skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldn't they just publish their data online?

Set up a definitive record of breeding history (maybe something like they do with horse genealogy), then describe the traits of each seed, DNA profile, etc. This could at least serve as evidence of prior art. It might take a few years to build such a database, but every little bit of evidence will help defend against overly broad patents.

NB. I am not a lawyer...
You're seeing that because you've somehow disabled custom fonts. Same thing happens sometimes on the web when you disable javascript.
I think you missed my point: the OP had linked to an accusation by an employer that Mr. Karpeles had been using IM software while claiming to be working.

If such an innocuous "lie" was any evidence that someone could commit fraud, then we are in big trouble. Because that sort of lie isn't merely rare, ~everyone does so at some point.

They don't necessarily do it to be deceitful, rather because it's easier than the alternative. I don't think it has any moral or ethical quality to it. For instance, say I was having trouble with my girlfriend and couldn't concentrate at work. So I instead was diddle-dallying around and browsing HN.

I don't have the time or desire to explain to my boss the personal reasons why I was on HN, so instead I might say I was "refactoring" or doing code review. The next day, I'm fine and work extra hard to compensate .. no harm, no foul. I think most people would find that to be a reasonable "white lie".
and this should be trusted why? because it made the homepage with 4 votes? fuck HN.
You can always have a function "roll" the query string for you, but the point is you pick the function and you handle its output, instead of making a metaquery to some engine, which calls your SQL server itself with something, but unclear what, unless it produces a log for you to inspect.

In the latter case it's also unclear when your queries run in a transaction, which isolation level the transaction is, heck, in many ORM you barely know when the server gets called at all (it's usually not when you expect it's called), nor you have any guarantees about the order in which your updates are fed to the server.

You also have no control to supply direct SQL when you need to as you have no direct access to the connection, or the ORM relies on caching where direct access would cause inconsistent data.

The difference between an ORM, and a simple query generator under your control seems like a subtle detail, but as the wise ones said, the devil's always in the details.
Spot the Vulnerability in Apache Config?
Seconded. The worst thing that happened to me was messing up lazy and eager loading and accidentally pulling the whole database into memory which went unnoticed for some time because there was never much data in the database during development. This happened using NHibernate and on my first project in my first job with my first exposure to an O/R mapper; no really bad experience ever since.
The tiles I've seen (including physically touching) have been smooth as a countertop, at least when new.

I believe this pix was taken in the post-FIB era. Flexible insulation blanket. Not all tiles could be replaced by FIB but some could and were. I imagine the heat load was not very high in those positions, so FIB makes sense. And I know FIB looks exactly like the wavy blanket quilt look you're talking about and is seen in the pix. FIB had another name which I forget. The nomex based "frizzie" (FRSI?) looked less quilt-y, more like a prom dress fabric, well, kinda. I don't see anything I recognize as frizzie in the linked pix. Frizzie looks like the inside layer of a firemans coat, which also probably doesn't help describe it very much, yet, there it is.

TLDR is that wavy tile is not a tile, its a quilt.

Most people know the engines were under continuous development for practically the whole program; well, so was the heat shield system. I can't be bothered to look it up and it doesn't matter anyway, but I don't think the same TPS configuration ever flew more than three or so times in a row without some new idea being tried, at least in the early decades. Continuous integration.

Personally I always suspected we'd lose more orbiters due to continuous integration fiascos than mechanical damage. Then again they spent a lot of money on research, Q+A, and experimentation so what would be a disaster in a typical IT shop works pretty well in aerospace.
I'm clearly showing my ignorance - but what IRC channel?
I do not really understand the desire for ORMs to try and recreate the experience of writing SQL. Why not just use SQL, then?

I understand that the ORM is trying to smooth over differences in implementation, providing the possibility of change from one DB access layer to another.

I have yet to see anyone do that on a real project, which makes me really wonder at the point of using an ORM at all.

I cannot quantify the amount of time I've lost figuring what the hell I must do to generate a relatively simple SQL statement.
I'm having the same issue. Anyone figure out how to actually hop on it yet?
China to scrap millions of cars in anti-pollution push
It's the difference between working on the problem, or working on the bugs / implementation details of the ORM. I know which I'd rather be working on.
Author of the article here (although not submitter). Pony actually has a way to log so that you can see every SQL query being ran against your DB. You can activate it with sql_debug(True). I monitored it for my first few Pony projects, although now I've just come to trust it will do the right thing.

You also can supply direct SQL to the DB via Pony, the documentation covers this: http://doc.ponyorm.com/database.html#using-parameters-in-sql...
Won't speak for GP, but to me it means:

- charging what you're worth to your client, not what you think you'd pay; (made this mistake for years)

- doing enough networking to keep business coming in. When you've got too much business coming in, see my first point.

- doing enough self promotion to keep business coming in

- learn something new frequently. New language, new toolkit, new mode of hacking (hardware vs software, for example)... Something that keeps you interested and engaged, and keeps you valuable. This is one of the harder ones, and probably the most important to future-proof yourself as you get older and have a family or other obligations. And it's damn hard for me to do if I don't follow #1.

There's a few other threads on HN about this subject that are worth reading, lots of good advice there. I don't always follow my own advice (and the above certainly isn't comprehensive) but I can say I've got a pretty good idea that I know what it takes.
I still hear many people say that games can't be art, but the debate seems to have subsided. Perhaps this is because games have become so ubiquitous there it's just not as interesting to discuss it anymore.
I think the honest reason was along the lines of "because I/we can". Many people (myself included) use the Sublime Text Haxe bundle[1], and the plugin is written in Python. Someone started a weekend project to create the Python target so they could rewrite it in Haxe, targeting Python. It got a few contributors on board and suddenly all unit tests were passing.

It does seem slightly odd (many would prefer Python for the language, not the platform), but for those of us more familiar with Haxe, or with existing code/projects in Haxe, being able to target Python means having access to a wider array of libraries, which I guess is kind of cool.

1: https://github.com/clemos/haxe-sublime-bundle
Exactly what I thought. The technical "difficulty" of joining an IRC Channel through the ancient incantations of actually using a text-based interface instead of some fancy Webapp is enough of a deterrent to serve as basic divider between the people you want to have in a channel and the rest.

The barrier of entry to this thing seems to be the goodwill of "someone".
While this isn't normal HN fare, it's tech-related, it's a pet project, and it's a holiday weekend, so hopefully it'll be okay.
Self citation and publishing very similar articles multiple times. Both are already problems, since they work well to game many currently used citation metrics.
No. Because Nginx doesn't dedicate a thread or process to each open connection.
freenode.net #startups

Also see the old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=85191
I have the same opinion.

I don't want magic on my database layer, because when it backfires, and it will, it might ruin the most precious thing that my application relies on.

I absolutely do not want a lack of understanding on my part to cause permanent damage to my data (already got burned by that). And since ORMs are usually complex beasts, I certainly don't want the burden of learning every single use case before even deciding how to model the thing.

The level of complexity does not balance the value added. It does not hide SQL, because you WILL have to learn both the framework and SQL to debug, and debug you will, often. It does not, in my opinion, increase productivity since I will lose many an hour figuring things out when things do not work as expected, and they won't. Simple bugs and performance issues become a great burden.

Simply put, I don't won't to forfeit control of the most sensitive part of the system, the data. Everything that goes on with data persistence should be really clear and simple, no magic.
As an aside, as far as (RPG) gameplay experiences go, few have topped Planescape: Torment in quality of storytelling.

If you include non-rpg's, The Thief series (1 and 2) are good contenders too.
Front end Pattern library App - Tapestry
You must mean it was deemed successful for its graphic design because the UX is horrible. So far the only thing I've succeeded in proving is that MailChimp works flawlessly ... I already knew that.
The developer edition is $599 when getting locked phone is usually a buy one get one free kind of deal.
My guess is to be invited into the slack chatroom. I remember slack needing that to invite.
ChucK Demos
MailChimp redirects to Designer Chat instead of The Hacker News Chat.
Capstone: The ultimate disassembly framework
If the constitution is so treasured as a framework constraining the powers of the state and guarding the rights of citizens, why is consensus not the only standard for which decisions are made on constitutional matters?

The Supreme Court gains its powers from the Constitution. Its like you've never even read the Constitution. Article III. If you don't like the Supreme Court, then you don't like the Constitution. Period.

No offense, but your words sound hugely ignorant of the meaning of the word "Constitution", or the theory of law under which it works.
I fail to see a good reason to request an invite to this service.

Sell it to me.
KAIST Raptor Robot runs at 28.6 mph and jumps over obstacles
Plenty of game developers are using Haxe in production [1]. Tivo [2] and Massive Interactive [3] are doing some large scale UI work for embedded systems.

Personally I have built a student management system for 4 schools as a web app in Haxe, using it both on the server and on the client (JS). I have loved the language, but it has been a mixed affair. On the one hand some features (macros, remoting, code sharing between client & server) have sped up development hugely. On the other hand, sometimes libraries or tutorials just don't exist and you end up reinventing tools that would exist in other languages already.

The community is tiny, but really really helpful, friendly and intelligent. I recommend having a look. There is some hype and ridicule over the "run everywhere" claim but the underlying technology is a delight to work with. I hope it gets more popular support and more tutorials / libraries.

1: http://haxe.org/foundation/who-uses-haxe.html
2: https://github.com/tivo
3: http://massiveinteractive.com/
Roombots: Lego-like robotic blocks that transform into furniture
I've only used Haxe a couple of times, but I think if you give it a try you'll find that it's a much nicer language than Javascript! FlashDevelop[1] is a great IDE for it if you're using Windows (and apparently Sublime Text has a pretty nice plugin for it as well)

[1] http://www.flashdevelop.org
The game’s pretty shit though.
Greece's Golden Dawn to enter EU Parliament for first time
Interesting to note though that even with a linear network that can be represented by a single matrix, it can be faster, easier and converge to better results with multiple layers because the different gradient and parameter space that is presented to the optimization algorithm.
Web Scraping in WordPress – How to Prevent it?
Yes, I was a consultant myself. All IMHO:

The best possible “last job” to have before doing independent consulting is at a consulting firm that doesn’t just do staff augmentation. You'll learn almost everything you need to here that will help you avoid major mistakes in your own business. Don’t do anything shady here (e.g. stealing clients, etc.) and when you’re ready to leave, leave on good terms. (My old boss and I are still friends, we travel together, and he was the first customer for my SaaS product.)

Whether you work for a consulting company or not, you’re ready to leave when you’ve got two contracts from other developer friends who have too much work and want to refer some leads to someone who can help them. One of your initial contracts should be for a long-term engagement, as this helps manage your cash-flow risk. If you’re working for a consulting company, I can’t recommend you work on your own contracts at the same time… but I think you’re in the clear if you’re lining them up and you make a clear break from one to the other.

To leave your company on good terms and potentially gain a valuable source of work, you can offer to contract yourself back to the consulting company you already work for at whatever rate they typically pay outside contractors. (For the consulting company I left, this was $95/hour, which was the lowest rate I was willing to take at the time and only for contracts that were very advantageous to my business, e.g. regular, long-term work.) This can really help them if you were a "rock star" and were keeping important clients very happy.

If your pipeline is a little weak through word of mouth, reach out to consulting companies and agencies to see if they need any help on the deals they’re closing. This is easier for them than hiring new people especially if they’re not sure demand will keep up.

If your first track is a long-term engagement, increase your rate on every new project on the second track by at least $25/hour. You may find that people stop saying yes at a certain point, so maybe you level off there for a bit. However, if you don’t force this rate increase every time you have an opportunity, you’re really selling yourself short. Again, my lowest rate when I started in July 2012 was $95/hour. By the time I stopped taking new consulting clients, I was comfortably charging $200/hour and people were still saying yes at $300/hour.

Schedule three annual vacations right off the bat, one of them within the first few months of consulting and make sure you take it and disconnect. These are the recurring litmus test whether your business is actually optimized for happiness and whether you're really putting family first if you've got one.

Here's my favorite part: If you completely fail at this, it's no big deal. You're going to fall back into a safety net of regular full-time employment where you're still in ridiculous demand. The worse possible outcome for your business is everyone else's definition of success.
Why the Solar Roadways Project on Indiegogo is Actually Really Silly
Also worth noting, there have been at least three "let's chat" apps written specifically for the HN community.

I'm not saying we don't need another one, but when you have a free channel, then several other apps, you gotta wonder what the compelling reason for this one is.
Drupal works flawlessly with Nginx[1], and there is little magic involved. You even have good handling of private files, permission and such.

There's only a few modules that require changes to the default ".htaccess" (basically just overriding Apache default logic) of Drupal, like the module Boost. But since Nginx can serve as both a application server and reverse proxy, you can have the best of both worlds, without doing hack-y things like Boost, which basically generates a lot of static files.

You don't want to use those converters, as they usually rely heavily on ifs, which is a bad thing, when things normally can be handled pretty well with the "try_files"-directive.

[1] I've been using it in my stack for a couple of dozen Drupal sites for about two years now.
Surprised by number of negative comments about ORM-s. Twice I have had to migrate projects between different sql db engines. Once SQL was embedded in the application, second time perl-s DBIx ORM was used from the beginning. Guess which project was easier. Why would you lock yourself into using a specific db engine unless you really had to. And how hard is it to embed SQL for a few specific queries even when using ORM. Lately heavily using Django's ORM and think it is great. And if your data structures so complex that ORM does not do the job maybe something wrong with your schema. I like my data layer simple if possible, and complexity in the application.
The number on the surface of a new tile is more or less the filename of a CNC gcode program that can create a new tile to a precision quite a bit higher than you can see visually... You can read a tangentially related discussion of this here.

http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum14/HTML/000534.html

There's at least 20K HSRI "model numbers" and over the years probably many more as revisions were made, they made lots of Q+A test pieces and there were many revisions and lots of repairs and there's a lot more than just black HRSI tiles, I'd estimate somewhere in the realm of "way more than 10M tiles" were made over the years. The hotter they get the smaller and thicker they have to be, something about differential thermal expansion stresses or something.

The TPS as a whole was quite a technological accomplishment.
I love redbean, it saved my butt once, but it gets lots of it's power from doing things "the PHP way", it makes linting and editor/ide autocompletion impossible, there is no one place you can look to find the part of the database schema relevant to your application, you can't just go read a models.php file and get a birds eye view of the database structure that matters and all...

It's basically the opposite of "pythonic". I can't imagine something like redbean written in a language like Python, and maybe it's for the best :)
I believe it's a reference to DjangoPony (http://www.djangopony.com/).
Reddit entrepreneurship?
Sounds to me like the real problem is lack of IP addresses, and the best strategy would be to hold off on updating HTTP and work on IPv6 ubiquity first. I can see why Google went a different route, but we don't all have to follow.
As much as AGPL annoys me the pony developers seems to understand it and use it in a reasonable way.

What really annoys me is

1. when people stamp a AGPL license on something (that was previously licensed under GPL or even less restrictive) and claim that it is still just GPL and everyone could still continue using their system as before.

2. when people make something brilliant and only offer it under AGPL without providing a commercial licensing option.
A Virtual Reality Gadget That Anyone Can Hack
Being completely ignorant of ongoing NASA or private venture space projects, if the Hubble telescope is so useful and oversubscribed (not to mention old) wouldn't it make sense to launch a few more Hubbles sometime soon?
First thing: The ":wq" search brings back "wq" results as well, so the results contain any instance of wq (crypto libraries, android kernel, variable names, wq.io framework, etc.) rather than just accidental vim writes.

Second thing: Most all of the ":wq" are in redundant bogus files, many authors knowingly leaving the accidental insertion in. "asdfasdfasdf:wq"

Edit: 6 million of the 7 millions results are in C language - mostly all variable names and library names. In actuality, it seems like only the first 34 pages have any relevant results.

Even if the author forgot to escape insertion mode before issuing the command, they would have realized that vim did not close and that a new line was created.

Anyone jumping on the "this is why vim sux" bandwagon here is biased or incompetent. If this was really an issue for individuals, they could just configure a key combination to to save no matter what mode your in.

HN seems to be becoming pedantic and ignorant in many ways.
Using contenteditable was an important decision for us at populr.me. We've put a lot of work into making the pages you create look the same in the editor as they do when published. Definitely difficult at times, but it is totally worth it.
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/17700
I've seen some pretty convoluted justifications as to why certain posts belong on HN. I suspect one for this post will rank among the best of them.

To those swayed by its supposed evidence, I would suggest this book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Improbability-Principle-Coincidenc...
Well, ORMs are useless if you're of the opinion that string interpolation and concatenation are a good way of composing logical units. Many of us prefer a proper API for doing that, and good ORMs like SQLAlchemy provide us with one.
Linux performance compendium
Hi, I am one of Pony ORM authors.

The idea of Pony ORM is to provide a Pythonic way to work with the database. We think that the generator syntax is very concise and convenient.

It is named Pony because a pony is a small, smart and powerful creature - these are the features which our mapper has.
Our goal is to provide non-leaky abstraction and good user experience.
PHỞ: Automated workflow for front-end
> There is no GUI to hint at how to do anything. No toolbars, no application menus, no context menus or buttons.

The Vim GUIs have all those things, try gvim on Windows or MacVim on OS X. Though admittedly I turn them all off except for the context menus.
Looks like most results up to page 34, the ":wq" was left in intentionally or the file is just bogus so the author didn't care.
This was a beautiful read. I too feel an emotional connection to these great machines and the fantastic people who design, build, and pilot them. To me, our missions into space perfectly captures everything to be admired in Humankind. It represents our inexorable daring in the face of great adversity, it showcases our insatiable curiosity, and, since the the end of the Cold War, it has united people across the globe in the greatest adventure upon which we have ever embarked as a species.

From the ground the moon and the planets seem so far away, so ethereal. Yet just knowing that we have sent people and probes to touch them underlines how obtainable the impossible can be with grit and science, per ardua ad astra. It gives me hope.

I wish that the spirit of international cooperation that has grown around this endeavour will endure over the coming decades and beyond.
Didn't accept my email aaskdljfhadjksfh@mailinator.com too
Or at the very least set up forwarding in case you can't get back to your account!
This approach has a minor issue. "break" changes semantics inside the block.

http://gustedt.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/scope-bound-resource...

http://blog.sam.liddicott.com/2013/04/using-for-as-brace-les...
Not sure how I feel about this.
This is 'HackerNews'. joining an IRC channel is definitely something this crowd knows how to do.

Or at least, it's supposed to :)
Persuade boss to support your startup?
> The track record for AI has definitely been over promise and under deliver.

I thought that this was an early, encouraging sign that the models being used were fundamentally valid. It's entirely consistent with the track record for natural intelligence.