skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://foundercollective.com/people/Bill-Trenchard <- wonder if they could have found a bigger picture?
please disregard. my question was addressed in a previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197455
won't this also draw concern from regulators?
Oral argument was held today - tough day for the patent applicant, with much skepticism expressed by the justices toward the idea that business methods (and, of course, any software that might implement them) should be loosely patentable: Justice Stevens: "None of our cases has ever approved a rule such as you advocate"; Justice Breyer: applicant is arguing "anything that helps any businessman succeed is patentable"; Justice Scalia: patents are given to inventions that are manufactured or produced by workmen, "not someone who writes a book about how to win friends and influence people."

Not good portends for a favorable decision for the applicant.

On the other hand, several justices overtly questioned the highly restrictive test adopted by the lower court that would essentially gut many business method patents.

Looks like this could go all sorts of directions but not likely to any extreme.
Judging by your response, maybe they shouldn't name it Cuilbot.

I wonder if their overzealous bots and subsequent blocking are reasons why they launched with such terrible results. I heard several reasons for that catastrophic failure:

* Overstressed subject-specific servers failed, leading to
porn on hamburger searches and that kind of thing

* Crashing, random result variations due to overload

* Excessive media hype exacerbated the load issues

Another one to add to the list?
The idea behind patents was to encourage innovation by guaranteeing certain rights to the patent holder; unfortunately, software patents have probably hurt innovation more than it has helped out.
Twitter To Rollout A New API For Location-Based Trends
I noticed an interesting phenomenon on Ebay. Looking up Krugerrands (after reference to them in a song), I found out about gold coins. Whatever country issues them, they all go for their weight in gold - even by auction. Perhaps Ebay is a great place to buy and sell gold (but maybe you could get discounts in bulk from a dealer). [I'm not advocating buying gold off Ebay, I was just interested].
They're mature, but they are also not very good. I still spend ages digging around trying to figure out what should be relatively simple stuff. The documentation around ns in particular is difficult to navigate.
Yes. And if you are interested in Graphic Design check this longer list of hall of famers:

http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/medalists
their search quality id even not matching duckduckgo, not mentioning google and bing
And, they can very easily show it to there friends, if it is in javascript. My niece loves designing webpages that she shares with her mates. Of course, getting her to program rather than put up pictures of twilight is another issue.
No Susan Kare (http://www.kare.com/)? She's iconic (!!) in the history of user interfaces.
There's a limit to how much I want to try to read up behind a tutorial when I'm just trying a new framework out. If my natural desire to understand what magic lines of code does causes me to break focus, tab out, google a bit, find some explanation that may or may not even be correct... yeah, I get put off a little.
Nobody brother to read Against Intellectual Monopoly then.

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

People should really seriously consider if a whole system is entirely flawed sometime or it may never do anything for innovation anyway.

As for me, the question is already decided. As an anarchist, I opposed patents on the ground that it is a property right violation. The innovation questions doesn't matter to me.
The problem with mathematics is that it's very hard, it's not for everyone, the common folk cannot understand it, and 99% of those who can will not be on the level of a Felix Klein or Henri Poincaré. This is well exemplified in the book "Indra's Pearls: The Vision of Felix Klein", even today it's hard to trained mathematicians to visualize what Klein described. How many mathematicians does the author of the post supposed there was at Göttingen for just one Klein to come out of blue? To be answered just read the paper "Klein, Hilbert, and the Gottingen Mathematical Tradition". I study applied math and computational science at university, still an undergraduate, because I have fun studying it, not to be a professional mathematician, I'm not smart enough to be good in the area in which I study (Numerical Analysis and Applications, Inverse Problems, Stochastic Processes and Scientific Computing), I'll probably try be a experimental physicist if I chose to remain in academia or will try to be a sysadmin (I already work as one in a part-time job).
This, and "The Machine Stops" by E M Forster (http://www.plexus.org/forster/index.html) are my two favorite science fiction shorts.

Both very relevant, and slightly humorous where we surpassed the technology in the stories. A computer weighs more than two humans! And still has crippled computing power. Makes me smile every time.

*Edit: Asimov probably imagined our missiles looking like this: http://www.yellow-llama.com/wp-content/uploads/harddrive.jpg . That dish washer being the hard drive (is actually a hard drive). And minus the humans inside.
just fire up gmail :-)

I think sexy was a bit of sarcasm.
Why An Exclusive Wall Street Journal Deal Wouldn’t Help Bing
From the api docs there is a 'demo' link on some pages. It looks like not all of the widgets have demo pages. I wish more api docs did this.
One upside in that scenario might be making it more likely that Google would face antitrust proceedings :)
This test is really bad. 3 iterations? 20 iterations? Common sense says that the performance difference in these cases will be immaterial anyway barring some bizarre scenario, so you should write whatever is clearer.

If you try 1000 iterations, StringBuilder will be clearly on top, and if you try 100,000 iterations, there will be no contest.

Also, the methodology in this test is completely broken. I wouldn't be surprised if the compiler partially or completely optimizes out the loops using immutable strings, since you don't use the result anywhere. To design a correct test for a micro-optimization like this you need to check the generated code in each instance (at a minimum.)

EDIT: I just noticed the strbldr.ToString() as well, which completely defeats the purpose even further. Please do more work before jumping to conclusions and publishing them to an audience. How did this make it to the front page?
Vernor Vinge's stories have addressed a very similar idea. "A Deepness in the Sky" has significant interludes on this topic, though it's not the main focus of the work.
What does this have to do with the topic here? Maybe you post in the wrong story.
10 Fresh & Original Gifts for Designers
What Dieters And Drug Addicts Have In Common
To me, this difference is encoded in the development philosophy of Python vs. Ruby.

If you like the meta-magic of Ruby, you'll probably like Rails. If you like the straightforward nature of Python, you'll probably like Django more.
The transcript is available from http://www.supremecourtus.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transc... for those who are interested in more.
I actually code and learn faster now than most people do in the 20s.
It's an intriguing question, encompassing complex issues around the linearity of application development, the constraints of path dependency, and so on. Frankly I don't know enough about the internal workings of WalMart's operations to answer helpfully.

The question is: would they really start from scratch or would they try to shoehorn their processes into some existing application that kinda, sorta does what they need and then hack-and-patch the rest of the way?
The Math Lifesaver: http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/

For when you don't like your book, teacher, or need outside resources (I only used it for diff eq and linear algebra) but each is very well written and get right to the point
Silly. Gold is amazing stuff. It doesn't decay nor oxidize (under most conditions on earth). From Wikipedia: "Gold is the most malleable and ductile of all metals; a single gram can be beaten into a sheet of 1 square meter, or an ounce into 300 square feet. Gold leaf can be beaten thin enough to become translucent."

So I didn't bother past the first paragraph. Did I miss anything?
Panera Bread Blocks bit.ly links
having run into several vague errors from CPAN I agree
other than that, this is an excellent, well thought-out study. ;)
I'm put in mind of when I worked at a bank, hearing stories of people who's job was to plug numbers into a spreadsheet or program, and copy the result to some other place, etc. If the result was orders of magnitude off, they wouldn't catch the error and wonder what was wrong, but just continue on to the next step, oblivious.

So the situation described in the story is already here, in some respects.
can we kill this thread before it devolves?
Why Your Press Release Sucks
Is there an rss feed available for PEPs?
Mendapatkan Penghasilan Lewat Aplikasi Facebook - Bagi-bagi on Facebook
Would be interesting to hear what the trendsmap.com folks think of this development.

Ah, the risks of developing on top of Twitter.
Buy Any Company In Under 5 Seconds, Courtesy Of LinkedIn
It looks neat, web-syncing would be critical for me though.

On a broader note, I think you're targeting the wrong market. You're pitching it at the GTD market, people who understand phrases like "Open loops", but most lifehackers already have a a favourite GTD tool.

I think you'd be much better off trying to target your app at the mainstream, doing so would give you a huge upside potential which you would never see in the GTD market.
I asked him the HN comment thread. He hasn't replied so far.
I hope that Google's takeover will improve the quality of Gizmo5 and bring in a strong competitor to Skype.

I tried to replace Skype with Gizmo5, but two major problems made me go back to Skype:

1) Voice quality on the receiver's side is awful, and the caller's side is too quiet.

This may be partly due to my connection– I was using wifi– but Skype worked without issues. I'm not sure whether this is because of the underlying technology, or because of the PSTN link quality.

2) Payments take a couple days to process, whereas Skype payments process in seconds.

That being said, Gizmo5's pricing is markedly better, which is what prompted me to try it out in the first place.

I think Google is definitely capable of fixing the second problem quickly and effectively. And Google's reputation for excellence gives me hope that the overall quality of Gizmo5 will also improve accordingly.
The releases will go on (probably faster), it's just the syntax that's frozen. This helps Python implementations like IronPython or jPython catch up, but it certainly won't help hosts.
And even further, in this piece itself:

It’s worth noting that lots of companies give us free services all the time, and we often thank them with a link in the right sidebar.
Make Posting Your Twitter Tweets Easier By Using A Desktop Twitter App
Once you are on Twitter, there are a number of different ways of posting available. Users can use a maximum of 140 characters per post or tweet as they are called. You can tweet as little or as often as you want, as long as each individual tweet does not exceed 140 characters.
Hey, I just thought of this story a few weeks ago! Great read. http://scifiwarp.com/questions/21/searching-for-title-of-sho...
Gold's relatively low practical demand makes the price stable, and that's the point. The alternatives you mention have volatile demand and are impacted by technological change. The prices aren't stable.
Their network, their rules. This rule: not so great --- not because private network operators shouldn't be able to filter their links, but because it shows a lack of understanding of how HTTP works.

A smart salesguy at Bluecoat is going to see this story and make a mint.
There's no such thing as bad press right? Maybe someone was counting on MA to respond with that type of blog post!
Which would be really bad for business, because there's a surprising amount of stuff hosted in the EU.

Broadly speaking, if your primary markets are not America or Asia and you are the type of company that buys racks of space in datacenters without blinking, western EU is where you'll probably be.

The main factors are servicing, bandwidth and reliability.

For example, many trans-national African projects are hosted in the EU because it's simply cheaper to set up infrastructure there, because you're piggybacking on the infrastructure that's already there (long-term shared costs). Once in place, it's easier to service because you outsource service contracts on things like hardware to the vendor, who can give you a decent quote because ... they have a servicing system in place.

Power comes from the power grids that are in place, and that's very reliable. Bandwidth comes from the bandwidth structure that's .. you got it .. already in place and being upgraded all the time.

Now try and set up a load of servicable hardware in a reliable datacenter (bandwidth and power-wise) in Africa. Or Eastern Europe. Or the Middle-East. It's doable, but the price tag goes up, up, up. To service your account your vendor will have to invest in local infrastructure, hire competent servicing personnel near site, find a way to deliver hardware components in a timely manner without access to a general depot, etc. And because you're the only one requesting this you'll have to pay for it all.

You could try and move into the Russian Federation, but the operational costs there are, ah, unpredictable. Also, the Russian networks do not extend well beyond the metropolitan areas (trans-national traffic is also a work in progress).

I could go on, but my point is that the western EU hosts and accounts for a lot of traffic.

I sincerely doubt this Directive will have much impact. There are just too many interests involved.
True. I guess these are the same two reasons anything needs to be web-based: (1)Easy to get started. No hurdles. (2) Sharing
The CPAN software infrastructure only works for things that it was intended to do, it is very hard to make it do arbitrary things. If you want to find out what file to download from the BackPAN to get Foo::Bar 0.2, that's too bad, you have to download the BackPAN and index it yourself. Of course, there is no way to index things without evalling code regexed out of every file. (And there is no way to predict if "make install" will actually install Foo::Bar.)

Something CPAN couldn't easily do a few years ago was install to arbitrary directories. If you set the right environment variables, EUMM would sort of do the right thing. If you set different environment variables, sometimes MB would do the right thing. Eventually EUMM and MB were patched so that it almost always worked, and then local::lib was written to paper over the differences.

And of course, nothing requires the use of EUMM or MB, so if a package doesn't use it, you can't install it to your home directory.

Anyway, the EUMM is what you get when you write code to fix problems that people complain about. MB is what you get when you write specs to "fix" problems people complain about. Maybe someday we will have a build system that has a sane design and actually works.
CPAN.pm has some great errors. If it thinks your clock is set wrong (!), it will print a warning message.
I'm still awaiting the day Cuil does phrase queries. I know, most casual search users don't do quoted-phrase queries -- but Google and Bing do, and I occasionally use them, and Cuil has no chance of being my default search engine if it doesn't take the trouble to support them, too.
I find package systems fantastic for things I don't want to care about it, but get frustrated when it handles the things I do care about.

Or maybe that's just my own experience using Common Lisp on Ubuntu.
Maybe python, but rubygems kicks ass.
The Internet is killing storytelling
Sites can use cookies to remember if someone left a menu open or closed, and keep the menu that way on new pages.

You can use cookies to act as a "bread crumbs" trail, so people can see what other pages/products they have looked at.

If you make a multi-lingual site, you can use a cookie to remember what was the last language the user chose, and show all future pages in that language, without them having to change it on every page.
Interestingly here in .au MS degrees are generally quite "soft" - seemingly anyone can get it part time. The bachelor ones require a lot more work. It used to be that a masters was a step towards a doctorate, but now its more of a business qualification thing (think MBA) for those who didn't do the right undergraduate degree the first time and don't have 3 or 4 years to spare.
CoTweet Goes Enterprise and Starts Charging $1500 Per Month
Just wanted to post this to show everyone that you don't have to live in SF to make a "web" product that can do well. PA is going to blow up soon.
You should check out Chipmunk BASIC [1]. Nice simple BASIC interpreter that runs natively in Mac OS X and includes basic graphical functions.

[1]http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/peps.rss

OT: Does Chromium (Dev channel, Ubuntu 9.10) not have feed autodetection? I had to look at the page source to find this.
The 2009 Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report
Just for fun I removed the extra concat on the stringbuilder and upped the cycles to 20 and 20,000.

Running it several times showed that the 20 cycle loop was fairly close, where the 20,000 loop was not even near close.

0.0000089 vs. 0.0000092

and

0.9846729 vs. 0.0006852

Edit: I also changed them both to add a fixed string, since I don't have enough memory for a 4 * 2^20,000 length string.
Ask HN: MBA or Masters in Computer Science?
I am on the verge of graduating with a B.S. in Computer Science. I'm still considering on what to do afterwards.

I'm currently working at a great company in California, I really love what I do there. My family has been encouraging me to continue on with my education. At this point I am contemplating the idea. However, I still can't decide which would be my better option, to get a Masters in Computer Science or an MBA. I really love both subjects. I need some points that would make my decision a bit easier.

Were you ever in my position? If so, what did you end up doing, what was the outcome? Even if you weren't in my position, what would you recommend? Thank you in advance!
The law appears to ban only long term cookies, so you are still ok if you use session cookies (such as those used for logins) which expire when the browser is closed.

Now comes the hacks: serve javascript with a unique id in it. Set the cache policy to never re-download, or recheck the file. Use you lawful (semi) permanent cookie.

The user obviously asked for the data to be stored, since it's part of caching.

Or am I going to have to ask the user before being allowed to cache anything locally?
Agreed. You'd think someone smart enough to set up the filtering would realize that it doesn't make any sense.
And every time I go to play a flash game it will have to ask me if it's allowed to remember where I'm up to in the game.
mod_security makes easy work of these sorts of rules
Google is the de-facto rubygem search engine. If you don't know the real name of the gem, you Google for functionality or common name ([ruby prawn gem]), find a blog post, copy/paste the line that starts with "gem install" (gem install prawn), and then go back to whatever you were doing.
The trolling in Perl discussions seems almost organized. Then we find snide remarks about operator count voted to 14, here. (Edit: 15, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=931618)

Maybe we should add a link to this discussion, to let Perl people know how to handle language war trolls pro and contra?
Creative people have only one thing in common: They create to their own standards. The result is that the best creatives look uniquely themselves.

But there's more than one creative stereotype. What about the hippies artiste? Or the goofy generation throwback? The dissheveled coffee addict? It's all part of the wide collections of stereotypes, which tend to reflect all the people in the field.

More elaboration on stereotypes for your enjoyment: Graphic designers are stereotypically much nerdier than other creatives. Not as artistic as fine artists, too nerdy and unkempt as advertisers.
A whole article on graphic design without any mention of the Futurists? For shame!
Where's Donald Knuth and TeX?! ;p
No, both of you miss the point. Rupert wants an audience. That is why he bought myspace. He talks about loyalty, but no so much that people are loyal to the newspaper, but he wants someone to stay on his properties the same way that when you buy a newspaper, you'd pour through every page. By simply making content premium, cognitively the reader is going to value the content more, thus making the reader stay longer. You see this with biz opp ebooks etc. Most information is freely available elsewhere, but the ones that get read are the ones people actually paid something for.
#0 You wrote a press release

Very few people read press releases from small companies; by "small", we typically mean "companies for whom press releases won't affect stock prices".

You probably misunderstood the point of a release. That's OK: most marketing professionals don't get it either. The point of a press release is to have your story mentioned in the mainstream media. But for the most part, the trade journalists in your field don't spend their days glued to BusinessWire. To the extent they do, it's to see if Google is doing something interesting.

If you want to get written up in the mainstream press, make a list of journalists who write stories about technology like yours. You should have at least 4-5 of them. Now, pitch them a story in a (very) brief direct email message.

Conclude that email with, "Thank you for your time. ps: I do a lot of work in this technology space, and have a very broad network. Please let me know if I can help you get in touch with anyone in my field for any of your future stories, or answer any questions."

#8 Your press release contained no customer quotes

To the extent that a small company press release is going to be picked up in the mainstream press, it's going to be on the strength of the customer statements in the release. Not what they say, so much as who they are. Although you're unlikely to get picked up regardless, you are far more likely to get picked up if your press release asserts a business relationship with Google or Bank of America.
> Does it provide any support for avoiding/detecting
> Javascript "memory leaks" which are easy to create with
> closures and anonymous functions?

I don't understand this. Do closures leak because of buggy javascript implementations or is there something about them that fundamentally prevents the interpreter from being able to tell when to garbage collect them?
Thank you psranga for being the only one in here to make a technical comment.

Leak profiling in JS is a pain. I wasn't really expecting Google to provide an answer here because all their apps contribute to wasted heap space too.

Google's answer (as far as I can tell) is just to push it back to the browser. In their case, use Chrome, which uses a separate process for each page.

Chasing JS leaks has to be one of the most frustrating exercises ever. I ended up using a windows tool for analyzing jscript.dll and cross-referencing this with a custom spidermonkey build (with lots of print statements in the source).

Anything less than insight to this problem I'm going to take with a grain of salt.