skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't doubt a WiMax-capable iPhone might happen, as a secondary data capability ala the existing WiFi support.

I just don't think it would be sold as a WiMax iPhone as opposed to GSM/CDMA/LTE.
:(

still no canvas or svg... jerks.
This has been tried elsewhere. The costs with hydroponics greenhouses are so high that it doesn't make economics sense to grow food, only much higher value crops like flowers.

Yet every few years someone comes along only to prove the economics don't work. Last I read someone was trying to get funding for a skyscraper hydroponic greenhouse in NYC which would be clear folly.
ITunes website open to HTML injection...again (lgt example). [WARNING: autoplay]
In the typical IT budget, only 13% of spending supports business innovation
Nina Muschallik HotShot Photos on Facebook
Maybe I'm missing something here: but what's the point of closures without functions as first class variables?
The Google Phone May Be Data Only, VoIP Driven Device
Credit to SSChicken who pointed this out in a reddit comment thread.

Permalink to their commment:

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/a5osy/oh_apple_w...
To be more specific, compression schemes decode predictably, but any given portion of the compression stream need not be independently predictable. Gzip (and DEFLATE in general) use adaptive compression approaches - the data determines the encoding. If you know your content of interest is in the beginning of the stream, pre-computing different compressions should work out. Otherwise...
Python lambdas do not work well, in fact they can only be one line long. For some cases this may be ok, especially if python was were the programmer learned about lambdas, but from those who come from with languages with real lambdas it is quite limiting.
Fair enough, but I think that this particular group of 10-year-olds would (small g) get enough for it to be useful - your original post left me with the impression it would be so far over their heads as to be useless. If instead you meant that they would get (small g) the WRONG thing from it, well, it would certainly be ironic if they believed Dawkins just because their hearing it made them infer that they should believe it because someone said they should, when what Dawkins was telling them specifically NOT to believe things supported only by the voice of authority.
Not really. For one thing, you can't modify the closed over values unless you manually box them in a list, due to scope ambiguity. (This may be fixed in 3.0.) It's a little thing, but it makes code that depends on manipulating closures pretty ugly, discouraging their use.

Scheme avoids the issue by having a non-ambiguous syntax (a big advantage of those parens), and Lua avoids it by defaulting to global scope* unless you declare them with "local", which also anchors their scope unambiguously.

* Which is actually not a big deal - the global table is just another table, so you can hook its set method to catch unexpected globals (see strict.lua). It's far less trouble than Python's solution.
last.fm uses a plugin for your music player to record to which songs you listen, and for how long. You can then elect to expose this to your friends on last.fm or use this with last.fm's collaborative filtering to suggest new songs.

The idea of doing this for research papers isn't bad, but I wonder how many people will pick it up. Depending on the subfield, I already see people act secretively about the current direction on which they are working, even with close colleagues. Sometimes it's about fear of being scooped, other times it's about trying a different direction. That would work against doing a stream of papers read, even if you could elect to share it only with some people.

Maybe more of an issue is the network effect. To really show value, I think they will need to capture enough people in specific sub sub areas that new ideas result, leading to publishable papers. Getting those people on to the service is a chicken and egg problem.
Never seen that before - thanks! I am enthralled by Shackleton's story, though.
5 Tips for Deploying Windows in the Cloud
Andy Grove's Prescription for Health Care
At least it's almost as fast as the slowest competitor...
Sounds like a good thing. Strange this was never done before
Three easy ways to fix the App Store. And one really, really hard way.
I wonder when or even if the attitude seen in the comments will spread out to the rest of the computer community. (IE is the devil)
Microsoft Outlook To Become More LinkedIn
Sure, you can buy shares in various worthy clean coal stations, which, of course, are carrying the fight against global warming on a daily basis.
Modern Moral Values-Black, White, or Gray?
I wish they had rewritten netscape, maybe firefox wouldn't be total garbage now. This advice, while great for some things, needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes, a full rewrite is the only option.
VC firm Maveron opens SFO office, likes online education and consumer services
Yeah, I love how they say IE is no longer an "outlier."

They need to use trickery in the graph so that it's hard to tell that it's still 3x slower than Chrome or Safari.
Matz was talking about concept, not implementation; MRI is not literally a Lisp interpreter with macros removed.
Bizarre Droid auto-focus bug revealed
AskReddit:What example of management speak irritates you the most?
:-) 4th graders?
It seems like an odd test to me. Swimming in cold water would test fitness more than ability to handle stress. And since some rats did not exercise they became less fit and would not handle the cold water test as well. Am I missing something?
Sending the SMS is instant, waiting until next time isn't.
what happens if someone picks up your phone and writes
venmo $100 to 555-123-4567 for hack. 555-123-4567 being their number? how can you issue a refund or deal with issues like this?
Not true in general. PHP just did it wrong, because the designers don't really know much about programming languages.
I love that one, too, but I'm saving it for at least 5 more years.
There are no transaction fees?
If you run a site with thousands of subscribers that depends on FeedBurner for serving feeds, it's a little worrying. There are things you can do to reduce the pain but it's still a sticky point.
Maybe I'm just an optimist but I'm really glad to see that MS is even looking at the Acid3 and SunSpider tests as important metrics.
A while ago, we think it is like a telephone exchange, then we think it is like a computer, then we think it is like the cloud.

There's a big difference between a metaphor and a theory. No one actually thinks the brain works like a computer. It's just a useful metaphor for working memory and other psychological phenomena. Quite far removed from the neuroscience underlying it.

The true advances in interesting computer results comes not from modeling the brain, but more from low-grade mimicking of the evolutionary process.

What does this even mean?
Disagreement is not something to be discouraged. Echo chambers happen easily enough that they don't need encouragement.

What if I want to ask a question? Should I have to down vote someone so that I don't automatically up vote just to seek clarification of a point?
I see a (brief) mention of HTML5 compliance; I'm not sure if it's significant that Chrome beta fails many of the tests at http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/ietestcenter/html5.htm
It's a great idea, but in reality, it's going to be a very tough job to make it secure and legal. If you haven't read the PayPal chapter in "Founders at Work" yet, you should.
Think about use for Political/Charity Fundraiser events... I think the product is very beneficial.
I've read that, but I still don't grasp it. Even though he calls Ruby "MatzLisp," it feels a lot more like "MatzSmalltalk" to me. Even without macros, the homoiconicity of Lisp makes eval-ing lists a completely different beast than eval-ing strings or blocks. And everything is an object, there are no functions. And there are magic syntactic constructs like while...

But I digress. I guess he did start with Lisp and remove macros :-)
This is a great article and I agree with it. However, I think a second point can be made that odd numbers are generally better with most collaborative groups(be it one or three founders in this case).
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/textpayme anyone?
Too low, or high enough to prompt you to join the profession?
I like the effect of competition on Microsoft.
Very cool & good luck! I hope you can bring down PayPal to their knees.
As a veteran developer, I too was hit by RSI, and strongly urge you to first start using speech recognition for dictating all of your e-mail messages, code comments, documentation, etc.
No mention on if they actually, truly, really support transparent PNGs this time around, either.

(If you think they fixed that in IE7, try setting opacity on a transparent PNG....)
I am shocked you would expect an honest report from Microsoft, about a very important product during the heavy media coverage of the PDC
> "perceiving the differences may be difficult on real-world sites"

Geee, I wonder why?

Could it be because noone can use javascript properly on real world sites because IE6, IE7, IE8 have effing 1/100th the javascript performance as any other major browser????
Have you thought about giving the option to link to paypal accounts?

Early adopters will not have venmo accounts but will have paypal accounts. You may get more new users if you give the option to use funds in the paypal account. The service could at minimum send the user an e-mail with a link to the paypal destination and amount.
Cellphone Apps Challenge the Rise of E-Readers
Regarding hardware-accelerated drawing of text:

I thought that IE just like any other Windows program is using Windows core APIs like GDI+ to display text. And those APIs, in turn, are hardware-accelerated as much as possible. These days the entire desktop is essentially a "game" running on top of DirectX, no?

Even back in 1995 most of GDI 2D functions were hardware-accelerated, assuming you had a good card with good drivers.

What am I missing? (I haven't done any Windows work in 5 years).
I love how this comment has no upvotes.
Christmas Nativity Wrapping Paper
Apparently the closures will be based on the FCM (first class methods) proposal be Stephen Colebourne:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddhp95vd_0f7mcns
If you want some details on the story, here it is: this wasn't for any service he actually paid money for. If I give you something for free and it breaks, you are entitled to keep both pieces. Expecting anything else is ... confusing.
Summary: still a long way to go.

No announcement yet on @font-face, canvas, video. Basic performance improvements.
http://www.problogger.net/

Even if you fail at this, you'll have more experience, learned more, networked more, and have something to show for it. And it's legitimate.
Also:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/mobi...
Deferred execution is a pretty big win for a lot of problems.
This is nice - I don't think I've seen Microsoft look at themselves this candidly before.

Next thing you know we'll have commercials saying "IE9? That was my idea!"
They did show how IE8 is orders of magnitude slower than its competitors - that display of honesty shocked me a little.
Nice approach to the problem.

:)
And what does instant payment bring ?
To me, it looks like a solution looking for a problem.
And more recently: http://www.slate.com/id/2235504/
Doubtful. This change doesn't affect normal add-ons. It only affects extensions that are installing bits in the main Firefox application directory rather than in a profile.
Pretty much! :-)

Also, I can confirm that the whole thing is indeed completely legit. The Open Source projects listed really are benefited from the proceeds and in return you get bad code offset cards in the mail.
Okay, I've never been able to figure this one out... you're saying the perfect place for a first date is a large darkened room filled with strangers and an attention grabbing audio-visual bonanza?

I just don't get it.

Maybe as a second or thid date, once you've figured out some particularly interesting inde film you think he/she might like. Otherwise it just seems a bit uncomfortable to me.

Anyway, having said that: I wonder if you can utilise aspects of speed dating and social media. The point of speed dating is the anonymity (it's a person, not a profile), and a (woefully) popular part of social networking are those abhorent lists of likes and dislikes. Throw people together "willie nillie" (anonymously so to speak) and provide them with some of the aforementioned evil lists to fill in about the other half. This can then be pushed as marketing info, and you can direct the latest black and white french film that the local picturehouse is showing to the perfect couple... the idea being that it is the other way round, (active instead of passive) so it still has the feeling that you invited her to this movie because she told you it was her favourite. You didn't just read it on a profile and think that'll do.
PayPal did pretty well with the idea.
Try this: Have your user select some 5 people they would like to date. Once selected shoot an email off to 5 of the user's friends asking them to have a look at the prospective date's profiles and tell which would be most appropriate for the user. Then confirm with the user and setup a date.

DISCLOSURE: This idea is not my own. I read about it somewhere, most probably a previous HN thread.
The @font-face spec doesn't mention a font standard, and Microsoft have already said they won't implement TTF or OTF because the font foundries don't like it.

It's possible that IE will implement the upcoming WOFF (Web Open Font Format) standard in IE9 but I wouldn't rely on it.
Why do you assume they won't be first class? We really have very little details at this point.
Link to the NASA page: http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/welcome
Can Link Wheels Effective Be Effective?
the 'MatzLisp' thing was a joke. He never understood Lisp, Lisp was too complicated for him and wanted to do his own thing anyway.
As someone who's implementing closures in a JVM-based language, I can tell you there's no technical limitations on the JVM side: there are decisions to be made as to how you want to implement them, but it's certainly doable with enough compiler magic.

That said, the BGGA proposal is a bit of a disaster in my opinion: the distinction between "restricted" and "unrestricted" closures, along with non-local returns, just makes no sense. My assumption is that they want to use closures for things like control structures, which they're just totally inappropriate for, rather than as just anonymous functions, which is what they really ought to be.

Basically, it's what they did with generics: take a relatively sensible concept, then add a bunch of baroque edges to it for no good reason. Honestly: => and ==> are almost equivalent things with totally different semantics as far as control structures? Really?

People are going to understand that about as well as they understand why they can't add an Object to List<? extends Object>, or why they can't pass a List<String> back from a method that says it returns List<Object>. By which I mean, not at all.
There are some success scenarios for rewrite. For example, IE 4 was rewritten from the scratch. It became #1 browser. So it depends.
MS Office, Visio, Project, Sharepoint, Exchange 2010 Betas Now Available
PayPal is about secure payment, it doesn't need to be instant.
On the flip side during an extended major refactor your code looks like a construction site. You have some stuff that has been rewritten, some that hasn't, and no consistency. Then during the refactor people will rethink how they want it written, and you get more code styles.

Frequently the dust and mess gets so discouraging that people start being driven away. And then the rewriting effort peters out and people just get used to living in a half-demolished house.

The moral? Keep refactors small. If you want to do a major redesign, I would suggest rewriting a small prototype of a piece of it. If the prototype goes well then expand it until it can replace the previous system. (I've seen this prototype approach succeed several times. I haven't seen such good results with major refactors, or the "Let's rewrite from scratch!" approach.)
The part of the post about the font rendering is BS anyway. The picture is supposed to show "sub-pixel positioning" and it only shows antialiasing (not even sub-pixel antialiasing) which as you've pointed out isn't handled by a browser anyway.

"Sub-pixel positioning" on the other hand would indeed need to be handled inside of the browser, so that the engine knows how much space something takes up so it can position the next item- But the picture accompanying the post is wrong/irrelevant.
OpenStreetMap was started to solve this problem: the lack of free (as in speech) map data for the UK.

We have excellent data in most of Europe and it's got an open license. Check it out: http://openstreetmap.org/
IE 4 was competing with NS 4, which also was largely rewritten. That leveled the playing field quite a bit. (Particularly since the NS rewrite introduced a lot of problems.)
You could also concatenate the strings, as they are know at compile time, and use puts or something simpler than printf.

puts("FAILED: " #expr )

(Or you could keep the printf, as it looks like GCC optimizes it to puts when just used to print a string, without variable interpolation)
Retailers are (in general) barred from charging different prices for cash vs card payments.

As I understand it, here's how it works in the US:

- Amex says: "You can charge a card fee if you do for all the cards you accept."

- Visa and Mastercard say: "No card fees, but you can offer a discount for cash transactions."
Paypal may make it hard to deal with, but I've never had issues disputing charges on an actual credit card.
Honest question: what does Microsoft stand to gain by doing all this work instead of just using WebKit?
I think buying your own SMS short code is key to making this service look legitimate to new users. No one wants to text information about money transfers to a phone number that could be anyone.

Also, the phone graphics on your homepage are copied directly from the TextMarks site!
Nah. Here are the details: I think I would be able to reproduce the issue but I have no way to contact them other than an abandoned "official" google group. I call this a crappy way to run a "free" service.
factorial(30..50) -- for factoradics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoradic). Representing the reproducable state of a list of randomly ordered items.
I don't see the point here. I mean, I could write Jenny a telegram if I wanted to tell her something. Am I missing something?
Looks like they've got the network effect licked

London-based Mendeley, which calls itself “the Last.fm of research”, has announced that it’s reached something of a milestone today – claiming 100,000 users and 8 million research papers uploaded to the site in less than a year since its launch. Furthermore, the online database is doubling in size every 10 weeks, says the company.
Are you saying that it's worrying that Google gives no support for FeedBurner or that it's worrying that a large site is dependent on FeedBurner?
Just curious: Do you eat the transaction fee if people fund their accounts with credit cards? If so... it seems like people might pay themselves thousands of dollars to rack up rewards at your expense.
You need some kind of a security code / pin system to prevent against fraud. Venmo has to match the pin in the message sent along with the phone number the message is sent from. And proceed with the payment only if the pin matches.

Venmo $10 to Jenny 1990

Where the last 4 digits of the message - 1990 in this case - is the security pin code.
Hopefully that's all they ban...situations like this make me nervous because legislators don't seem to have the ability to comprehend an industry before they pass sweeping legislation. I could easily see the backlash from this resulting in legislation that forces online merchants to make customers jump through a bunch of hoops before they can sign up for a monthly recurring billing plan.
That says a lot about startups now a days.

They could probably get away with charging 1% or 2%, but it looks like they don't take any transaction fees.
Control and influence. Backwards compatibility. And they probably still believe they can do it better.
Come on, have modern humans actively shunned any archeological site? Have we even shunned hostile environments? I think it's the contrary, we're drawn to them.

A plaque with all the UN languages is a rosetta stone, something of obvious intrinsic value. The Periodic table too - to any potential future civilization that hasn't already rediscovered those things, it may be a sought after source of knowledge.

The site is also attractive to those who would wish to use what's there to their advantage - as a weapon against their enemies, likely w/o really understanding the consequences.

Too expensive to launch it into the sun, no other solution (if we're not going to derive the value of reprocessing and actually use it up).
Right now, it's possible to simulate one biologically-accurate neuron at a compartment-level (where you model a neuron by dividing it into many connected compartments), on one CPU core in real-time.

Here's the kicker: it's also been shown that these simulations can scale linearly with the number of processors (given sufficient interconnect bandwidth). So with N cores, you can simulate kN neurons for some constant k (and I think that k=1).

This implies that the limit is the number of CPU cores you throw at the problem. The human brain has around 100 billion neurons so, in theory, if you had a 100-billion core supercomputer, you could simulate the whole thing. That's a lot, but my point is that scaling a simulation is an engineering problem.

This doesn't say anything about the accuracy of the model; that depends on accurate characterisations of each part of the neuron, and of how they're arranged and connected. But the key point here is that these are low-level characteristics that can be individually examined, making whole-brain simulations a tractable problem.

Source: Djurfeldt et al. Brain-scale simulation of the neocortex on the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer. IBM JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT (2008)
RealSelf, Backed by Rich Barton, Blazes Trail for Niche Content Startups
I also don't think that full rewrite from scratch is a viable strategy. Much better is to rewrite by pieces and integrate them with existing system via interfaces/adapters/etc. For example, you may start new Data Layer and move code from old app to it slowly, but constantly. Sometime you will have completely new DL.
Talking to $1 Billion CEO's
So what you are saying is that rocket science is not rocket science.
Interesting idea! I wonder if that's why I always feel so much more awake and focused after taking a shower?
DNA Testing Firm Goes Bankrupt; Who Gets the Data?
IE is deeply integrated within windows. Rewriting everything for webkit may be costly.
Sorry, that's a 100% plain not true. Snail mail gets through OK, but it's a real pain to execute from. If I get a letter I throw it away, because a) I can't easily put it into my process queue to action later and b) I can't easily click through to a website link without laboriously having to key it in manually.

Don't use snail mail. Use email but with a) A superb subject line which lays out the differentiator of your product and b) a clear concise intro para which lays out the proposition in one easy glance.

That's all. If it's any good, we'll take a look at it. And yes I'm a journalist/blogger.
How does that reply have anything to do with what you're replying to?

Post: "you are not entitled to support"
Reply: "i can reproduce this problem, but i can't get support"