skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry. I had to bail out on the second page when the author wanted to pivot from "hey look, all these billions showing up to save the world!" to "the public has a right to know how these people made their money and why they're spending it the way they are"

No, we do not.

Then there was an argument that if these people hadn't have spent their money anonymously, the money would be available to the government to spend as it chose.

At that point I decided my 20 minutes were best spent somewhere on the net that had a higher caliber of analytic thought.
It seems like CC did the right thing in general but the informer of the problem would have liked an email acknowledgement.

Although not as serious as the release of names and addresses, I email people and organizations all the time when I see typos on their web sites, and I don't much expect any response or acknowledgement; I am just trying to be helpful. It seems like the author of the article was similarly trying to be helpful.
Is this where we get to complain about how horrible Google Maps suddenly is?

Because wow. I can speak about this. It's terrible. First and foremost, and they have their "reasons" of course, but my Samsung Rant (yeah just a feature phone) always had great maps. Just a simple Java app, built on the maps API. Well that doesn't work anymore. Like, nothing. Google basically says "Get an Android phone, sucker." F U Google. Is what I think of that.

Secondly, the desktop (and basically the tablet experience too is the same) has gotten terrible. It takes a really long time before my mouse event matters. By this time, the screen, since it's still resolving and moving things around the canvas or whatever the hell it's doing, well by the time my mouse event registers, the object I wanted has moved away. I'm now doing something else!

Directions. Just so retarded. The accordion shit on the left. Just show me the effing directions, like you used to. I don't want to tab around a widget in the upper left. Plus you have toggle it open in the first place, and it's not very responsive, either.

Also, just simple double-clicking to zoom. Extremely less useful than it used to be: just this one simple thing.

I could go on. How awful. What happened?
I don't see how citing 3 month old tweets is in any way relevant to a webapp.

Also the selectiveness of tweets and bug reports makes it all seem very labored and seedy and betrays a lack in of understanding in how complex software development (btw directwrite is behind a flag in Chrome 35)

And when you take into account that the author has a history of shitting on Google, it appeals like an attempt in catering to a like minded audience: http://techcrunch.com/author/jon-evans/
The first half of the sentence definitely feels that way... the second half just feels almost offensively exclusionary. Unless Berlin is a really weird, dysfunctional place, like London's Old Street roundabout on a city-wide scale - which is a horrifying thought.
Still in Canberra? I'd like to buy you a drink.
Something like 'enlightened self-interest'. I like the term "effective organizations". There's little point it supporting any other kind, except perhaps for external effects - praise, reflected esteem - which is more PR than a will to benefit the public.

Now I have a way to distinguish public organizations wanting my money. And since I donate anonymously, I have no need to ever donate to the PR kind.
The "liberal-free market" education isn't

Distortion n.1: offering student loans. "Ah but the unprivileged don't have the resources to go to school!" Then give scholarships. Or cap limit student loans (to 10k for example), yes, to a lower number.

Distortion n.2: fscking textbooks. Really, if I'm paying an absurd amount for tuition, everything needed should be included. Nowhere else in the world people are made to buy scantrons for example.

Distortion n.3: people shooting for "the best schools". I understand the connections a good school offers, etc but 1) courses can only go so far (even STEM courses), 2) after around 5 years of professional experience your education becomes less and less important
I am a little annoyed that I have to keep going through clickrobatics every time I change back to old Google Maps, and explain why each time. I've already explained a dozen times, quit pestering me. Also, get off my damned lawn.
If you enter a search term and just hit enter Google will try and guess which result you want (like the I feel Lucky button). The auto-complete will give more options to pick the correct place name from duplicate names in different places. I think they do a bad job of surfacing the different possible results.

The Google Index does seem to lack a lot of more obscure names. In this case I would rather have high quality authoritative gazetteers than an algorithm that tries to guess what I mean.
This kind of public shaming needs to happen more often. Someone should build an anonymous (to avoid lawsuits) public index of assholes like these.
In Tassie now, happily running my own business and not dealing with cretinous managers. But thanks!
Oh thanks! Not sure how it got trashed.
Why is every other company redesigning for UX when Amazon sticks to the same 2007ish design successfully?
I'm calling that Chester's Law, and quoting you henceforth.
Symantec Says Antivirus Is Dead, World Rolls Eyes
> The need to show some forest when you live on the other side of the world is minimalistic.

Really? I love reading about some exotic place somewhere and looking it up on google maps. How hard is it, really, to look for sambisa forest near you and when you don't find it, look globally?
Off-topic question for the professional scientists in the room.

The OP reports individual donors contributing in excess of $100 million to particular causes. We've spoken often here about the various inefficiencies in the current research structures: top scientists spending too much time writing grants; disincentives for the curiosity-driven research that often leads to breakthroughs, etc.

So the question: is investment on the order of $100M+ sufficient to set up a private research facility with research "done right"? (By which I mean, of course, the way I would do it. :) ) It's easy to imagine a private facility that recruits top-notch but frustrated scientists from various schools, sets some important problems for them, and sets them free from grant writing, publishing pressures, etc.

The obvious objection is that the donor would call the shots and subvert the research... but on the other hand these sorts of donors are already willing to just fund research with no personal input into process.
I thought perhaps my way of loading Google Maps would still yield the old style - using '!m address' in DuckDuckGo - but no, sadly, its now the new dumbed-down page.
It's pretty cool to see .NET catching up with Mono on that front ;)

Fun fact, MonoTouch applications are built with a very similar pipeline, except that LLVM does the compilation in the end.

The steps 4 and 5 in the blog post map quite exactly to the Mono.Linker and the Mono.Tuner. Both tools are using a XML file format for whitelisting pieces of code that need to be included, that's useful if you're calling code with reflection at runtime which is not statically discoverable at build time.
I'd love to watch this on my large living room television via Roku+Vimeo, but apparently the AofB people have decided to make their Vimeo-hosted videos private and only viewable via their own site. Pity.
"If you registered, logged in or changed your password after January 8th, 2014, your password was converted to be hashed with BCrypt and HMAC using a unique salt. Before that, it was salted MD5."

Are they saying the passwords were hashed with MD5 before January? Because that'd be a bit scary.
It's not supposed to be a shaming, just important to see the people who submitted the patent.

The most troubling thing is that this diagram: http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid=08676045&homeurl=http%3A%...

Depicts pretty standard butterfly/paramount lighting (less the lower reflector) that is taught in every college photography program in the world. I also worry that they appear to be photographers outside of their jobs at Amazon, what kind of a competitive advantage is this? I have no clue as I'm not a lawyer.
Years ago we thought Apple was headed in this direction as well. There were rumors of "The Brick", which would be a phone-type device that would slot into a larger monitor and transform from a handheld into a PC, taking your same experience everywhere.

Turns out "The Brick" was just the singular aluminum ingot that the iMac is carved from.
There's a new version of it now, which is an option when you go to maps.google.com. I tried it and gave up because it doesn't seem to work on Tasmanian ADSL - sits and spins, never loads, presumably because the new state government got into the state's internet infrastructure and shot one of the hamsters.
The finance market provides needed liquidity. I'm glad these guys took the risk to offer their resources. That they are relatively better at it than you or I is no skin off my back.
There's a small voice, way way in the back of my head, that's wondering if corporations are in the beginning of a campaign to reserve everything doable and expressable to themselves.

That sounds ridiculous, except ... well, patents like this, and the apparent willingness of the Patent Office to grant anything that can be said on an application.
It seems to me that Google hired the Gnome Dev (team) that screwed up the Gnome 2.x GUI.
> The overlap of mathematicians who care about category theory [...] and mathematicians who program [...] is pretty much zero. You probably won't find your algebraic topology professor programming

Well, unless perhaps s/he has some involvement in a project like this one http://comptop.stanford.edu/ ("The overall goal of this project is to develop flexible topological methods which will allow the analysis of data which is difficult to analyze using classical linear methods"; first named person in left sidebar is an algebraic topologist).

Or this one http://www.esf.org/index.php?id=8764 ("Applied and Computational Algebraic Topology"; first named person on steering committee is an algebraic topologist).

Or this one http://munkres.us.es:8080/groups/catam/ ("Computational Applied Topology and Applied Mathematics"; directory is an algebraic topologist).

Or, turning away from algebraic topology as such to mathematics inspired by algebraic topology and involving both category theory and programming: http://homotopytypetheory.org/ ("... new program for a comprehensive, computational foundation for mathematics based on the homotopical interpretation of type theory. [...] currently being implemented with the help of the automated proof assistant Coq"; note that in practice doing nontrivial things in Coq is a matter of functional programming).

For sure there are plenty of mathematicians (in algebraic topology and elsewhere) who don't program, but I think the intersection between people interested in categories and people interesting in programming is bigger than you suggest.

I don't know how many of them are using Haskell, though.
Nevermind the tea. How does it compare to modafinil?
I mean just 4 - 5 Major changes in last 7 Years?
Can you check their "Add to cart" and "Whishlist" buttons.

It all looks so unpolished and old.
You have got to admit that it looks oldish and they can do better at design.

I think they can make more of millions with a redesign.
It's just a nice round number. The next halving of the coinbase reward is still far off.
No offense ,but probably Amazon is not brave enough to try something completely different.
I am colourblind. I feel like this demo has potential somehow. Let's say we have a "standardised" colour contrast formula on one side, and the one trained for my preferred colour contrast or the other. Could that somehow be used to create a customised Daltoniser?

http://www.vischeck.com/daltonize/
Of course. But there is a huge asymmetry in that issued patents are presumed to be valid. There is no burden on a plaintiff to prove their patent is valid. The defendant has to separately sue to invalidate, and that costs at least a few $100ks per patent.

There should be an administrative process to invalidate patents and a bounty for successfully pursuing such actions.
In the example given it's the word "forest" that is the problem.

"Sambisa" would have found it.

"Sambisa Reserve" would have found it.

"Sambisa Forest Reserve" would have found it.

But my guess is that something attempts to understand keywords and context and when you end with "forest" it looks within the set of forests that are called Sambisa, and actually there isn't a forest called Sambisa, there's a nature reserve called Sambisa, which covers an area within a forest landscape.

Yeah, that's pedantic and Google could do a better job when it attempts to contextualise like that (especially if it's topical), by just doing a second search internally for exact matches and doing a join/merge on the results.

But still... you're going to have the same problem with Open Street Map for the same reason:

http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j...

http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j...

http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j...
Do the "principles" in your case revolve around openness, freedom, and so forth?

I've heard a lot of people use such ideals when advocating for Firefox OS, but I just don't see it all holding true in practice.

Firefox OS is one of the more restrictive environments, at least for developers. I'm basically stuck using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. If I want to use any other language, I have to try to molest it through something like Emscripten. If I want to create a native app, I'm out of luck.

At least a platform like Android gives developers a comparatively wide variety of options, from Java, to C and C++, to JavaScript/HTML5/CSS.

By limiting the freedom of developers to create apps as they see fit, then it directly impacts the freedom of end users to use such apps.

And I don't see Firefox OS as being particularly open in other respects. Maybe the code is available under an open source license, and maybe Mozilla will accept minor bug fixes from the community, but I really doubt an average user would have any ability to influence/impact/control Firefox OS beyond that. Decisions are foisted upon the users. It doesn't seem any better than Android, or iOS, or whatever other platform you want to consider.

The same goes for the "But we implement open standards!" claims. The process to come up with such standards isn't very open at all. It ends up being controlled by a small handful of major browser vendors, with minimal to no input from others. Merely being published does not make a standard "open".

All in all, it makes no sense to me to choose Firefox OS on a matter of principle. It doesn't actually meet whatever standard is being set by those principles, yet it still gives a much inferior experience to the alternatives.
I don't have any idea of US Patenting works. Its ok some idiots apply for patents like this. How it got accepted! Is it like I can say anything i like and got accepted!
The worst about that Sambisa Forest thing is that the autocompletion finds it (http://imgur.com/kWgcByo) and then when you press enter, you get a not found error (http://imgur.com/GyhVSaO) !
The author is complaining about product development siloing at Google. I know, because I consulted there, that they are working on better cross business integration for internal systems (this is a goal of all large organizations). That said, don't you want some degree of siloing between products? Certainly share infrastructure, share some data as appropriate, but it just seems to me that by having smaller independent teams that you get more creative products, and better productivity with smaller teams.

BTW, I love Google maps and Google Now - my fanboy'ism is based on both pretty good functionality right now, and I my expectation that it will keep getting better. I have some privacy issues with these products but at least for now I consider the functionality worth some loss of privacy - I can see my opinion changing however.
What is a Pitch Deck?
Looks like that site uses WordPress for the index site, but as soon as you make a search you are redirected to a site based on something called CKAN (http://ckan.org), a dedicated data searching engine. Probably better than Drupal for that purpose anyhow. Can't see how that is damning for drupal.
>public index of assholes like these.

It's hard for me to upset with these specific individuals, because I don't know their plans or agenda. In reality, if it wasn't them, at this point, it would be someone else at some other point. From that perspective, companies are almost forced to do this to protect themselves. What would happen if they were beat to the patent?

All you can do is hope the the patent holder is the most benign option. The real idiots are the regulators. This system is broken.
This is pretty much what Mike Lazaridis of RIM did to set up The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perimeter_Institute_for_Theoret...

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/

It was an initial donation of $100M in 2000, followed up by $50M in 2008. I believe Lazaridis' financial support has ended with the difficulties at RIM, but PI is by now self-sufficient and supported by the Canadian government.

The place is well known for hosting some pretty crazy and speculative research. It is the only institution I know of that has a Quantum Foundations department. But they have enough money that they have been able to attract some big names to lend significant degree of respectability to the place.

(I'm starting a postdoc at PI in the fall, and the complete freedom available there was a big part of the attraction.)
"Brause" can also be translated to "lemonade" or "soda" in german. The article claims "shower", which is another meaning, but in the context the wrong one.
The last tweet is pure gold in this context: https://twitter.com/thinksimplenow/status/464738030125711360
total mischaracterization
Of course it looks different , but too old.
Compared to any ecommerce site
Oh dear... I should have been a lawyer. I could troll for money, instead of wrecking my head with processing myoelectric signal on a mean 16MHz machine. [no offense to lawyers]
+1 thanks, interesting story!
I love German candor in product descriptions. Right on the label it says "tanning agents." Mmmmm. Tannery. That hits the spot.
It seems the patent has four inventors, but tinasu isn't one of them. Where did you get the name from?
You'd be surprised how much "PHP login" tutorial use md5 for password encryption. And then people are surprised these devs dont known better? it's because of all the mis-eductive content the web cant get rid of.
100 times YES!

I've gotten this behavior for years and it drives me nuts because I can't understand how it's not fixed? I remember in 2009 I was driving down from SF to LA. I stopped in Santa Barbara. I needed my bearings and I didn't not know the address or the name of the street I was on but I did see an Albertson's supermarket about 200 feet away so I searched for Albertsons and Google gives me some place in Texas. (I think this was on a SonyW810)

I've searched for Pizza in Tokyo last December and had it give me some place in Chicago. It's so infuriating. It knows I'm in Tokyo, it's pinpointed me on the map. So in what situation would I EVER want Pizza in Texas unless I specifically asked for "Pizza, Texas"?

There's other things too. It mostly feels like maps hasn't changed in years. Sure, there's the new maps UI which many people, including me, feel like it's a change for the worse. The geek in me loves that it's slick and live and webgl but can you figure out how to get a short link to a place? Clicking "Share" just brings up a G+ form. Not what I wanted. I wanted a link I could msg to someone. Didn't have that problem with the old maps.

How about how to print? The old maps had a print button and it would format for printing. The new maps has one but I can never remember where it's buried in the UI. Picking Print from the browser directly doesn't do this.

Trying to figure out the UI that pops up and down. Here's one. Pick any marker on the map or search for something like Best Buy. The popup UI should show some details on whatever you picked or the one it picked for you. Now click "Directions". Ok, now how do you get back to the state just before you clicked "Directions"? There's no back button, clicking the X in the corner goes all the way back before you selected anything. In other words there is no back. If you clicked directions by accident well, I guess you just have to start over and type your search in again. If you clicked some dot on a detailed map, well now you've lost your place.

Even more frustrating is who can compete with them? How do you compete with free? If they're not going to do a good job then I'd love for someone else to try but the moment that someone else does try they'll finally feel some pressure to up their game and you're out of business.

And where's the ads? Maybe you don't want ads but I do. I want to see logos of places. Maybe I'm looking for McDonalds. Even if I'm not the logos serve as landmarks. You'd think it would be in their best interest to sell ads on maps since 90+% of all of Google's revenue is ads. And, if done right it would be extremely useful for users as well. It would even fit their mission statement if done well.

Sigh....
The US patent system must be a money making scheme because it looks like (at least to my untrained eye) they're granting patents for anything. I thought the original idea was to patent inventions. Huh!
"No, we do not."

Why not? If I am rich enough to have my pick of the best researchers and doctors, and to divert their attention to a disease or condition of my choosing, then shouldn't there be some oversight of that?

Perhaps all that money could have been better spent on malaria or cancer, rather than a rarer condition.

I don't know why an arbitrary rich individual should be able to direct medicinal research better than a public body, and get the most benefit for humanity or, at a lower level, their fellow citizens,
It's not scary, it's the truth, and it's bad. But, what can you do?
It depends what you mean by "made in the US stock market".

The ROR can include capital gains (the price of your stocks rise) and income (you get paid a dividend). These are different, but both contribute to your returns.
I have never used Drupal (I am not much into Python), but in general it makes lots of sense for governments to standardize on open source tools, including CMS.

At least AFAIK, Drupal is fairly efficient. I would not be so enthusiastic about Wordpress.
Of course you loose a little platform independence, but that is something you don't have anyway when you program in C++ or that kind. Also you get rather rich support for makefiles that are cross platform. I had no problems till now with C code I wrote that integrates into the Python environment. When you don't need OS specifics and have knowledge how to implement things CPU independent (given a common >=32bit architecture) in C, you will have little to no trouble at all.

Also one little hint: Use Cython for enhancements. Cython is great for implementing small enhancements when you don't want to hassle with refcounts and the normal Python API. Also your enhancements are automatically compatible to Python 2 + Python 3. You can also call C functions from Cython very easily for full speed. Cython is really great, when you don't need to optimize to the last nanosecond.
Web hosting company puts FCC in the 'slow lane' in net neutrality protest
Or maybe they confused Alsup's ruling:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140509/10133727178/appeal...