skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Is there a clear evolutionary advantage for these leaves to be superhydrophobic?"

From:
http://biomimetic.pbworks.com/f/The+dream+of+staying+cleanSo...

"The evolutionary benefits of sophisticated superhydrophobic surfaces are diverse. With plants, a water film affects the gas exchange which is crucial for many physiological processes (Brewer and Smith 1994 ,Brewer 1996). This is true particularly for the underside of the leaf where the stomata are usually located. Consequences of a disturbed gas exchange are inhibition of photosynthesis and suppression of plant growth; the latter can even become chronic (Ishibashi and Terashima 1995). This might explain why in numerous plant species the underside of the leaf is less wettable than the upper surface (Smith and McClean 1989). Moreover, a water film significantly increases leaching of nutrients (Tukey 1970). The prevention of a water film has an important side effect: the period during which dissolved air pollutants can damage the plant is distinctly shortened (Haines et al 1985).

Clearly, the ability of a plant to clean itself is an additional benefit. Naturally and artificially emitted dust that is deposited on photosynthetic plant organs causes shading, enhanced reflection, increased leaf temperature, decreased gaseous diffusion and increased transpiration through stomata and cuticle (Thompson et al 1984 , Eveling 1986 , Hirano et al 1995 , Sharifi et al 1997). As a result, the photosynthetic rate is reduced and the plant gets under stress sometimes to the point of damage to its surface (Eveling 1986).

Another important function of the self-cleaning mechanism is its role in the protection against pathogen attacks. Spores of pathogenic fungi are completely washed off surfaces of certain crops with well-developed epicuticular waxes, provided that the surface microstructure is intact (Neinhuis et al 1992). Moreover, a dense layer of wax crystals makes it more difficult for fungi to penetrate a plant surface (Schwab et al 1995). The almost permanent dryness of superhydrophobic self-cleaning surfaces is an obstacle particularly to pathogens producing spores which require free water for germination (Juniper 1991)."
Turkish coffee is a method of preparation, but I have never known it to be made with chicory. Perhaps you meant cardamom?

I've only ever had coffee made with chicory in New Orleans. Somewhat ironically, supposedly we have the French to thank for that - http://www.cafedumonde.com/coffee :-)
Flash sucks
How We Identified a Relationship Between Cell Phone Use, Academic Performance...
I knew a professor who was an adjunct. She was nice, taught the class well, was very intelligent, and even wrote a textbook used by other universities. She still had trouble finding steady teaching work.
Yes, though which do you propose should be used? It's nice that the type is wrapped in the std namespace, but for something like a basic standardized type, seems like a waste. I think I'd rather include stdint.h.
both ways, i completely miss the meaning.
Solidarity after "Sharing"
Yeah, he described Omni magazine basically didn't he?

Which was pushed by "public interest" into a lot of fringe silliness and ads from outright con artists selling pseudoscience.
It's called the "lotus effect" :

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

And it works even with honey:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJtQ6dvcbOg
Hardware-In-The-Loop Simulator, Software Development for Mars Airplane
I'd fear any language provided build tool would risk becoming, like the python standard library, the place where modules go to die. I think what we've seen in recent years (particularly with the example of node.js) is that it's best for a language core to remain as small as possible, offloading most functionality into external libraries which can have their own release cycles and development philosophies, and even be replaced if need be. With maven we even have a nice layering of this: maven's core is small and most of the functionality is in modules, which can be updated or replaced without having to rewrite everything.

If we bundled maven or maven-like functionality into the Java core it would slow down the release schedule and destroy the productively competitive build tool ecosystem we have at the moment. What is it you think we'd gain?
I am not a lawyer but the way I understand it is, in the old days you could get a patent for a machine that separates cotton fibers (a complete and specific design for creating something that does this), but not for "a machine that separates cotton fibers" (the very concept of such a thing, and all possible implementations of said concept, accompanied by a crude description of what such a thing might look like, given a sufficiently smart compiler).

What it sounds like to me is that the court is leaving open the possibility of software patents that are more like the former case, although the vast majority are more like the latter.
Show HN: Build online Books directly from GitHub
If you have an iPad, PixelPress Floors is a great option - http://projectpixelpress.com/floors/
Agreed, but I'd argue that striving for perfection in every detail is a bit of first world problem, and it also assumes availability of infinite resources. Starve a man for enough days, then give him a steak on a stick and I'll guarantee that he'll be happy just to tear the meat apart with his teeth caveman style, forget the formalities of napkin, plate and utensils. Same goes for software, esp. startups, where the first challenge is to get to having something that will do a right job however imperfectly, than the wrong job, however perfectly.
The ladder is usually, and in this instance, the things that working give you such as on the job training and building up a personal reputation as a dependable employee. It gives you exposure to company processes and gets your mind working on how to improve them here or at the next gig. Sitting on your ass because minimum wage cuts you off from opportunities and your only option is going on the dole gives you none of that.
That's nice. But you didn't really answer the question.
I believe the explanation for why the leaves are so hydrophobic is quite simple. Those leaves are huge. Since they are so huge, they act as a canopy, preventing needed water from reaching the ground... unless the water could just somehow bead up and roll off the leaf. Saying a leaf is hydrophobic is another way of saying that water doesn't stick to them. If water doesn't stick to them, it falls off. Very simple, and ingenious!
Nice. Reminds me a lot of https://www.gitbook.io

We actually ended up building our own Gitbook/Bitbooks for Discover Meteor, in Meteor.

And we also have a Middleman implementation, although Middleman does 90% of the work out of the box.

In any case it's nice to see open-source options coming out so we don't all have to keep on reinventing the same wheel.
UI/UX Designer
We’re an off-the-record YC company building financial services tools. We're already cash-flow positive, and laptops, and office snacks, and etc. and so forth. and general good things. Here's what's awesome: we have non-technical customers paying us for an online tool. Everyday, our clients call and email to say that we're making them happy. And that feels great.

But there's one problem: parts of our product are a little bit ugly and a little bit confusing. We're rapidly adding new features, and we're quickly outpacing our design capabilities. In short, it’s time to hire a UX/UI designer.

Our clients use our product for hours at a time. This is their tool for getting their jobs done. It is their workflow. We want it to beautiful and intuitive. It should be easy for a new client to learn, while at the same time, it should make power users feel like they’re flying through their day.

You must have experience with The Struggle of Application Design. And frankly, you should enjoy this struggle, because it’s hard to get things right, but really rewarding when you do.

What would your first day on the job be like? Well, we’ve got a product live right now that processes several hundred orders per day. You now own the design and you will be responsible for improving it. Changes could be simple, like, ‘make this button blue’ or it could be more elaborate like, ‘add tooltips and a new customer tutorial,’ or maybe you might want to redesign aspects of the site from scratch. Ideally, within a couple weeks, clients should be telling us that they’ve noticed small, nice design improvements.

List of Responsibilities:
- Design
- Usability and Utility are more important (at the moment) than purely visual appeal. As a team, we frequently meet with our clients to learn how they’re using the product. A good candidate for this role will be able to speak to users and feel out their feelings.

List of Skills:
- UI/UX design experience
- Responsive design experience (a lot of our clients access our site on their phones)
- HTML/CSS is great. At the moment, we’re using a lot of Bootstrap. Pixel perfect designs are not (yet) crucial; usability is paramount.

We’re in San Francisco on a trolley-filled street in Union Square. We’re small (3 in-office employees) and we’re still building a culture. If you have ideas for how to build a blissed-out company, we’re all ears. Thinking of moving to San Francisco, but not yet ready to commit? Talk to us.

Send an email to fintechw14@gmail.com telling us about yourself. Include a resume and a portfolio if possible.
I feel bad derailing this thread further, but you know bloody nothing about me.

My comment was on-topic. grkvlt's was not, regardless of what he thinks I meant with that one pronoun (which was wrong, anyway).

Maybe you should realise that sane women, just as much as sane men, don't think pronouns will "solve" sexism. If I'm referring to a specific person, I'll be specific. If it's some random imaginary person, it's none of your bloody business what pronoun I choose.
This is a direct and entirely predictable result of the publicly-administered, nondischargeable-through-bankruptcy student loans. We can't have everyone going to college and also have all colleges be nice workplaces. Society has recently taken the former option, but one can imagine that decision changing.
Nest is acquiring Dropcam
Note that this Tim B Lee is NOT Tim Berners-Lee of invention of the web (HTTP) fame.
Moderators: Name should be BoringSSL, not Boring SSL. It is the tentative name of Google’s OpenSSL fork.
And also emscripten-qt:
http://vps2.etotheipiplusone.com:30176/redmine/projects/emsc...
Does this have anything with the old ios game by Frank Li and Jason Ma?
I think the distinction would be practical implementation. For instance:

Abstract: A way of making video files smaller by compressing it using various mathematical procedures.
Patentable: A way of making a video file smaller by braking it down to keyframes and than ......... {detailed description of one specific way of doing it}....

I think that's the line the supreme court is drawing.
If you are looking only to optimize your career and expertise, do whatever you want.

If you care about having a codebase that is accessible to all levels of talent, then you should optimize for readable code. The least skilled team member is still a team member. The fresh grad, the intern, the customer support rep with an interest in code, the new hire. Why are you so willing to discount any of these members as not valuable? Just because they don't have an innate skill and interest in code golf?

Reading symbols is a near instantaneous exercise. You can tell the difference between "i" and "index" with no extra work. Stopping to think to decipher the meaning of cryptic code is slow.

It doesn't hurt to use a full word instead of a single letter variable name, or an explicit function call instead of an alias to some cryptic character. We don't use languages anymore that benefit from have a small file size. Reading will always be more important than writing, until you get down to hardware drivers and kernels.
While I have to put up the big blinking disclaimer that I'm not a Java programmer so take this with a box of salt, I'm not sure that really invalidates his point -- out of the box it's (apparently) far harder to build at least certain kinds of applications in Java that seem pretty trivial in other languages. I don't doubt your word that if he'd started with Play it would have been much easier to write that command line app that fetches a document with HTTPS, but downloading a third-party, self-described "high-velocity web framework" probably shouldn't be a recommended way to solve this problem.
perhaps the dog from duck hunt?
This isn't a Show HN, this is a blog post.
Isn't "research" mainly professor and grad student salaries? What's the difference?
Command line access from your browser using shell.php
> The value in a piece of literature has little to do with the individual words it's made from

Literature would be hobbled if one couldn't use certain words without fear of litigation or rent seekers suing them.

> software is clearly vastly more than the sum of its algorithmic parts.

But it's all algorithmic parts, and the whole is no less an algorithm because its parts are.

Algorithm + Algorithm = Algorithm

If you want to rely on literature as your software analogy--that the composition of words/algorithms, the expression should be protected--then you're arguing not for patent protection but copyright protection, which we already have, and ridiculously is far better than what writers get. Because we don't have to share the human readable part the source code, just the compiled products. At least with patents one was supposed to disclose something of value.
Fun uses for an SMT solver
Yes it's dreadfully unfair. Little children are crying. And yet GP's observation that "specialty" Courts tend to rule on the side of what they were meant to "judge" is true, without consideration for particular procedural differences.
Concept attenuation.... don't think many 57th Century Ultra-monkeys (or drones, or praeter-singularity-humans or whatever) will know or care anything about the Pope. Brilliant thought experiment though, and love that it tests the bounds of discipline and rigour!!!
SolVPS Rolls Out Linux VPS Hosting on 100% SSD Platform
"killer"
All of those bids and the result along with the findings should be public, as in published.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirties...

I could figure out how to post this w/o it showing up as a dupe but I just don't care enough.
Time Travel Simulated With Photons
You can get over the flagpole in world 1-1 and 3-3, but it involves at least 2 quirks in the game to do 1-1's.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMCfqjRheY8
Trade in Service Agreement, or TISA
JavaScript Proxy Madness
what's free will ?
Googles Nest buys Dropcam for 555 million
Ask HN: What horrifying and/or terrible things have you seen in production code?
Interested in hearing the worst things you've seen that somehow went into production somewhere.
Or if you prefer quarters, get quarters.

http://washboard.co/
Are high-profile announcements typically announced at 5pm on a Friday?
Put the administrators on a living wage and send them home.
Being tested by someone who has a service providing premium freelancers.
> However, even though I'm very passionate about this idea, there are some major obstacles involved. Namely, my service would need to be HIPAA compliant in the US. The more I've read into that process the more I've been discouraged.

Out of experience I know that one quality that serial-entrepreneurs (e.g. Elon Musk) have is the ability to fight successfully with the paperwork. The laws are written, some make sense, others do not. Doesn't really matter because you can't change them. Most people are intimidated by the very sight of paperwork. Especially the kind that is written in lawyer's language. You can only become successful if you learn to read this language. From what I've seen, it's extremely valuable asset, no matter what kind of company you want to create.

Another thing I've noticed is that only 10% of the people you'll ever talk about, no matter how they present themselves, really KNOWS what are they talking about. So keep your faith no matter what others tell you.

I would say, go for it. The experience of driving any such venture up to a point where you create something or you stop because you're over your head, will prove extremely valuable anyway. It's the kind of experience that you can't buy with money.

Wish you all the best :-)

ps. If you pursue this path, make sure to write a blog post a let us know how it went in about 1 year or 2 from now.
Have you read anything he has written about the actual theory?
The difference is that in the software case the patent claims are completely divorced from the computer's physical operation. You could be using a gravity-based computer built out of planets and stars and it would infringe all the same. Because the computer isn't required to do something, it is only required to calculate something.

Let's try this another way. You understand that it is possible to build a computer out of anything. Let's build a computer out of nothing. We want to perform a calculation without building anything whatsoever, so all we are going do is observe nature. There are any number of ways to represent a calculation. If there are three pigeons and five more arrive then you have only to observe the resulting number of pigeons to learn the sum of three and five, etc. Nature is going to do lots of calculations we don't care about the answers to, so we ignore those and only pay attention to the ones necessary according to the algorithm to be executed.

By doing this you can execute any algorithm. Doing strictly nothing but observing natural phenomena. There is no machine. Because the result you are trying to obtain is not a thing, it is a representation of information. And information can be encoded into anything and the representation is defined by the context. By changing the context -- an entirely intellectual undertaking -- you determine what information is represented by the physical state. What the machine (or the birds or the stars) do is comprehensively irrelevant, as long as things are happening you can use them to represent the execution of computer software.
All of these brilliant people have driven their institutions into the ground chasing rankings and fads like diversity and prestige buildings. Universities have taken on mountains of debt, and just like the portfolios of those university trained traders on Wall Street that destroyed the world a few years ago, they are very susceptible to unthinkable events like young people no longer finding college worth the money. It will only take a small decrease in enrollment rates for the wheels to come off. Bankruptcy is all but guaranteed.
Google has acquired Nest... so now Google has also acquired Dropcam. I wonder why they call it Nest acquistion, to downplay privacy concerns?
Thread sanitizer is a tool which can detect races. Spin is a tool which can prove an algorithm (or a simplified specification of it) is race-free.

You start with an algorithm involving concurrent operations. Spin searches across all possible interleavings of those operations -- basically like running your program while simulating every possible ordering of execution. Over all those simulations, it verify invariants (that you choose). So it's like a proof agent -- if your proof succeeds you get a much stronger guarantee that your algorithm behaves as you believe it does.
Yup, the want to avoid the headline: "Google buys network of in-home cameras."
It's interesting how google subsidiaries somehow announce acquisitions rather than the parent company.
Keep in mind: a lawyer tried to attack the crypto credibility of Whit Diffie!

Remember, that lawyer who attacked Diffie won the case! The jury decided that the Patent Office knew better than Whitfield Diffie about encryption and awarded millions to the guy who claimed to invent asymmetric transport cryptography in the 1990s.
PyPy seems to be 7x faster!
So we could have a startup that administers 3 day quals and hands out a degree based on passing our rigorous tests? Like passing the bar but from a private firm giving a certification, the education is on your own.
Hard to read; hard to sort; false, non-intuitive affordances; way too many font styles/colors; and lots of bugs:
* headings overlapping text
* half-visible tables
* 'pause experiment' times out
I fail to see how a program is not a mathematical algorithm.
http://pastebin.com/DtsYEsYL
$1M isn't much for VCs. Yo didn't raise money from VCs, however. They raised it from angels, and it's a lot of money to them.

Why is it hard to believe that $1M isn't really a lot of money in the context of business?
Likely the timing is because of stock exchange regulations. Google is publicly traded company so announcing it on different time may gave someone "unfair advantage".

Doing that 5pm Friday after market closes give everyone 2 days to process that information.
If they need the whole weekend to find the right tone to explain this acquisition, yes. Looking forward to seeing how Google handles the privacy concerns on this...
Until this CRM is in a hospital and you 're the patient in the intensive care unit.
Smoking doesn't make you relax. Doesn't relax your muscles or anything. I could go on and analyze (from a pharmaceutical perspective) what happens in your body when you inhale, but I guess you know the resume anyway: it's awful.

My father stopped smoking when I was a little child. He just took the decision to never do it again. After about 6 years he couldn't stand the smell of a cigarette. I know that this isn't a widely used strategy but I've seen it work fine.

Anyway, even if you can't stop entirely, I'd say try to limit smoking as much as possible.

Why don't you try some Yoga to relax? (not joking).
Our tasks can generally operate independently. For example, if the painting task is stalled, scrolling can happen in the compositor; if the layout task is stalled, painting can happen on the retained display list; if the script task is stalled, layout can still happen on the retained render object tree. This is only possible because our data structures are cleanly separated between all the tasks. I'm confident that this approach will result in good latency.
I peeked in at the discussion about trying to recover more of the stream. It was pretty neat. Some of those folks really know their stuff when it comes to the bit-level details of video encoding. As I recall, a bunch of the errors in the stream ended up being fairly regular and identifiable/reversible with human intelligence, like repeated sequences of N flipped bits every M bits.
Passwordless sudo for www-data and a shellcode injection attack give a pretty nice exploit vendor.
Exactly! theverge.com suffering from this problem too. When I visit that website, I want to see what's new. But I see a mangled mess of different articles that are not sorted.
To give us commenters the "Nest"ing doll softball of a pun.
They store broken hard drives for years? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Who knows when someone will need to try and end you career as a civil servant to advance their chances with hillbilly racists in a midterm... so keep those broken drives for ever!

Of course, the drives could have info about the liberal nonprofits that they targeted, too... but that wouldn't help any of these bat shit crazy house reps would it?
Google’s Nest Buys Dropcam for $555 Million
I think those are all still at least marginally better than having the bridge you're on collapse, but on the other hand they can wind up affecting many more people than can fit on a single bridge...
You are not a betting man.
I'm surprised Nest (Google) hasn't bought Logitech's Alert division yet. Logitech has been shopping it around - looking for a buyer - for awhile.