skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is overdramatized but I have to point one thing out. MS can't sue linux. Period. Asside from bad PR there is one major problem: MS is already accused of monopolising the market. Thus suing linux providers will only hurt their cause. Instead it is better if other companies do it. Or maybe they do/don't care about it but they just want to rid themselves of these patents so they can claim "we are letting linux die because MS makes a superior product, not because we are trying to kill of linux with legal red-tape".

It may have been coencidence that linux got the stuff, it may be that AST made a profit buying and re-selling. In any case while MS might be evil we definately got another kind of evil sitting on the other fence keeping MS in check.

Nothing to see here, move along.
Lewis Pugh swims across the North Pole in a Speedo (video)
I don't understand articles like that. They all mention that the valuation for Facebook at $15 billion was from the $240 million investment for a 1.6 percent stake. But the $240 million was not just a purchase in the stake of the company it was also and advertising deal. Before someone can then come up with an evaluation from that transaction they need to break down how much of the $240 million was to purchase a stake and how much was for the advertising deal.
affiliation with universities has something that reading a newspaper lacks; status. The web does not yet have anything that approaches a social indicator to replace that.
I perked my ears at some bizarre method for pagination without PHP, but the title is just wrong here.

Actual title: "Pagination with jQuery, MySQL and PHP."

Which puts it solidly back in the realm of the boring. Pagination is something every beginning PHP programmer needs to puzzle out, but I find it quite hard to forget how to ride this particular bike.
I think it is hard to underestimate how much SQL code and database design is an afterthought on many projects. I tend to see lots of ad-hoc relational table/view/procedure creation by developers on the fly, without much thought put into how to best use a relational database and SQL to reduce the amount of code needed to implement a simple and straight-forward solution.

So I would argue that you're not seeing the work of SQL developers, but rather the outcome of letting the db design and SQL code be done by inexperienced developers with backgrounds in imperative languages.

Part of the problem is that SQL developers (and I'm in that group, both from personal viewpoint and job title) are not necessarily seen as necessary for a software development project, even when there is a significant relational db design and SQL code component in the project.

Add in the fact that most of the db backend work is poorly understood and documented in the first place, and you really quickly get into exactly the situations you describe.
Right now, we have a bias against online learning since we think of it as a low-class experience or for people who didn't go to "real" colleges. But I think this is a lot like online dating.

Umm... I want to point out that the actual dating still happens in person.

I'm not sure this is the best analogy. You could just as easily compare online dating to choosing your university or your courses online, which already happens. Or you could compare online learning with cyber relationships, which AFAIK is still far from the social norm.
Yeah, as if he's going to sell 500 copies at $39.99.
What are you talking about? Pushing more computer usage in education has been done for a long time. PLATO was an online system for education and it came into usage in the early 1970s. We've had a long time to learn from the mistakes of the past and to adapt all the good bits into current implementations.

Working with shit that makes your life difficult is a damned good argument against online learning. A lot of people already hate dealing with systems like Blackboard. Would you like to torture them further and force them to use it on a daily basis?
Isn't making pickle completely secure equivalent to solving the halting problem?
But social networks like MySpace and Facebook aren't e-commerce sites. That's the whole point. Zappos wants to sell shoes. They probably don't want you on the site for that long. They want you to quickly and efficiently find what you want and buy it.

So a comparison to Facebook beating MySpace with a cleaner UI doesn't really make sense here.
There's a level of irony in the fact that the author of this blog post/presentation frequently scorns other designers for even the slightest likeness to what he considers to be his own design stylings, but he just completely and totally ripped off a blog post format that is so similar to a format that Dustin Curtis has produced and honed in the past that there are users here who are noting it and have even remarked that they looked for his navigation when first coming upon the site.

Good designer. A lot to learn about business.
Because according to Andrew, they make $1 billion in sales. The site is making a lot of money with the existing design. I can see why they don't want to fix what is not broken.
Ars Technica Announces A Subscription Based Service
Yeah I was scrubbing the initial unfiltered results. I was expecting it to work like a video scrubber though and thought the results should move to where I was scrubbing too.

I was expecting holding down the left and right arrows to have the effect the scrubbing does (Constant scrolling). Currently that doesn't do anything.

Anyhow kudos for the nice interface.
Good post. Of course each experience is different, but I'd like to point out that Jessica's business acumen and experience are key, too.
I'm not sure what your point is. Someone could go to college, do poorly in everything except one particular area and be the optimal candidate for a job in that area.

Just like you may well be more helpful to someone with a similar condition than the general oncologist.
Useful Properties of the Floor and Ceil Functions
Call the product "I Will Guess Your Baby's Gender". www.iwillguessyourbabysgender.com
But why pay $40 for fun when you can do it with free information on the net? If you're doing it for fun, then that information is more than adequate. If, however, you're doing it because you want a real language that people should/would use, then a 44 page PDF is not nearly enough, regardless of how good and densely packed it is. For a real (as opposed to a toy) language, you require theory on language design, on compilers, on programming paradigms, on syntax, on computation models and so much more.
The part that strikes me as snobbery is your statement that you cannot learn language design from a small book. Based on my actual experience in the same regime, some of which involved reading books but far more of which involved thinking through code, I think you're just wrong.
Your argument boils down to "hand cannon are slower to use and less safe than longbows". My argument boils down to "you can invent the flintlock musket, and if that's not enough to sway you, just wait a little longer and we'll have caplocks and repeating rifles."
Keyspace 1.1 released
The city actually did something right... awesome
> Y Combinator transforms this force from a weight on your shoulders that keeps you down, to a powerful rocket that propels you to the sky.
It doesn't seem surprising to me. Doing anything really hard is as much about mastering oneself as about domain knowledge. You'd hear similar things from a lot of top athletes, for example.

And while "entrepreneurship" in general is not necessarily hard, the path Slava has chosen is. It's not easy to start a new database company.

He deserves better than snarky one-liners.
Kind of sucks that they're putting their "Deep Technical Reviews" behind a pay wall... I've really enjoyed a few of those in the past, but probably not $50 worth. Could be an opportunity for micro-payments I suppose.
Design asthetic is one thing, selling millions of dollars worth of shoes (every day) and serving tens of millions of pageviews (every day) is another. Don't forget one of the most important criteria for any scalable design on a site of this scale: speed. Speed, CDN requirements and caching, image load time, these are more important than how shiny and flashy a site looks at this level. IMO.
Yeah. "Our customers love us" makes me think, "Oh really?! They don't hate you?" And I always assume customer stories are a lot of bull written by staffs.

Good customer service has to be experienced, or shared by the word of mouth, not told by the vendor. Zappos already did well in that department, don't ruin it.
"The part that strikes me as snobbery is your statement that you cannot learn language design from a small book. "

I stand by that. Design in any endeavor can't be learned from books, small or big. Before you can "design" you need the nuts and bolts skill to implement your designs.

The books I reccomended, if sincerely worked through, give you the nuts and bolts knowledge to implement the designs you do conceive. Reading through the source of languages you admire, will teach you a lot (I reccomended that too).

Since I never said you could learn language design (vs learning how to build interpreters and compilers - I started my reccomendation list with "If anyone is really interested in learning to build an interpreter or compiler, ..." -) by working though books, I fail to see what you are reacting against?

I maintain that a 44 page book (particularly this one which is an outright scam) doesn't have the space to cover even the basic implementation techniques, leave alone "design".

Please provide counter examples of such "small books" that teach "language design" if you disagree. One counter example is worth a lot of internet debate!

The shortest introduction I know capable of turning you into an interprter/compiler writer is Chapters 4 and 5 of SICP (and there is a lot of stuff in the previous 3 chapters that lead to these chapters).
I'm saying it's not healthy for Saudi Arabia as a whole.

You should visit the kingdom. Economically, the people there are pretty well off. Democratically not so much.

It's quite simply, empirically, not comparable.

You're going to have to find something more than anecdotal observations to make a claim that there are more homeless in the US than there are in Europe. Until then, I've got a tough time accepting that claim, even if I think the US would benefit from more safety nets.
From Baz Luhrman, Sunscreen:

"What ever you do, dont congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either - your choices are half chance, so are everybody elses."
My friend who is a basketball player here in Mexico was telling me the other day that 'nigga' is the best compliment you can give when some body does a great move. IMHO, I think is kind of nice that it's changing its meaning.
If you want feedback on your product, don't you think an "Ask HN: Please Review" is more appropriate than derailing this thread? And it's clearly self-promoting, despite the "I don't mean to self-promote..." disclaimer.
Server Sizing - CPU & RAM
I need some help in sizing a new application we are developing for secure online storage. I am quite confident about storage and traffic numbers - but server numbers & size (CPU, RAM) is quite difficult since the application is still in development. Does anyone know some good reference material for this subject?
Feds to Let Citizens Log In With Yahoo, Google, Paypal Accounts
Fastest Pick and Place Robot and LEGO Version of It
You're second quote is horribly out of context. Turing says using a survey to describe machines as thinking beings in the commonly used sense of the words is absurd, not the question of "Can a machine think?".
I used the PLATO system a lot when I was a kid. Really opened my eyes to what computers could do, it was way ahead of its time. A touch screen WAN networked graphical terminal in 1979. Unfortunately I spent considerably more time playing EMPIRE than learning on it.
I was wondering about that. Was it really just a joke or are a lot of the underground crime syndicates in Africa based in Nigeria?
Makes me fear that data corruption in my pickles will crash the system. Maybe someone should implement an interface to 'pickle' that maintains a hash of the string.
I think the laws are more liberal here (California).

I think if you offered a no questions asked moneyback guarantee for wrong predictions, then the only people paying would be people whose predictions were correct (assuming every person with a wrong prediction requested a refund). You would of course put a disclaimer (as psychic hotlines do) that it is for entertainment purposes only, etc.
They still own the equity of accreditation and geographic name recognition which seems proportionate to the price of tuition.

Solve the global accreditation issue and universities will be forced to respond to the pressure of declining enrollments.

They still have a lot of money and will respond. But we said that about newspapers too didn't we.
This sounds like some good old FUD. Unfortunately, attacking me, or my family, doesn't make for a constructive argument. Last time I checked, my personal blog was ... my personal blog. I'm not asking you to be a reader of my blog.

Anyway, I've owned the Drupal trademark for a long time. The lack of a Drupal trademark policy doesn't mean the trademark was unprotected -- it was protected by trademark law. The lack of a Drupal trademark policy meant that it was unclear what was allowed and what wasn't allowed, and frankly, that you were bound by trademark law. By creating a trademark policy and a licensing procedure, we've provided us options we did not have before. Things have become more permissive.

The goal of our new policy is to provide guidance and clarity on how the Drupal trademark is allowed to be used. The goal of the policy is to create a fair-level playing ground for all people and organizations that are part of the Drupal community.

The entire process of developing the policy was a community effort, with help from a variety of legal experts. We worked on the policy over the course of almost two years. A draft version of the policy was posted at http://groups.drupal.org/node/19068, and through the community feedback that developed there, we ironed out many of the wrinkles of my original draft. Larry Garfield, the Drupal Association's current legal representative has provided feedback, and both my own attorney (DLA Piper) and additional attorneys from the Software Freedom Law Center and the Drupal Association were part of the policy's development. To help validate our work, we reviewed other similar policies from sister projects to make sure that we were in-line with the current legal trends in open-source development.
Perhaps its anecdotal, but overall, I am hearing a lot more about these types of ideas. Maybe there is a trend to feel a bit of urgency to make money, so people are trying silly things like this.

For me, having a history of never monetizing anything but my time, I can identify with a general sense of urgency. Still, I would probably never do something like this. But, if I did, I would certainly never tell anyone.

Edit: I changed my mind. I'll see you at the Kansas State Fair... look for the booth titled "Will your startup ever be profitable? Two questions will tell the answer. 'Free'"
"Well, perhaps, but it's border-line kitsch."

Bah. I'm not making aesthetic judgments --- I don't care if it's good or not. I do care that he is willing to deny an entire medium the ability to change the way I think, feel, and sense the world.

We live in a time when people think that art is a frivolity; silly at best and a senseless waste at worst. That is not because people have become less intelligent or less capable of culture. It's because artists (a community I count myself within) are failing to communicate, to relate to the rest of humanity. Artists denying each other's work and medium of choice is a pretty vicious act of treachery against the mission of reminding the world that art is vital --- it is both a living field and a necessity of life.
/me puts on tin foil hat
They could follow the LWN model of freeing paid content after a week (or after a month).
What's up with YAML? Doesn't Google use it extensively? Is it a better alternative than JSON even if you are sending serialized data from the Javascript in the browser to the web server and back?
"Monitoring" was not part of the equation and that's part of the problem. The implication in the cited article was that logs IN AND OF THEMSELVES result in better security. That's simply not true. Monitoring logs is better, but analysis and even reactive tools that make use of those logs is better. That improves security, but log files don't..

Absolutely agree that logs are an enabler of security. Either someone needs to look at them (analysis) or they need to be leveraged via third-party tools (if you're looking to do more real-time analysis or catch a breach in progress).

And very good point on the investigation aspect - I was thinking more external facing (breach) but there's also good for internal facing (infection/containment).
> not quite as blatantly insecure as pickle (it won't do any string interpolation on load)

Are you saying that pickle works via string interpolation (or that this problem is possible because of interpolation)? That's incorrect...
I think most of us on HN realize it's gonna take more than a few days and a few pages of reading to truly understand what it takes to create a programming language, not to mention becoming the next Guido or Matz. The table of contents looks more like it's an introduction to the concepts with the added bonus of having working code by the time you're done reading. Don't get me wrong - I think the concept and content look great. It's just that you're telling me I'm going to be Larry Wall by Friday and I know that's not true. The message undercuts the content IMO.

My other gripe is with the price. $40 seems high for a 44-page document. I'd buy it if the price was lower.

BTW - thanks for Thin! Because I know your name and work the content came off as sarcasm to me at first, but I could definitely see how someone without this prior knowledge might think it's a scam. Best of luck with this book; it does truly look cool.
Discover if your favourite apps work on Snow Leopard
"It generally takes much less water to deflect visible light and reduce the efficiency of a silicon solar panel than it takes to absorb the UV that is producing power through the melanin."

I'm confused by this statement. I'll try to clarify.

Melanin's absorption spectrum can be found here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jgd1000/melanin.html
As you can see, it has high absorption from 300nm-700nm which is in the UV-Vis range.

Similarly, silicon's absorption spectrum is here:
http://www.wsi.tum.de/Research/StutzmanngroupE25/Research/Ph...
So it absorbs much more in those wavelengths so that's why you're bound to get higher efficiencies.

Alternatively, water's absorption spectrum can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Water_absorption_spectrum....
Water does not have a high absorption in this region. So clouds will not absorb wavelengths in this region.

And sorry to nitpick, but nothing deflects light. Light is absorbed, transmitted, and emitted. If it is emitted in the direction from which it came, its called reflectance.
Apply for a license. As said, the goal of the policy is to create a fair-level playing ground for all people and organizations that are part of the Drupal community. If your use of the Drupal name is fair for others, if it does not suggest an official link with the Drupal project, and if you adhere to the Rules of Use, there shouldn't be a problem. In fact, the trademark policy helps protect your investment in Drupal because it avoids that others can use the name in ways that are unfair to you or your Drupal business.

The lack of a Drupal trademark policy doesn't mean the trademark was unprotected -- it was protected by trademark law. By creating a trademark policy and a licensing procedure, we've provided us options we did not have before. Things have become more permissive.
Yeah, did you see what they did to the Turing Test? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize

Chris McKinstry (the guy behind the MindPixel project) got fed up with them and made the Minimum Intelligent Signal Test (MIST), which is more objective than the original Turing test and may be the simplest way to test for general, common-sense intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_Intelligent_Signal_Test

Edit: forgot link. d'oh.
The copywriting is a little over the top, but my suggestion is for the book itself.

I'd like to see more details. Your sample chapter on Lexers, for example, would be much stronger if you went into more details (maybe 3-4 pages) on how a scanner identifies a token, how it knows when it has reached the end of a word, how it recognizes and handles whitespace, why it's important to keep track of indentation and newlines, what is the difference between keywords and other identifiers, etc. Maybe also give a written explanation describing what each section of your lexer for Awesome is doing.

Please consider this as constructive criticism: I think the book is a good idea, but I also think it needs more meat. I don't know how easy it is to revise it at this time, but I think you'd have better luck if you added more details.
Oh, wow, I linked that list without reading the latest version. That's really cool. Seems like a great time to start an education startup.
I think it must be a hoax.
Complex indeed: http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_on_archeology_anima...

"Nathan Myhrvold talks about a few of his latest fascinations -- animal photography, archeology, BBQ and generally being an eccentric genius multimillionaire."
Push yourself to learn
Great shopping experience is not having an awesome interface so that I can browse all day long.

Ultimately, customer satisfaction comes from getting the greatest value/deal in the least amount of time. No body actually enjoys the act of shopping. Just ask your mom or girlfriend how they feel when they spend hours shopping and come back empty handed.

Perhaps the author redesign could enable faster transaction. It doesn't sound like he's going for that direction though.
The Ultimate State Selector
You'd have to define exactly what you mean by "completely secure". It's secure now - as in: it will not pickle any user input in a way that it will be executed during unpickling. It's also insecure now in a way that's been described.
Just to be clear, this is their 2nd subscriber program. The first Ars Premier program launched eight years ago: http://arstechnica.com/staff/palatine/2009/09/introducing-ar...
Newspapers are going the way of the typewriter my friend, the writing is on your screen.
Microsoft Doloto tool makes AJAX webpages more responsive
Atwood's blog isn't peer-reviewed and he's been slammed (rightly) many times on HN. Jeff seems like a nice guy, and some of what he says is useful. But please stop citing him so much in your posts. It's a credibility sink.
The simple answer is that Sun panicked when Java failed to gain any traction for applets vs Flash and JDBC was rushed out of the door as they flailed about trying to rebrand it as "Enterprise" by people who had very little experience of writing database apps.