline in handwriting, but I grew up before personal computers were ubiquitous (I was born in 1977) and cursive was already heavily deemphasized in the schools I went through. I don't recall a single teacher who wouldn't accept hand printed work.
PR nightmare in the making: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23horizon
Wish he'd talk about why he thinks it may be faster. Mochiweb isn't exactly slow. Is he making different compromises? What are they?
I can't justify buying a product that's not really mine. Call me spoiled, but using stuff like Linux made me feel I am really in control. The netbook is mine, and nobody will make my computer do something I don't approve.

This should be enshrined as a sacred principle of programming, not unlike the medical profession's Hippocratic Oath: "I will not build user-betraying systems." It is not enough for us to swear not to buy them: the sheeple will. And they have the most dollars/votes. We, the programmers, must refuse to participate in their creation.

See:

"Ethics for Programmers: Primum non Nocere"
http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html

"The "you don't own your computer" paradigm is not merely wrong. It is violently, disastrously wrong, and the consequences of this error are likely to be felt for generations to come, unless steps are taken to prevent it."
“We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.” Michael added that the company has a “good reputation it wants to preserve.”

Something here has to be taken out of context. Surely no one whose goal was to preserve their company's reputation would say something so silly as that first statement.

At any rate, looks like it's going to be a fairly clear cut Streisand effect here.
Agreed, this is getting idiotic. The site is cool enough, we don't need to arbitrarily add "hacker" to titles as though it magically means the link belongs here.
It's actually not a vulnerability in isolation. The use of SELinux simply changes the address space policy from one in which the kernel enforces the zero page area to one in which the process can map stuff there (by default, unless the security module turns it off). By itself, that does nothing.

There were other holes that had to be there too: the handler code was incorrectly dereferencing a pointer before the check for null (that's a real bug), and the compiler was optimizing out the null pointer test in the same function (a really, really subtle interaction that no one expected) that would have detected the attack and returned an error instead.

It's a perfect storm of coincidence, basically. There's nothing the NSA could have done to predict this, and the SELinux part is only a small piece. And in any case, the security policy bug isn't even in the NSA's SELinux code at all, it's in the way the kernel sets defaults for its security policies for any security module. In principle, app-armor would be vulnerable to the same issue (not sure if it is or not to this one specifically).
It shouldn't be any surprise that demanding physical labor jobs do in fact naturally pay more than minimum wage. Lots of people have physical limitations that prevent them from lugging sacks of concrete, yet they need and can afford things built with concrete.

If minimum wage is totally moot as you argue, what is the downside to abolishing it? It does not require someone to be consisently un or under employed over a number of years to prove that minimum wage laws contribute to unemployment.

Being out of work for 6-12 months, but willing and unable by minimum wage law to work for $5 an hour to put food on your family's table, would be a substantial and avoidable hardship.

Fortunately, in the real world that doesn't actually happen much, because those enterprising hard-working people can find under-the-table paid-in-cash work.
Thanks for writing this up. Seeing "cute" examples like this is actually helpful, because I don't need to learn a particular application area while reading about the solution method. It's a great way to get me started thinking about new ways of approaching old problems.

While you play around with the how the algorithm parameters affect its ability to find the polynomial coefficients, it would be nice to see how adding some random noise to the sample points affects it, as well. This would make your example more realistic (because it would mean you'll never be able to generate a perfect fit).
[Google] Online Stochastic Matching: Beating 1-1/e
IBM, please fix their software, it crashes all the time, the new versions of SPSS are slow, the charts are ugly as hell and the file formats are not open.

It would be the best thing in the world if they could open source it, but I'm not holding my breath. I guess I could learn R, but old habits die hard...
It's a subscriber-only article at lwn.net, which means it isn't available to the public for a week. I saw it last week too, but HN can only link to it today.

FWIW: lwn.net is a great site, and very much worth the subscription cost. Better kernel articles than anywehre else, and a higher signal-to-noise ratio in the comments than anywhere else on the internet I'm aware of. Lots of famous geeks post there regularly.
"What I don't see here is any corroborating evidence that this is anything other than a bug or a faulty cable."

As for the faulty cable, unless the fault is really small, there is no reason to believe there is one. The cable works flawlessly with other iPods that have the 1.x software. I could not find any other cables from the same manufacturer and, since it's just a cable, I threw out the box it came in without much thought of that.

I contacted Apple support, but since the cable is not made by Apple and the iPod's warranty is expired, they said I am pretty much on my own.

As for being new to the brand, I own (and have used then extensively in the 80s) a couple Apple IIs and a somewhat large collection of Macintoshes. Sadly I don't have a Lisa or a NeXT cube (working on that and gladly accepting donations), but, if that's not enough to make me a non-Apple-newbie, I certainly don't know what would.

Did you even read the article? It's all written in the first paragraph...
No, I think it at least seemed appropriate to whoever submitted it because of the interest in recipes that was expressed in this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=726544

Now, I haven't searched the site, so I don't know how many cheap/easy/tastes-good recipes they have there (which are the kind the folks on HN seem to be most interested in). But based on the interest expressed in the aforementioned thread, I think there is a decent argument for it being appropriate for HN.
Would it be funny if Lisp turns out to be something everyone really does love, but the problem was actually the crappy and fractured implementations and the libraries that existed with all the old versions of Common Lisp?

Or would it be like, tragic, or maybe something else.
Howto: Change default browser/email client in OSX
There is this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/business/10novel.html

(coming soon to an iPhone near you)
It looks like you're making requests directly to the online validators (this is a guess based on how slow it is). Why not just run a local copy? The source for the HTML validator is available, I would be surprised if the others were not available too: <http://validator.w3.org/source/>;