skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The $1.2 billion is the projected revenue.

Also, this just seems more rumor spreading without really knowing much. I'll just wait till Apple announces it, or there are at least some pictures that look are possibly real.
Gödel Escher Bach - The video lectures
The Microsoft Mall Invasion Begins
Windows XP SP3 runs browsers 13% faster than Windows 7
Web attack blogger blames Russia
Just out of curiosity why do you say that turning into a custom software development shop is a waste of talent?

Granted yes I'm very much with the rest of the HN community that we should concentrate on making products and all.
From the article:
I’m not great at math, but RadioShack.com has a 14-inch Toshiba laptop that weighs 5.8 pounds. A 14-foot laptop would be twelve times the size of a 14-foot one, so it would presumably weigh about twelve times as much. That means that the giant laptop weighed slightly under seventy pounds.

I'm hoping this is a joke, but I'm really not sure...
ExxonMobil: Green Company of the Year
Every time I've tried to use Scala, I couldn't get through the tutorial without a version incompatibility. It just gave me the impression that they don't really have things together. Until I can get all the way through the tutorial without unexplained error messages, I'm not going to bother too much.
Try "betty bought some butter it was bitter butter so she bought some better butter" ;-)
Auction: Signed, mint copy of On Lisp
I recently had the opposite experience. I was flying from BWI to MEM via Charlotte (which is what I get for buying tickets last minute.) MEM->CTL was delayed somewhat, leaving me with approximately 2 minutes to get from one terminal to another far away terminal.

I naturally didn't make the flight. While they were more than happy to accomodate me and get me onto the next CTL->BWI flight, I was worried about what was going to happen to my luggage, though it somehow beat me there.
I voted up and would do so multiple times if I could. I don't like those slideshow sites that want you to login either or those embeddable slides! They all break page on the web, IMHO.
Well, people could be buying from Tesla because they got money from the government, but as the article says:

>The $20 million in revenues and $1 million in profits do not reflect any proceeds from that loan, the company tells us.
Mouse gestures.

The "graphics off" key. Admittedly less of an issue on broadband, but still.

Fast page loads.

Just generally spare and coherent design. IE is a behemoth and Firefox is a grab bag. It's rare for Opera to do something I don't like.

And maybe force of habit. I picked it up around Opera 4, when I did a comparison with other browsers available at the time and my priorities, and it emerged the clear and easy victor.
Dare I ask how Scribed got to a point where their SEO is too well done?
Python.org is down
That would pretty much drive me nuts.

I mean, you'd end up having to worry about the migratory patterns of birds and the pollen index while attempting to lock the actual value down.
Non-piracy use of Scribd will evaporate entirely when Google gets around to making their brilliant pure-javascript PDF viewer (currently only used in Gmail for attachments) available in general form.
I just discovered this today (and yes, on mefi). And I don't see what's wrong to share it with the fellow hackers here.
LOVE the name they gave it.
Voting up or down isn't supposed to be a statement of agreement but rather one of quality; I believe.
Same. I use subversion to keep track of .tex and .svg files as well as many other odds and ends.
This is the default behavior in Emacs 23.1.

Most of the time, it makes editing text easier, as one would expect. The exception is when using a keyboard macro to do something to a bunch of lines. It's common for such macros to have a form like

1) start at the beginning of the line
2) do stuff to the line
3) go to the beginning of the next line

When the navigation commands take line wrap into effect, you can wind up with a macro that gets run once on short lines, but twice on long lines.
Too much "what" and not enough "why" and "how"
Take a look at the mr command. I find it very handy for working with heterogeneous collections.

http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/mr/
I work with Python for a living. Once upon a time I worked with Perl for a living. And I've seen a fair bit of Ruby.

And in my experience, you're simply wrong; aside from toy programs written for golfing or obfuscation contests, there really doesn't seem to be a significant difference, and many of the "concise" features of, say, Perl tend to be frowned on for real-world use because of the impact they have on the ability of others to read, understand and maintain the code.

As for Lisp, well, "concise" Lisp programs tend to remind me of stuff that comes out of the demoscene, where the headline is "look at this awesome demo in 4k!" but it actually relies on hundreds of megabytes' worth of graphics APIs. Lisp seems to be the same way: for every short piece of amazing Lisp code, there seems to be a corresponding huge chunk of functions and macros backing it.
DISREGARD THAT HE EATS CROW

1) The vending machine doesn't exist in the way it's presented
2) He never actually performed substantive experiments
3) The few trials he actually did were total failures
* and mostly involved captive crows, indoors!
4) What little real research exists is not his
* The actual researchers divorced themselves from him
5) He's a new media douchebag in ITP at NYU, not a biologist of any sort

The whole thing is Gladwellian just-so bullshit on so many levels, and the hype from the NYT and TED really pushed it over the top.
Restricting worker's ability to find new jobs is not a nice gesture. It's opressive, and also may be illegal.
Sarcasm, sir.
I plan on using one in a EE senior design course, making an IR tracker using Wiimote camera with some servos for full pan and tilt control. Also going to interface a nunchuck for a manual control mode.
Is it me, or does this look like an obvious ploy to get attention? It seems pretty well-timed too, to conincide with the 1 year anniversary of the attacks. I'm suggesting that he hired the botnet to attack his own site.
It should detect loops faster:

http://translationparty.com/tp/#563411
As well as Redis, cassandra, CouchDB, and more. It's a confusing space :P
Beyond that, in Haskell you can make your own infix functions with arbitrary symbols, arbitrary meaning, and arbitrary precedence when that's what you want.
Dammit, I made a syntax error. The factorial function in C should be

int fctl(int n){ return ( (n == 1) ? n : n * fctl(n)); }
Before any of that would be people walking by or int he area of the experiment, your own body and your changing (increasing?) weight.
cough---LTCM---cough
Like credentials in escrow. You'd have to have a service that was massive, like a Verisign/Thawt . . . actually an existing SSL certificate provider is perfectly positioned to enter the market.

When you die there's a list of next-of-kin that are contacted with your credentials to various sites, and maybe a prepared (editable or non, depending on preference) obituary.
Super high page rank + lots of pirated content + well optimized site. I think that's it.
198 Methods of Nonviolent Action: Albert Einstein Institution
This can be rather poetic. "Why don't we do it in the road?" becomes simply "Expectations?"
Some praise for this article: Identifying a set of patterns for sub-quality programming practise is useful in order to set about correcting those things esp. if you're in a mentoring position. I think it would have been nice to have given these names (like design patterns perhaps) and fleshed out their definitions further.

Yes, the author is more arrogant than desirable in his delivery but don't let that blind you to the good stuff. Some of the teaching analogies, in particular, I thought were good.
Revenge of the netizens
Surely, you meant either "secure pseudorandom numbers" or "/dev/random".</pedantry>
That's a pretty extreme case don't you think? You're certainly playing devil's advocate here. We all know what the author meant by this.
Interesting. I'd expect that sort of thing to mainly be an issue with multinational platforms, like JSF, but the DARPA writeup makes it sound like a more widespread problem.

The Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations are looser about it than I expected, too. There's a whole section dealing with foreign suppliers, but the only absolute ban I see on a foreign source is for China: http://www.acq.osd.mil/dpap/dars/dfars/html/current/225_7.ht...

That's the evolving battlespace for you, I guess. Wars fought by hackers and robots--coming soon to a theatre near you! It seems weird that such science fiction is already real.
"For example, if the key and JS are provided by the server, then it is the same as basic auth (all data needed to obtain the plaintext password is in the HTTP session). If the key is generated locally on the client, you have the problem of including a good enough PRNG, seeded from enough entropy that the attacker can't guess it."

What about if a public/private keypair is generated on the server and the public key is sent to the client? That sounds fine to me (implementation bugs notwithstanding) and it's what the second FAQ (http://www.jcryption.org/faq/) says happens.

Of course, this is still an awful idea because, as other posts have pointed out, the library itself can be doctored in transit, but I don't see a problem with the key handling design.
Hm, working again. :-)
I agree - it seems to be usurping some of the attention and certainly does not deserve nor has earned it. It really isn't innovative - isn't lightweight, and isn't based on some "killer app" - its just made up of interesting ideas (perhaps too many?).

I certainly hope it doesn't reflect too much on scala. There seems to be a bit of a hang over from java framework-itis where people get more exited over generic meta frameworks rather then solving actual problems.
Aks HN: Bing's search strategy is different from MSN?
I understand Bing is from microsoft who until few days back was pushing MSN search.
I have started using Bing and have realized that it doesnt really suck like MSN.
I also read news about Yahoo and Bing coming together.

I just wanted to know if the search algorithms used by Bing are different than what was used for MSN. Because the results are pretty good with Bing.
unfortunately I hate how the current actors are deliberately type-unsafe. Has burnt me a few times ... the reason is that they were "borrowed" from erlang, as much as possible - the idea being that pattens could be added to the match on an actor (after it is created), so any unmatched "messages" in the "mailbox" will just sit there in hope that one day a pattern will fit - which I can't imagine is a common thing to want to do in reality.
Sounds great - hope you keep a diary blog of your progress.
I guess an XML aware diff could work though? certainly not at all line based...
Similar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtmLVP0HvDg&feature=relat...

A crow, given food in a thin cylinder and a piece of wire, bends the wire into a hook and pulls the food out.
Then it should be easy to support. Let's talk fact here, common knowledge is often wrong.

Sure! In 2003 the United States spent about $94 Billion Dollars on medical reseearch. About 28% of this came from the National Institute of health. Yes, you are technically correct, this makes them the largest "single" contributor. (http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/...)

In 2002/2003 the UK (the largest EU contributor to health research) spent about $480 Million (400 Million Euro) on cancer research. (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=15...)

In this same period, the United States spent about $1.9 Billion. (http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/NCI/research-fu...)

I understand that these sorts of things are inconvenient, and I apologize for not citing sources earlier. Like I said, this is pretty much common knowledge to anybody even remotely familiar with medical research.

In the future, I suggest using this website: http://www.google.com .. it is really great for helping you find things that support "common" knowledge.
To be precise, weight is defined as the magnitude of the force one must apply to an object in a gravitational field in order to hold it at rest.

If you're on the moon, the gravitational force of the earth acting on an object is not what matters. It's the gravitational force of the moon that matters.
"To be clear, this unwritten agreement was that Google would not go after Apple employees, and vice versa. However, employees of both companies were free to apply to the other company on their own, we’re told."

While this doesn't affect employees' ability to find jobs as much, it would affect their pay (as there would be no bidding wars over employees wanted by both companies).
What if you desire to change your passwords, or one of your existing passwords gets compromised and you need to change it?
no, he meant /dev/urandom. /dev/random is reserved for hardware random generating devices on some operating systems (which may not return anything). /dev/urandom is a device that will always output pseudo random data without blocking when the entropy pool runs low.
Dean Kamen: empire off the grid
Well you know what they say: Make hay while the sun shines. I'm only wondering what took Reuters so long to respond.
For example, the pairing of PUT with 'update' , with only POST allowed to create new resource, versus allowing clients to PUT a new resource (effectively creating them) when given the proper URL.

See, for example, http://www.rgoarchitects.com/nblog/2009/06/23/CRUDIsBadForRE...

and in particular the idea that REST is about documents, not databases. "The data model is _not_ the resource model," as one comment there puts it.

Also, CRUD makes no allowance for HEAD and OPTIONS, as if they don't even exist.

I see too, in digging around for links, that this has been discussed on HN before (big surprise, no?):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=629843
While not as much as in the west, there are plently of companies that use Python in India and not all of them "do crap work outsourced to India". Here's a list

http://wiki.python.org/moin/BangPypers/PythonCompaniesInIndi...

A local user group in Bangalore is organising the first Indian PyCon right now and we've talked to many companies (some Indian and some not) about sponsorships because they use Python.
carl sagan has a great section about this in 'the demon haunted world' - he describes / speculates how many modern stories of 'alien abduction' can be explained by sleep paralysis.

it's usually caused by disrupted sleep patterns. i get it pretty often if i take a nap - my trick to get out of it is to try to wiggle the fingertips first.
>One solution is to send a (moderately complex) programming
>problem by email and ask them to send code back. This will
>weed out a lot of people without wasting your time.

This is I think the best solution. A friend works at a company here called Tachyon and they have this part as part of the form on their jobs site where you can apply for jobs.
http://tachyon.in/jobs.html
Yeah I remember to update. Also if I create a new account I care about.

It's not 0 maintenance, but after I spent a day thinking things through I rarely spend more than a few minutes on this.
I worry over introducing incompatible changes (which is more of an issue in middleware and libraries). OTOH, it's common to see "deprecated features", and ActionScript (in flash) has been utterly redesigned a few times. They're still ahead.

Another issue applies to patentable inventions. You need to get this right, because you need to file a prov before you can launch. What if you find out your invention doesn't work in some cases, and you need to change it? What if you have improvements? These encourage a perfectionistic approach - but the truth is, you can just file another prov (depending on jurisdiction, they cost $80, so filing several is no real problem). The only danger is that time started ticking on the first one (you have a year), so you're using up your time until you have to expend real money and effort to patent it for real - or let it go.
What happens when you take the one dumbest data format in existence, extend it (I won't even go into that), stuff it into a centralized server, and let people manipulate it concurrently, using a TECO-ish differential editing protocol?

Answer: Google Wave.

http://pwpwp.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-i-dont-get-about-wave...
Thanks, was gonna say... they were profitable for a long time. I always find the USPS to be great, better than UPS many times... but not so much Fedex.
How to Tighten Up Ab Flab - 10 Minutes Per Day
A good method. The skills required to create or navigate a codebase of 100, 5000, or 100,000 lines are different not only in degree but in kind. Behaviors optimal in the first case can be brutally maladaptive in the last, and vice versa. A preference for global variables or multi-threaded solutions says a lot about the size of project one is comfortable with.

But beyond the practical, what you're really measuring is the ability to break down a large problem, solve individual pieces, reason about how those interact, and iterate. That is the critical intellectual muscle that makes programmers reliably great.

I remember a few projects I abandoned when their size outgrew my ability to comprehend them. It took multiple attempts with new methods to break through certain complexity barriers. I could not write a program longer than about 500 lines until I had learned the practical use of subroutines and data structures. I could not write a program longer than a few thousand lines without a sense of taste when it came to objects and modules. And I could not write a program of significant size until I reliably turned out code that could be comprehended at a glance after months or weeks away, as my own throughput guaranteed it might be that long between visits to disparate parts of the codebase.
Saw that one too. Did a Charlie Brown sigh. I've filed educating people in basic geometry right along with correcting people who misuse "begs the question". Its in the folder marked "training cats and other lost causes".

Also, please, please, don't name it "THE SHACK". I feel dumb enough going in there as it is now. "Hey, where are you headed...?" cringe
I thought that was a flaw in his article. It should be possible to make a bidirectional gateway between a Wave server and and SMTP, and then incremental adoption becomes easy.
repost of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=747619
sometimes they do, depends on population density.
Because food is predictable, available, and cheap. Healthcare is unpredictable; you don't know when you'll need it and you hope you never do, but if you do, it could completely bankrupt you and since your life could be on the line you'll do anything to get it.

Also unlike food, since we have a massive insurance industry involved to spread the risk of unpredictable and often massive expenses, we've actually created a system that incentivises people to hurt other people by denying claims. Not everyone believes the invisible hand of the market is the correct solution to every problem; I'm all for socialized healthcare.
Many hedge funds did indeed collapse. Their fall was not as loud as the fall of the Wall Street banks because the hedge funds at least had the decency not to ask for bailouts. More info at:

http://www.nuclearphynance.com/Show%20Post.aspx?PostIDKey=13...
My company is post-revenue.
related: http://discoverydrivengrowth.com/site/results/

There's a story of a guy who wanted to sell cars over the internet, but he wasn't sure it would work. So he setup the minimal website, where he was the backend. It looked like it was automated, but under the hood, he just got emails from forms on the website, and fulfilled them manually. Extremely inefficient, and therefore defeated the purpose of putting it online... except it was an experiment to validate the concept. Which apparently it did (though I've not heard of the actual business, so it may be one of those business parables/lies).

However, this approach prevents you from succeeding in businesses that can only become viable once you've solved problems with them that you are yet to come across. You need to go quite a few steps into it before you come across the crucial problem that makes it a viable business. These types of businesses can only be successful if run by visionaries (i.e. people who see with their eyes closed). That is, they require "faith", "confidence", "trust" that is not justified by the available facts. My business is one of these, and I think the secret of it is to be motivated by something other than "success", "fame" or "money", but something intrinsic to the project, that is its own reward.

I've not done a survey, but I expect that all revolutionary businesses have some of this in them.
Does anyone here have any cool projects to show off? I would love to see what people here have put together...

I'm working on an alarm clock that requires me to do some math in order to turn it off. Thinking about extending it with an automated french press with heating element to have a cup of coffee ready for me.
Sun, fish, and seaweed
http://www.midwestlife.com
I got into AVR programming before hearing all about the Arduino. I don't really understand the appeal since an AVR development platform is quite simple to put together for a lot less money than an Arduino board. I also prefer Freeduino since it's open source:

http://www.freeduino.org/
You say,

"there are plently of companies that use Python in India and not all of them "do crap work outsourced to India"."

Interesting. I see Tavant (outsourcing company), servelots (looking for people with java sql tomcat -hardly indicates a Python focus), moog (nothing very python specific and seems to follow the "offshore India dev centre" model - high probability of dealing with crap work the folks in the West don't want to do), Trellisys (outsourcing) , DIQ (I can't even make out what they do. Seems like a company run by a bunch of jokers, see their blog!).

Can you point out any companies working primarily with python don't do outsourcing, and have sophisticated python based products in that list? If you can't doesn't that just prove my point?
It's certainly pragmatic, but most people find it a rather morbid preoccupation for someone young and healthy.
Bing is a re-branding of 'live', with by the looks of it substantial work done to improve the search results.

More information at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_(search_engine)
"I would classify us as a "very good company" and we use python for our scripting needs though our major work is in C/C++. Does that make you feel a bit better? :-)"

Which company is this anyway? What is your product?
I hope you paid them for their 10 hours. Otherwise, I'm not surprised half of them turned it down.
I don't want to suggest that this isn't very cool, but there was one thing about it that bugged me a little.

The researcher put the cylinder in the cage, and after the rook comes over to investigate, the researcher comes back and puts a handful of rocks right next to the cylinder. That seems like it would suggest to the rook that there's some connection between the cylinder and the rocks.

Again, it's still very impressive (especially considering the speed with which the bird puts two and two together), but it's not quite the same as the bird thinking, on its own, "Hey, you know what would help with this puzzle? Those rocks that appeared last week on the other side of my cage."
Google exposes security cameras
I think the makers of these cameras should include a 'robots.txt' by default that stops crawlers (or more correctly asks them to stop) from indexing the cameras.

I highly doubt this is intended behaviour, some of these look like they were not meant to be exposed to the general public.