skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was going to say before I read the rest of the article that there's probably an uneven surface on the leaf that's allowing the droplet to retain its superior surface tension.

Conversely, the waterproofing nature of bird feathers is, apparently, not well understood. It was originally posited that the hydrophilic oils from the Uropygial gland spread during preening added to the waterproofing nature of the feather, but (according to a Wikipedia edit which has no citation that I can find no further evidence of on the Internet) there's some theory about an electrostatic state due to the mechanical process of preening keeping the feathers free from water sticking to them. It's also claimed that powder-down birds use their feather residue as waterproofing, but that seemingly hasn't been proved either.

Ah, I found the paper, I think [1]: Here's a paper from the 1950s which did an intense study of ducks and various states which might affect their water-repellent nature. It turns out that removing the Uropygial gland from newly hatched ducklings resulted in their feathers being just as water-repellent as ducks that still had the gland. Interestingly, the diet of the birds seemed to effect the water-repellent nature more than anything else, but also completely dependent on where they were fed.

The end of page 6 and the rest of 7 point out the theory of the barbules in the feathers being responsible for the waterproof nature. The idea is that when they are properly aligned, air between the barbs (when at a constant distance from each other) keeps a narrow enough distance that the surface tension of the water is maintained, similar to this leaf. So this is probably where the idea of an "electrostatic" force came from (or the paper by Madsen that's cited: "Madsen, H., 1941: Hvad gor Fuglenes Fjer-Dragt vandskyende ?. Dansk Ornithologisk Forenings Tidsskrift, 35: 49-59")

Can somebody stick all that into the Wikipedia article? I'm lazy.

[1] http://wildfowl.wwt.org.uk/index.php/wildfowl/article/downlo...
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20437221 (a modern paper confirming the results)
Good luck finding a copy of it with the original film noir-esq voiceover.
If your main source of energy is from light, and water diffracts light, potentially making it harder or less efficient to use, does it not make sense that the better you're able to keep your energy harvesters clear, the more energy you can create? Evolution at its finest :)
Appleʼs Take on App Architecture
To be fair, if you have your data setup in such a way that you know what is coming next, prefetching is a very viable strategy.

That is, this might not be as unobtainable as you seem to be implying. There was a great presentation by someone in the gaming community about this. I can't find it right off, but at a glance this[1] article seems pretty good. And is basically this idea.

[1] http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/data-locality.html
So now the court has to decided about how complex said algo is and weather or not it is simple enough to not deserve a patent.

Basic Lossless compression can function like this:

Imagine a string of 1's and 0's e.g. 10010000011000101111001

This string can be trivially compressed in a losses manor using this algo, every time the bit changes to a one or zeor, record the previous run of bits. So we would compress this string to look like:
[1,1][0,2][1,1][0,5][1,2][0,3][1,1][0,1][1,4][0,2][1,1]

I understand now this is a terrible example however it is good enough here.

So since most/all compression algos are just using a pre-defined set of choices on how to compress data in either a lossless or lossy manor. The only difference between two compression algos would be their rules for what data to keep and how to arrange it more efficiently into a different data structure.

I think the analogy of board games can be used here. While you are free to get a trade mark on many aspects of your game, you can not patent the actual rules or game play. http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html

The rules and game play is what makes Risk different from mouse-trap.

Replace rules with compression algo (or any software algo...) and we come to the conclusion of software is not patentable.

So at what point does a collection of fundamental computer science concepts become patentable?

The line is completely arbitrary using the compressions algo example. I honestly have not been able to reason through a real life example that hold up to this scrutiny.

Maybe I am misinterpreting your answer, so if I am, I apologize, just ignore me =D

EDIT

Thanks to person for the discussion free down vote. Why engage when you can suppress.
Sounds good to me. Personally, I'd risk it as well, since negative outcomes for me are unlikely.
NCIS checks are up over 50% since 2002.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2012/08/23/what-the...

So overall purchases are up.

However, the number of households with guns is down:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/us/rate-of-gun-ownership-i...

So I think you is mistaken in that gun ownership is increasing as a share of the population in a major way.
> So you call say 3 methods, and at the end you have a "file not found" error... which call resulted in that failure?

The first exception hit pops out the other side and you pattern-match against it. So, the one that did file access and returned a FileNotFoundException. If you have multiple pieces of code that can return FileNotFoundExceptions, you can pass a message in the exception, just like any other Java exception. You can often be more type-specific, too. Bear in mind that defining a new exception in Scala is a one-liner, and you can encapsulate your FileNotFoundException in a RetrievalFailedException very easily and cleanly.

Your method is not more robust, I assure you--it's just verbose and both typo- and thinko-prone.
Wrecked Tesla sells for more than most new cars
The waxy layer is believed to have developed as plants moved out of the water onto land, it helps to retain water:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_cuticle
AutoIT Developers F***ing Hate You
I strongly suspect what you saw in this paper was Samsung's[1] auto-trim (people often use inaccurate terms like "idle garbage collection") that reads the NTFS allocation bitmap and trims free space, a feature that was only included on a few SSDs because it is a potentially unsafe rampant layering violation. In the history of SSDs, almost none have auto-trim, so the results from this paper are highly non-representative of SSDs in general.

[1] Note that the Corsair SSD used in this paper is rebranded from Samsung.
Improving JavaScript Performance by Deconstructing the Type System
Yes, clearly a node cannot be up if it's failed, and yet you refer to "perfect" consistency and "all" nodes. That's the inconsistency (heh) that you need to fix.

Speaking of consistency, I stand corrected that you did define it . . . incorrectly. That's a definition of consistency, but it's not the operative one when it comes to CAP. Gilbert and Lynch specifically refer to atomic or linearizable consistency in 2.1, and that's a stronger requirement than yours as it also precludes reading still-in-progress writes. The definition of consistency is central to the proof, so if you want to put down others for not understanding CAP it helps to get it right yourself.
And it ends with the Space Harrier theme! Massive pangs of nostalgia just started flowing through me.
Do you have much experience with multirotors? It's fairly simple to get a decent rig that can carry a GoPro for 10 minutes (per battery) that weights under 3 pounds and isn't going to be very audible once it's 10 meters or so away. It certainly won't be <2" in diameter, and it won't literally be silent, but it's not going to be the massive disturbance people in this thread seem to expect.
The obvious rejoinder, of course, is: who was president when the crash happened in the first place? And I disagree with your characterization that it hasn't helped, either-- look at how many jobs have been added since the administration took office.

But this isn't a productive framing.

As much as we wish presidential administrations could make or break the economy -- it makes partisan sense, and it makes us think at least someone could run the show if they got their shit together -- it just isn't so. The current recession has its roots going much farther back than 2008. Depending on how you reckon, someone who's now 27 was either not yet conceived or in diapers when the bubble began inflating.

Likewise no amount of perseverance, hard work, temerity, gumption, or whatever the hell you want to call it, can wish the economy back to the '90s.
That explains the need for a waxy layer, but it doesn't explain the need for the superhydrophobic bed-of-needles surface.
Thanks for the response, feel free to tell me to go away if I'm annoying you. I'm wondering about a third thing now.

You seem remarkably self aware in your analysis of your strengths and weaknesses. The skills you feel weak in, communicating with the clients and keeping them engaged, have you looked into partnering with someone who has those skills but lacks your technical expertise? The observation is that finding someone who was a 'people person' to be your interface to the clients might go a long way to creating a more effective enterprise, and some folks are really passionate about customer service and understanding the clients requirements.

The trick here is understanding how much that person brings to the total equation. I've known folks who hired an 'admin' for minimum wage and didn't recognize how much better the overall system worked, until the admin (who did see it, quit). But being aware of the 'before' situation and being able to appreciate the 'after' situation, you would be in a much better place to compensate that person in a much better ratio metric way. For example, if you find you double your revenue with that person on board, sharing half of it with them is not ridiculous even if they write no code at all, and all they do is pamper the clients.

The danger sometimes is that the 'brains' of the organization rationalizes away the increased revenue as something that would have happened anyway. It doesn't sound like that is your issue though. An acquaintance of mine who founded a very successful company once claimed they owed their success to hiring people who did the things they hated doing.

Thanks again for the follow-up.
Are you saying that every JDK install should come with Solaris?
Or that operating systems should be built specifically to suppport java installation?
If you allow custom HTML via an iframe and make it shareable you have to host the iframe from a different domain, otherwise it's XSS vulnerability heaven. The trick will be authentication because separate domains don't share sessions (and you wouldn't want a secured domain access to your session anyway) but you can do communication via postMessage.
Property destruction isn't a very classy thing to advocate.
Critical security problem found in Google Play
Oh yea?! so where does there exist a natural fusion reactor?!? Man: 1 Nature: 0

(... :P I think the point was that there are— as far as we know, no evolved organisms using fission. Not that there wasn't fission in nature prior to man.)
One of the largest frauds in science tells his side of the story
Yeah, I don't think people need to be commonly operating drones in these areas (I'd still probably be okay with allowing them on Tuesdays or something like that).

On the other hand, I don't think there needs to be special rules for every potential type of litter.
You're assuming they actually read the paper. I'm guessing the editors simply rejected it based on the title / topic. This might be understandable, given that they probably get lots of cranks submitting similar sounding papers.

On a different note, I think you have the responsibilities of authors and editors mixed up: it is up to the author of a paper to select an appropriate journal and weigh their chances, the editor is only responsible for the quality of their own journal. Yes it would be great if they also gave you free advice about other journals, but it's really not their job.
Maybe? There was a time in the recent past where any college degree could get you a good job in nearly any field. That is no longer the case. Also, one would expect that students move with the economy, but that doesn't appear to happen, either.

My gut says the problem can't be solved by changing the nature of students. If they go to school without regard for job prospects, and we continue to believe that education is important regardless of job prospects, then we should look for other solutions. Changing human nature doesn't seem to me the best way to go about that when there are many other issues at play accounting for boomerang twenty-somethings (high school debt, mostly government issued, appears to be the lowest hanging fruit).
The news to me is that they are using the restriction to buy stock cheap and sell it dear, screwing their early supporters out of the difference.
When I was a TA for my undergrad operating systems class, I gave a lecture once on using SPIN for basic verification of a handful of mutex implementations, and proving a handful of properties about them. If you want a basic conceptual primer for Spin, I recommend checking it out -- here's a PDF of the slide deck:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410-s11/lectures/L38_SPIN.pdf

And here's a set of resources:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410-s09/lectures/L40_SPIN/spinfiles/

Linked to from the above is another good resource from people who have used Spin -- a formal verification of Linux's RCU design, using Spin:

http://lwn.net/Articles/243851/
how about being portable to non-Intel platform?

Really, nothing new to see...
OpenFit Bluetooth Scale - Open Source Fitness Hardware and Firmware
It's been tried before, but not with the talent of Nintendo behind it. I remember playing the Nerf-branded UT game with my nephew many years ago, for example.
I was in Zion National Park about a month ago and overheard two rangers talking about these drones. At the time, it was illegal to take off or land inside the park but, as they did not control the airspace, you could fly them in the air.
I would love to see a SEM (scanning electron microscope) picture of the exact area where the water comes in contact with these fibers (instead of this non-SEM fuzzy picture: http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/plume-poppy-...). They have the equipment. They should have done it!
sam, go take some time and read about the shoebutton complex
"While you can have both true int arrays and Integer arrays, the same is not true of non-primitive types. There is no way to have anything like an array of structs, with the same compact representation, as you can have in C. There are benchmarks showing that Java and C are competitive in performance. But C/C++ can be used to preserve locality for arrays of structs and objects in ways that Java cannot. Java has to be slower in these situations.
"

Java does not have to be slower in these situations.
The fact that something does not exist in the source language is irrelevant.

You can rearrange, restructure, and generally do whatever you want in a compiler as long as you preserve the original semantics or can prove they don't matter to the program.

For things like you are talking about, for non-primitive accesses, often the non-primitive types are locally split up in a function, each piece treated like a separate part, and then put back together where necessary (if necessary, in fact).

Given large parts of the program, you can also do this interprocedurally as well (it's trickier though, to know when it is safe).

For arrays of whatever, it may be internally transformed into the same contiguous representation you see in C.

(ie struct of arrays transformed into array of structs, which has been done for a very long time. It became famous because it sped up SPECcpu's 179.art by a very very large factor).

Besides that, data layout optimizations are pretty common in compilers (as is loop rearrangement of various sorts. For heavy locality optimization, algorithms like http://pluto-compiler.sourceforge.net/ exist)

So in short, it does not have to be slower. It often is for other reasons, but it does not have to be. It all depends on how much time you are willing to trade optimizing code vs running it.
Two reasons for this come to mind, in addition to the "rain on the roots" idea: dry surfaces are less able to support fungal/bacterial growth, and suspended water is less likely to damage the leaf cells with jagged ice crystals in the event of frost. Awesome article! :)
Two possibilities:

One, a superhydrophobic surface reduces the surface area of the water that lands on the plant, allowing less of it to evaporate and more of it to fall to the ground.

Two, it may help prevent plant diseases by allowing less water to attach to surfaces that are prone to becoming diseased.
this is especially challenging actually. just because you own the domain name, doesn't mean you own the infrastructure you are pointing your DNS records to!

So adding DNS records is pretty useless to provide proof that you own the resources under test.
I've never see Kaizo Mario World before. That's amazingly clever. It's easy to just, say, spam a screenful of koopas at you to make something hard. These levels, though are hard because they involve a complex interaction of Mario skills, with zero tolerance for getting it wrong. If you've played enough Mario, some of the sections are actually funny in the same way that comics are: I immediately see how difficult the task is, why, and the combination of both almost makes me laugh.

I actually threw up my hands when I saw not only that the player had to throw a baby Yoshi up in the air to eat an enemy, but that the designer of the level expected this! Same when I realized that the the length of an area was tuned so that it was juuuuuust smaller than the amount of time Yoshi held a shell in his mouth before swallowing.
No difference? Are you kidding? This new technology is very useful and interesting. But is it different from a tripod? Yes, in many ways. At what decibel does your standard tripod operate? What are it's risks of falling out of the sky due to malfunction? How often does your tripod wander in front of other picture takers during use?
Full reverse and crack analysis of CryptorBit-In the top 3 worst encrypt infection
Handy informations for tourist in palermo
Not broken, per se. Rdtsc counts instruction cycles. It's not an accurate indication of time when the clock rate is variable (and in fact pausible).
Quiet, slow, ground-level activities are generally thought of as OK. Noisy, fast and elevated things are generally not. As the sphere of influence of some activity grows, more people begin to object to it.

The problem with things in the sky is that they visible (and often audible) from long distances. A single noisy drone might affect several square miles, covering hundreds or thousands of people (depending on the location). A guy hiding behind a tree with a tripod will likely affect a few square yards, and a tiny handful of people.
Opens possibilities for developers to create their own fitness apps/link with an open platform of fitness devices instead of developers/users being tied to fitbit.com or nike.com to check their fitness stats/data. Hope to tie this in with Apple's and Google's fitness SW platforms as well since the Firmware is open source.

Support open source HW and SW! Thanks
My first guess would be that it requires less energy to produce and maintain than other similarly effective arrangements of the wax.
Are there any patents on physics or laws of physics, the same way there are patents on things like "swipe to unlock?"

Eg, has anyone filed a patent on something like "swing hammer to drive nail." Or "Spin wheel to turn car?"

I personally have not heard of such ridiculous claims however it wouldn't surprise me to learn some have slipped through the "filters" that are supposed to catch this stuff.
Because of visibility... say you are trying to take a picture in the air and there are 10 other aircraft in your picture. And none of the other 50 people with their tripods are going to want your silly drone in their pictures. Not to mention the loud buzzing making the whole place an annoying place to be instead of a wonderful moment for everyone. Get a clue.
>By whom, where and when? I've been to three commencement speeches in the last several years, and even there didn't hear this. As a baby boomer and parent of a millenial, I sure as hell didn't aim to convey that message.

When I was growing up it was prevalent in the media and in schools. Not all parents bought into it of course -- perhaps even the majority of them didn't -- but if the TV says something and your parents don't tell you it's a lie, it must be true right? What is a 5-10 year old's capacity to tell fact from fiction, especially if an authority figure (like a teacher or someone on TV) is saying it?

I was fortunate enough to be able to figure out at a young age that not everyone could grow up to be President or an astronaut and to temper my expectations accordingly. But should it be required skills to figure that out WELL before you hit puberty? Should that be the standard by which all persons are judged?

By the time a commencement speech has rolled around it's already a decade or two too late. Minds have been impressed with crazy ideas that have little/no bearing on how the world ACTUALLY works. Some people take years to un-learn these silly notions; others never do.

You might not have aimed to convey that message. You might have done a good job explaining to your kids that life is hard and success isn't becoming President but making your own way in life. But even if you did that, they might have still picked up enough nonsense elsewhere to believe it.

Other phrases of a similarly unfortunate bent:

"Follow your dreams"

"Reach for the stars"

"Do what you love"

If you don't believe me that this is prevalent in culture, check out Google n-grams in books. It's imperfect of course but it's illustrative:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=follow+your+dr...
This is an important observation. There are absolutely angel and venture-backed startups with "real" revenue (fewer with actual earnings), but if you look closely, it appears that a non-negligible percentage of them derive a not insignificant portion of their revenues from sales to other angel and venture-backed startups.

More broadly, an even larger number of startups are also indirectly dependent on the current landscape, as they operate in regional markets where consumption is being driven in large part by the influx of capital into tech.

There's nothing wrong with building a business that takes advantage of these types of situations, but my sense is that a lot of the entrepreneurs running these types of companies aren't consciously aware that they're the beneficiaries of an environment that will eventually change. As such, they're not at all focused on trying to diversify their revenue base and to be frank, it many cases there really isn't an opportunity for them to do so anyway.
I skimmed the study, and that statistic is a little misleading.

They weren't typing predetermined sentences. They were instructed to come up with a story based on some pictures and write it down. They weren't bottlenecked by typing speed, but rather by pauses for thought between words.
You can't. SEM requires coating the scanned things in a thin layer of metal.
Boring SSL
I think you're assuming that because people can't type that that implies they don't remember where the keys are located. People who can't type simply have developed different muscle memory, which is probably less efficient than typing. However, as many people have explained, it's not such a big deal. There has been code completion, in some form, for decades: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HippieExpand

Also, consider that people seldom type "M...y...C...l...a...s...s", they type My<TAB>

And soon we'll be typing "var foo = 2"

There's so much code completion in a modern IDE:

if<TAB>
for<TAB>
r<TAB>
The first stable release of PyPy3