skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not Another Twitter Conference Mini-Doc
I think a sufficiently long knock (just like a sufficiently long password) would still be almost impossible to crack. If you go on for 15 seconds, who's going to be able to get it right? Not that this makes it practical. I'm just saying. It's only if the knock is really short that this is a problem. If you knock out 30 seconds of a song (assuming it's obscure enough that no one will be able to determine the song), there's no way anyone who doesn't know what song it is will be able to reproduce the knocks.
Safari: NYT
Firefox: Techmeme
The iPod was the big driver, but it was the software/hardware ecosystem, the content, the ads, as well as the design that made it a success. There were full/touchscreen phones before the iPhone. I don't think it was the clunky ID that kept them from being successful. It was poor feature design, implementation, and crappy software.

That said Ive is awesome, the products are lustworthy, but too much credit for the "design" is given to the ID team.
Cocoa for scientists
I have to say that London was the most violent place I've ever been.

As a point of comparison, have you ever been anywhere in China? That's where I have seen the most open public violence, much more so than in any part of the United States (I have been to all fifty states, including some very tough parts of inner cities.)
I liked his suggested solution:

PS: Here's a zero-technology solution to the "Yeah, but they'll overhear your secret knocks" problem: Scream while knocking
The House Passed the Health Bill
Bugs like? I'll be very interested to learn as I was considering rolling out something of this sort.
Thanks for posting this, very interesting.

More stuff like this on HN please.
Now if we can only reform medical insurance...
A personalized Google home page on my main browser.

On other browsers I use, it is some page I frequently visit in that browser (often because of website-browser compatibility issues, or to experiment with the look of certain pages in different browsers).
You might think it's funny, but a lot of the advice that people are giving to Apple right now will look like this in 10 years.
The most recent page(s) that I visited. I almost never shut down the browser, so it usually has a half dozen tabs with my commonly-visited sites already up.
blank - clean screen, clean mind :-)
Many-worlds isn't really a silly concept. It's one of several interpretations that are equally consistent with current experimental results, and it does have nice properties such as avoiding nondeterminism and nonlocality. It's also (in a way) a conceptually simpler theory, in that many-worlds is roughly what you'd have if you got rid of wave function collapse and naively applied the rest of quantum mechanics. If memory serves me, a substantial percentage of physicists consider many-worlds to be plausible, or even likely.

Also, be careful when talking about "observation having a bearing on reality"--the quantum mechanical sense of "observing" state has little to do with the conventional meaning of the word, and absolutely nothing to do with the presence of a conscious observer. On the other hand, an "observer" in the anthropic sense, in the quantum suicide experiment, is generally assumed to be a conscious being (though this isn't strictly required).
A bookmarks page I made at http://toxicpixel.org/pod/jma ... years ago was just a flat html file, now is a rails project I infrequently attempt to update in various ways.
http://icewm.sourcearchive.com/documentation/1.2.30/bindkey_...

It's the only accurate documentation I could find of the hotkeys for the ice window manager. I was studying it for a while, getting cool at magically rearranging windows at my whim.
Seems like the right decision under these circumstances:

> Mr. Sullivan, 34, had committed a string of crimes by the time he was charged with raping a 72-year-old woman after a burglary in 1989 in Pensacola.

String of crimes including raping an elderly woman? Probably just better off locking up people like that forever. Heck, if even 1 out of 10 of them repeated if let out at age 40, what a horrible mess for no good cause. String of crimes including violently abusing an elderly woman? Yeah, that pretty much forfeits all claims on your sovereignty and freedom.

> Mr. Graham, 22, was sentenced to a year in jail and three years’ probation for a 2003 robbery of a Jacksonville restaurant, during which an accomplice beat the manager with a steel bar. Mr. Graham was sentenced to life in 2005 for violating probation by committing a home invasion robbery when he was 17.

Repeated violent crime, followed by more crime on probation? Again, what's the downside of locking him up forever? That it might be nicer or more proper to let him go after a long time, let him back into society with no skills or acclimation to the outside world? In days before society had resources to imprison people, both of those violent criminals almost certainly would've been executed and society would've moved on.

Now, I'm against the death penalty typically outside of states of emergency, because executing even one innocent man is a terrible thing. But if someone's repeatedly hurting people from a very young age, it doesn't seem like there's any gain to letting them loose after 20 years, and potentially a heck of a lot of bad that could happen.
U.S. House passes health care plan
I'm sure glad this one got filed before the door closed on protected innovation forever: http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=T2QKAAAAEBAJ&dq=P...
Why Many Companies Just Don't Get the Web
No one has proved that technology won't one day make everyone grow to 6 feet and live 200 years. In fact that could quite plausibly happen. But you'd still be a fool to count on it.
How to Talk Like an Intellectual
Free Sheet Music | Learn Playing Modern Pieces
I would really like to see a competition where teams write opposing AIs for UAVs and the UAVs duke it out.
For those in the aerospace industry, are we seeing any movement towards unmanned commercial airplanes? Are the impediments mostly technical or social? Any rough timelines?
I am surprised it is missing a horizontal scroll wheel- although it could be programmed to use the vertical wheel in combination with another button. Does Apple have some kind of patent coverage on the little trackball scroller? I use that for horizontal scrolling in spreadsheets quite frequently.

I generally find buttons and other physical controls much more usable than touch style interfaces and would be willing to give this device a try to see how it compares with the Space Pilot. http://www.3dconnexion.com/spp/index.php
Does Technology Reduce Social Isolation?
("the last.fm case" probably refers to http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/technology/2009/may/Tech..., for any who were as confused as I was.)
In fact, it was only one bug (checked on the email I send them): it didn't track clicks on images. So any sort of "Sign Up" button weren't tracked, manking the service worthless to me.
How The Scroll Wheel Should Work in Windows
This is more of a problem with bad professors than with PowerPoint. I have had professors who were absolutely horrible teachers and used only the board, and excellent profs who used PowerPoint (well, come to think of it, AppleWorks and LaTeX, so maybe there is a problem with PowerPoint after all :).
This is Bilski http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Bilski

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2009/06/bilski.html
Lots of people charge 10 cents per KB.
Just to be clear, Mr. Sullivan was 13 years old. In most of the world (apparently not Florida) that's an age where there's at least some questions about you being responsible for your own actions.
The Firefox "Speed Dial" add-on.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4810
http://www.quakelive.com
http://start.io

Totally customisable, good-looking start pages based on a really well-designed CMS. You can make some of your links private and some public.

I didn't make it, I just really like it. One of the guys that did make it works at Tumblr.
Why Dilbert Is Doomed
I see complaints about security here, but you are missing the point, which is a secret passageway.

As we usually see in movies secret passages often have very unsecured ways of entrance (turning a wine bottle in Young Frankenstein). However using a knock for a secret passage would much less easy to stumble upon.

If you haven't noticed I've been thinking a lot about secret passages recently.
C130 Keypad Ways Problem
I think it was Eliezer Yudkowsky who commented that if it only took two days to start the LHC spinning it would have blown up by now.

Also, I'd be surprised if our overlords are actively observing us, I would think that "the Higgs Boson is undiscoverable" is just a condition of the universe and the universe itself just adapts to prevent it from being observed, rather than some guy floating on a cloud saying "ok, this time we are going to have a bird drop a baguette."
I wonder how would you repell a state with sophisticated robot terminators war machines.

Lawn-motor robots? Perhaps arduino-controlled pistol gun with belt feed bullets?

I am worried about the future ability of a population's to resist a technological tyranny.
In olden times they would hang or severely flog such people. I have no idea what is best, but in some instances you are essentially dealing with broken specimens of humanity. Maybe a good lobotomy would be best. They could ask me whether I prefer plastic or paper.

I prefer plastic.
Similar to the javadoc tool, which has some native support.
Famous and Significant Bridges Of Pakistan
About half a dozen tabs. Google Reader, google.com and a few community sites I frequent.
A webpage that tells me the ip address of my router at home. Useful for when I'm out of the country.
I'm pretty sure that commercial aircraft are about 99 percent unmanned at present.
Especially when they don't have any market pressure to move.
I think it was more along the lines of "contempt for anyone who, when asked to write code to do something difficult that they're unfamiliar with, chooses to write very, very bad code instead of learning the bare minimum needed to do a passable if amateurish job". For what it's worth, a day or two reading a decent textbook would provide sufficient "extensive experience with parsers" to avoid most of the horrible mistakes described.

Intolerance for egregious unprofessionalism and incompetence is not exactly something our field suffers due to an excess of.
There's probably too little freight to justify development of an unmanned commercial plane. I think the trivial advantages for passenger planes would be outweighed by the misdirected incentives. :)
Yes, yes, a million times yes. I'm an avowed chalkboard lecturer, for all the reasons the poster mentions in her essay, and also because it lets me engage the students to a much greater degree. I can elicit responses or even whole examples from the class and then run with them. I'm not constrained to a linear progression of events (as with a slide-based lecture) and can digress as appropriate. I have on occasion presented topics a full week or two early just because a student asked a reasonable question that motivated the topic---and because I was working with a chalkboard, I just ran with it and shuffled everything else around to compensate. Plus, it frees up the projector for other things, like the Java API reference or an open IDE to test something out.
get the speedial plugin for firefox. Without hyperbole it will change your life.
My experience with Photoshop leads me to believe that either its internals are a mess or they don't have a UI team at all or that that they're morbidly afraid of changing anything. Or all of those things.

Several different styles of sliders are the least of Photoshop's UI's problems. It still doesn't have some features we've been taking for granted even back in the 90s. I hope customizable toolbars and palettes finally made it into CS4 because in CS3 my screen is full of buttons that serve as nothing but a visual distraction. Also, looking my current PS layout, I can count FIVE different places where I can change the selected color and not all of them behave the same.

It looked like things were getting better when they finally implemented Corel-style context sensitive toolbars a while back, but of course they got it wrong by hardcoding them and only including certain commands based on who knows what criteria. But my (least) favorite f*ckup was when they introduced customizable shortcuts but couldn't be bothered to remove all the hardcoded ones first. This meant that some of your custom shortcuts would do something completely unexpected, like launch the scripting window.

I really don't understand people who go on and on about how amazing Phostoshop's UI is. For me, using PS has always been a highly frustrating experience.
There are several problems for an unmanned commercial airplane. None of them are insurmountable, but they add up to making it easy to see how this will probably be the last sector that gets automated.

In a combat aircraft the advantages for getting rid of the pilot are numerous: less weight & volume for the pilot and their associated support kit, eliminating the pilot allows for plane geometries that are just not possible with a human onboard, eliminating the pilot enables maneuvers that would turn a pilot to jelly, etc. The pilot is probably the most expensive component of a combat aircraft. Eliminating the pilot opens up new mission profiles (e.g. you don't have to worry too much about the aircraft getting back to base.)

For a commercial aircraft the benefits of going unmanned are not as pronounced and in some cases are non-existent. In addition to the lack of benefits, you introduce additional costs related to liability (you can always blame pilot error for a problem, but if there is no pilot then it is the airlines fault for either not maintaining the system properly or for selecting the system in the first place) and the fact that passengers are not going to trust this system anytime soon.

The impediments are almost completely social, but the benefits are so slight that it does not make much sense to bother aiming for completely unmanned. What you are going to see (and in fact what has been happening for years now) is the increasing automation of cockpit tasks. There will always be a human being "at the controls" for the forseeable future, but what that actually means and how much active control they are exercising is going to be slowly changing.
I think you're confusing the circumstances of the introduction of the iPod and the iPhone. I certainly agree with you that the iPhone's success is only minimally related to industrial design, and mostly due to a well-designed operating system and ecosystem.

The iPod, on the other hand, was on the market for a year and a half before the iTunes store opened. Its competitors were the likes of the Creative NOMAD players, which were very much clunky, some even in comparison to portable CD players. The iPod software certainly wasn't revolutionary. It was the physical interface, centered around the clickwheel and far simpler than the competition that was so groundbreaking. As slashdot so famously and bluntly put it, the iPod was downright lame in most other respects.
Exactly. Experience has shown it's unwise to budget less than a full day for an OS upgrade. Multiply > $100/hr. times ~7-8 hours and you start to understand why I haven't yet upgraded. I'd appreciate if these Gity guys would explain why 10.5 wasn't good enough for them.
He's defending PSD by saying "It works great the way it is. And people shouldn't be wanting interoperability with Photoshop.

A key phrase is "And it's not at all clear that the benefits here would outweigh the costs.". Whose costs, and whose benefits? Obviously it wouldn't be great for Adobe to have to re-write their file format, and they wouldn't get that many happy customers initially.
I feel like my eventual children, or maybe my children's children, will see a world where Americans don't go to was physically (or at least in large numbers). This whole war thing is going to be really weighted against the poorer countries who have to leave real people to die.

I see terrorist tactics (blowing up buildings, schools, etc.) as dominating their efforts.

That said, I think that if I were to do a defense startup now, it'd be towards detecting explosives, guns, etc. in large groups of people. If that technology falls behind, war's about to get a whole lot uglier.
In the USA at least, the population has been completely unable to resist the state since the Civil War.
I see my children's children living in a world without war.

Articles like this are interesting, but a little sickening in that they assume that continually increasing defense spending is actually a good idea.

I'd work for Swoopo long before I would work for a defense startup.
The unit tests are the contract. That's the point.
I use Firefox and Google Chrome, and I don't remember what the homepage is on either because they open my last open tabs.
Indeed. As shown by the recent distracted-pilots-flew-past-Minneapolis fiasco, modern planes have become so automated that one of the biggest problems for pilots is fighting boredom:

http://www.startribune.com/local/68083742.html
It's nice to see highlighted the things that Linux does well. There are still too many people who automatically write off open-source solutions, even in 2009; it's time they realized that companies don't have a monopoly on good ideas.
What about cost reduction -- less than 1 pilot per plane, there only to monitor situations that require a human?
And from reading Philip Greenspun's blog, pilot's salaries are reflecting that reality. It's heading towards a minimum wage job.
You can always blame pilot error for a problem, but if there is no pilot then it is the airlines fault for either not maintaining the system properly or for selecting the system in the first place

Great observation. The primary advantage I saw (reduced pilot errors, responsible now for ~3/4 of all aviation accidents) is a liability for the airline and the manufacturer.
By the way, for people looking for free, open source solution for clickmaps, have a look here - http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html
That's awesome.
But from the last page of the patent, it looks like it was re-examined a month and a half later and all the claims were revoked.
or Software Developers for UAVs Face An Exciting Future

It's fun to imagine that somewhere sometime a scrawny geek told a chiseled-jaw pilot "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"
Thanks. Wonder why didn't they track clicks on images, cannot imagine a plausible reason.
> Just to be clear, Mr. Sullivan was 13 years old. In most of the world (apparently not Florida) that's an age where there's at least some questions about you being responsible for your own actions.

He raped an elderly woman - regardless of any questions about whether he should be responsible for that in a philosophical sense, don't you think it'd be incredibly reckless to let him back into society?
They didn't "slap their name on it." Other people refer to it as their algorithm because they came up with it first. It's obvious to you that someone would want an algorithm for a random shuffle of a sequence. It wasn't obvious at the time.
Unlikely to be soon.

Radar guided missiles are easily defeated with modern ECM. Despite what the salesmen will tell you, in a real fight you have to get in and knife the f*&kers.

The same happens with remotely piloted vehicles. If you ever go up against even a modestly sophisticated adversary they will show phenomenal pluck and ingenuity. See serbian downing of an F-117 for an example.

Human pilots will be needed for some time to avoid having your toys fall out of the sky or stolen and used against you.
Medical insurance? What a barbaric concept.

I paid $30K in taxes last year. I don't quite understand why would I even have to think about terms like "insurance" and "money" when/if I get sick. I'm not an American, although I've been living here for 11 years, yet the thought of PAYING for medical care still feels shameful and medieval.

If there isn't enough money in the budget to pay doctors then start cutting: on "defense", on bureaucrats, I don't care. Medical care must be absolutely the highest priority federal expense: not a single government employee should be paid until the last US citizen who needs medical attention gets help.
I am sure at the end of the 19th century horse drawn carriage makers faced a dismal future as well. Some professions simply die down and become irrelevant.

Interestingly enough this already happened to the Airforce in the late 60s. Airforce was running manned spy satellite missions, but because of the cost and the danger involved, those missions were being canceled in favor of unmanned satellite missions. So this is basically a repeat for Airforce.
So the Dems gutted the bill(from single payer), just to gain a single Republican vote?
I use opera and it has a quick dial with currently 16 sites, including hacker news and several projects I'm working on and forums I'm involved in.
I agree 100%! I think the best classes that I have taken have been the ones where the professor can digress on the topics and give you a deeper understanding for the topic. I had an older OS professor who would go off on tangents about the companies and people who had an impact on the early Operating Systems, which has been one of the most intriguing classes I have taken.

I agree that professor seem scripted when they rely on powerpoint slides. Also, I have noticed that professors are relying more and more on the slides from the book, which tend just to be a bulleted version of the book.

Death by powerpoint!
I think that is up to psychiatrists decide, judges don't have the proper education to determine whether or not Mr. Sullivan is dangerous.
> eliminating the pilot enables maneuvers that would turn a pilot to jelly

I think this is a common misperception. I believe the operational risk is that manuevers above 6g (varying on pilot and G-suit) reduces blood flow to the brain (by forcing it into the legs) and cause a blackout. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-LOC Blackouts, even for a few seconds, can be devastating in the middle of a dogfight. I believe there is software in modern fighter jets for just when pilots blackout but I can't find it on google right now.
As much as I agree that such people are "inhuman", and my first instinct (like many, if not most, other people, I'd imagine) is that these people don't deserve to be treated like 'normal' people... they do deserve it. If you act in a violent way against someone who is not actively dangerous (e.g. waving a weapon around), you're not better than they are. We have laws for a reason, and this guy probably should spend the rest of his life in jail, but doing physical harm to him just brings you down to his level. When it's done by our government (e.g. capital punishment), it's just making us all responsible.
Resources for creating iPhone apps
Not very practical.
If we want to avoid carrying key with us, then fingerprint lock would be more convenient and secure.
Out of curiosity, what constitutes the fifth (I refuse to use an even more obscure -ary word) sector?
Why should medical care be a higher priority than food?
Sliders? There are features in Photoshop that only make sense if you have done darkroom development. They are already so heavily invested into being complex and it has been OK so far. For more reasonable UI, you can use Adobe Lightroom.
How about for cargo planes?
I think it's incredibly reckless to write him off at 13 years old. There's plenty of examples out there of people who committed horrendous crimes as teenagers, paid appropriately for their mistakes, and went on to productive lives.
I agree, the article talks about the competition investing in UAV's but it fails to mention the average modern military's ability to defend themselves against UAV's.