skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A laptop battery may have quite a bit of energy density, but that's not entirely relevant, as he points out in the next sentence. The speed at which the energy is released is far, far more important.

Remember all those news stories a few years back about Dell laptops bursting violently into flames?
As said by others, this is a feature. I remember that this problem really happened at the very beginning of Gmail (2004) but it was quickly sorted out once they realized that some people had managed to sign up with different accounts that were actually the same.
"That's ignoring all the many holes with the case (that ended up requiring using a legal backdoor to convict them without a unanimous verdict."

Your choice of terminology here makes me a little uncomfortable.
I think the other michael doesn't know his own email address.
My first reaction was "WTF". But really it does make a ton of sense. I'll bet this deal, more than any other, scares the crap out of Balmer. If Google can get big organizations living inside the browser they're going to win the whole game.
The thing is that there is no such thing as a product page on apple.com for anything that is sold on the iTMS. The itunes.apple.com/... should be a give-away by now.
On a couple of occasions where I've seen Joe Kraus speak, he had a slide that said something along the lines of, "Being early feels a lot like being wrong." And he explained that sometimes you attempt to tackle a market before the world is ready for that product or idea, and it fails, not because the idea is unsound or the product isn't cool...but because several other pieces haven't come together in the market, things don't work out.

Think Apple Newton, for example.

Of course, being wrong also feels a lot like being wrong.
$300 Mac Netbook.

http://gizmodo.com/5389166/how-to-hackintosh-a-dell-mini-10v...
Niice. So much for intelligent commentary.
And what happens if Google loses interest in this product?

<Edit> My first line comes across as snarky, and I apologize.

But it still concerns me about relying on on-line services when I have read so many articles about one company or another either losing information, selling the product to someone else who has a different agenda, or deciding to abandon a product (among other actions).
My uncle works full-time six-figures as a dedicated RFP response writer. It happens.
The New Start Ups
Does anyone other than me wonder why TSA is using Blogger for their official blog rather than WordPress?

Anyway....
"The function is either tail recursive or it isn't; it either has extra statements after the recursive call or it doesn't. You can't ever invoke it both ways."

I think the thing here is that in, say, Scheme, the performance and actual execution semantics of your function vary wildly depending on how much you mangle your algorithm. If you twist it into a shape that ends with a recursive call, it does one thing; if you don't, it does another thing. This is why tail call is a leaky abstraction and why I generally look down on it (setting aside the fact that the most natural expression of many algorithms often involves other methods of implementation -- truly "naturally" recursive algorithms aren't all that common in my experience).
Many intelligent people seem to be solving the same sorts of problems over and over again.

- Evan Williams created blogger. Then he created Twitter.
- Paul Buchheit created Gmail. Then he created Friendfeed.
- Mark Zuckerberg created several unsuccessful social interaction tools before facebook.
- Steve Jobs has tried at least twice to sell the world a computer shaped like a cube.

If you feel that you bit off more than you could chew the first time around, you probably need a good plan to simplify and make sure you aren't doing too much again.
Ruby and Rails Ecosystem White Paper
Strongly disagree. Most of the services, especially if you're a "catch" for them will go a long way to let you explore your interests on behalf of the country, whether that's a PhD program in an area with national defense implications (most of them) or testing new equipment. A "prison sentence" gives a great disservice to those who are adrift and choose to serve.

(Needless to say, the financial/educational benefits due to the updated GI bill are also quite attractive)
You can search for "Randall" on the page to find Randall's comment and TSA's response.
This just reinforces that normal application marketing can't be thrown under the bus. There may be a slight bump for 'being there', but you still need to find your customers and tell them about your app.
Because of this little feature I've ended up on several ultra right wing mailing lists (subscriptions that were meant for someone who shares my name, obviously). It's horrifying and hilarious at the same time.
Most definitely, or it is indeed spam as spammers seem to be getting really tricky these days.
Well, it's a biblical reference. 'Roast the fatted calf when the prodigal son returns.' At least, that's what Ringo and Weber's "We Few" claims... ah, I love me my MilSciFic :)
Whenever Apple takes a crap, fanboys flock to the stall to comment about how smart the smell is, and how stylish the toilet paper is. How only Apple could produce turds of such quality because they really, you know, think about what goes into the process and their specially formulated fiber diet is a totally unique combination of oats and bran that you simply can't replicate in the Windows or Linux world. So you have to pay 3x the price for that formulation.

And then blogs are filled with how it's all just so totally brilliant.
I saw that you also posted this review of your own app (Gaia GPS, $2.99), claiming that you hadn't tried one of the features:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewConten...

andrewljohnson: * * * * * (five stars)

"The new version of the app is a nice improvement on the original. I particularly like the map bookmarking button, though I haven't used the driving directions yet. The maps from CloudMade are also an improvement on the OSM maps."

What's up with that?
Sounds great --- I'm looking forward to this event!
OWL 2 Came Out Today
Ok. I think your main problem right now is that you are falling in the 'anti money laundering' category from the point of view of the bank.

As for liability, for an Iphone application I think that since the transaction is between the customer and Apple that you are more or less out of the windy zone anyway, the only one I can think of that would apply would be gross negligence, but since Apple reviews the Applications they might even have to take the heat for that one.

Presumably the only party that could sue you with some chance of success would be Apple.
That upgrade price point sucks especially compared to Snow Leopard upgrade $25. I bought vmware fusion 2 a couple months ago. Instead of shelling out $40 for an upgrade, I may have to look into "alternative" ways to of getting the software.
Re naturally recursive - it depends on your application domain. If you work with trees all day long, such as in a compiler, templating engine, scene graph, etc. recursion is almost more common than looping.
Okay, but you're still doing the twisting with recur. The only difference is that the compiler checks that recur is actually in a tail position. That's probably nice to a newcomer, sure, but once you do it a few times, it's pretty simple to tell whether you're making a tail call or not.
For a while I was getting emails that were sent to <me>@googlemail.com (I have <me>@gmail.com) destined for someone in the UK, including flight confirmations and subway card top up reminders. Either that guy didn't know his email address when he booked his flight and registered for a few other things, or something was up with Google's handling of GMail/Google Mail addresses.
Perhaps it's not too popular, but VHDL or Verilog are a ton more useful for learning about how a machine works. Seriously, writing some x86 assembly teaches you a thing or two, but implementing a full CPU from the design of the ISA to putting it on an FPGA is the way to go. Once you've done that, all the magic is gone, and computers are completely transparent and understandable.
Who said anything about living in the browser? Google provides my email service too and I hardly ever use the web interface.
> Is The Party Over?

No, but the gold rush might be. The iPhone is still a very viable platform for making money selling software. Mobile apps can be incredibly useful, and the App Store makes it easy for people to spend money.

It's hard to get noticed right now because there has been an absolute flood of apps. As people start to figure out that not all app developers get rich, that flood will slow to a more reasonable stream.

There does seem to be a market inefficiency in the huge disparity in sales between apps that are featured by Apple and apps that aren't. Picking up that slack in the market has to be an opportunity for a startup. If Apple isn't providing a good way for great apps to be found in the App Store, someone else should.
Because highly successful people are not necessarily those who can teach (and also, are 'human teachers' anyway). Teaching is inspiration, empathy, enthusiasm, wit, patience. You could be a Nobel Prize laureate and have none of these, and you'd make a perfect snooze-worthy drone (witness some highly decorated profs at some top universities). I'm going to assume you don't have any children because I think otherwise you would see how much a difference person's personality has on the child's ability to learn.

Granted, many teachers suck. In the U.S. we don't have a system that rewards good teaching.

Also granted, the ability of the current technology to bring amazing (human!) teachers to the masses is great and growing. But, teaching is a two-way street, and you can't have much of that with 1 to 1 million ratio.
It might be willful ignorance on my part, but I really want to believe that eHealth is the (unfortunate) exception, and not how IT usually works - even when we're talking about government contracts.
Complete Guide to Apple Certification and Training
Unfortunately while people are arguing about the security checks / rules, I see another danger. Looking at the length of current security queues, it's not a problem to find a place where ~200-400 people surround you (guesstimate; assuming one of the "quite large, but not enough to get a new terminal" airports). My prediction is that the next attack will not be a guy bringing down the plane, but simply a guy waiting until he gets halfway through the queue with any bomb he wants (noone will check him before, right?) I wonder how will they solve that one...
1. Remove tinfoil hat

2. Use ctrl+f
He seems to believe that the only reason for a comment is to describe what something does, and thus clearly-written code would be equivalent. If that were strictly true, he may be right.

However, a major benefit of comments is to explain why something is done a certain way. Is anything temporary or arbitrary? Is there something counting on a side effect? Is something being bypassed for efficiency? How will this null argument to a function be interpreted? Is something not being checked because it is assumed to have been validated earlier? And so forth.
Presumably this is a gateway drug for Google Docs.
As great as XKCD is, seeing the TSA respond to this cartoon is just as bad as CNN fact-checking the SNL sketch.

As someone with more than a casual familiarity with man-portable explosives (some R&D work on remote land mine detection), nobody with any modicum of sense would EVER confuse a bottle of drinking water with a bottle of liquid explosive. The latter have a very low vapor pressure, very different viscosity, and give off very distinctive odors. The most commonly obtained ones are also NOT transparent.
I work for a publicly funded institution, in our jurisdiction we have to go through the RFP process. It is either an RFP (where we are allowed to do an evaluation of who "best" met the requirements - using a pre-defined scoring criteria) or a straight tender where we have to pick the lowest bid that meets the requirements.

I sympathize that it is very difficult to produce a proper response to an RFP, however as one who evaluates those responses let me tell you it is quickly evident which vendors spend the time to do so. It is also painful on the client side to prepare the criteria on which to fairly evaluate the responses.

It is an imperfect process and definitely more of an art than a science but the good news is that a well-defined RFP will often signal a client who understands their requirements.
The True Impact of Our Actions?
Also see a sci-fi story by Robert F. Young called "Thirty Days Has September".
JQuery yummi - auto-complete any word in a text field
I hope you're taking advantage of our open-source reddit code.

http://code.reddit.com

Email on the way. I've always encouraged folks to bring on the competition :) social news is far from done.
You can also use the +subscript feature for that. youremail+twitter1@gmail.com youremail+twitter2@gmail.com. Allows you to filter based on account as well.
U.S. electricity grid will get a 21st century upgrade
Interesting, but quite anecdotal.

For example, this:

"The fact of the matter is that Java, currently with the dominant market share in the enterprise, takes too long and costs too much in both development time and opportunity
cost."

Where did this info come from? What studies? Why should I believe this, in a report that favors Ruby, written by a Ruby consulting company?

I ask not to call into question the integrity of anyone at InfoEther, but it is exactly these sorts of claims, made against various languages (including Ruby), without any real tangible, verifiable support, that need to be examined.

I mean, it feels true, and I'd love to believe it, but I'd much prefer that any claims made about programming come with solid evidence.
Correct, they use about 50% less power, plus it costs less to purchase to start with.
Does it matter whether it's called Dalvik or JVM? I hope so (and yet doubt it), because Java on my Symbian phone equals slow and memory hungry.

It will also be interesting to see how the performance will be influenced by the fact that all the programs will be Java. On the desktop/server you can get away with a memory hungry Java app to gain speed, but on a device...

Google didn't have much choice with programming languages and API: Nokia bought Qt, .NET belongs to Microsoft, and that left them with Java. They should probably add a Python interpreter if they haven't already. Nokia has had reasonable success with this approach.
Diet almost certainly plays a role. The diet of the Tarahumara Indians (the subject of the 'Born to Run' book mentioned in the article) is practically meatless and consists of about 75% corn, with the rest made up mostly of beans and various types of squash. As a result their diet is about 80% complex carbohydrates, which is what allows them to run for those insane distances.

This doesn't seem to jive with the persistence hunting theory, since meat is one of the worst fuels for distance running (or any endurance sport).
The only one I know personally who is a FTE is making about $40-50k (in the UK).

Most programmers of his seniority in central London are in about the same range. An good architect/team lead with about 10 years experience would be lucky to make $100k.
"At two updates a month, I can make $2000 a month - just enough to pay my rent and groceries, but no extra to cover the sunk production costs."

I don't quite follow that logic. The expectation seems to be to write one successful App store game and then live off the revenue happily forever after?

Seems to me that if the game cost, say 20000$ to make, and you make 2000$/month for 10 months, you have hit break even. During those months, you can create more App store games that will add to the revenue.

Instead of one game making 2000$/month, you could also have 10 games making 200$/month, and so on...

If it continues to sell and sell for years, ultimately it won't have been a failure. It was just a couple of months work but brings in money forever (I know, it probably won't sell forever, but that is another issue).
1.) Was engaging and interesting at startup school? Check.

2.) Cool company initiative that I can respect? Check.

I think Zuckerberg might finally be growing into his own. :)
I addressed some of this in a comment on the reddit thread:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9ye8o/tail_call...
I almost got it, but given that a six-digit prime number is odd, which half of the Monkeys lie again?
But are there really all that many undergrad programs that prepare people to go straight into the associated careers? Why hold CS to a different standard? Maybe we just should have a programming school a la medical school :)
I'm not sure I'd use it to the extent of the original poster, but I can think of a number of places it could come in handy. Like the ruby(&:function), frequently that is what you want to do.

I would be curious to see if there is any performance hit. I wouldn't think so, but sometimes JS finds a way to surprise me like that.
In other facebook news everyone in my freshman level class spends the whole lecture on facebook on their computer and is very surprising to me that the teacher doesnt ban computers from the classroom. ( When I started 2 years ago no one even pulled out computers during lectures unless they were at the back of the room. )

Maybe facebook is planning world peace through extended computer use.
jQuery is the library of the present. LOVE it.

It's made me look forward to writing JS in my projects, and that's saying something.
Given the refresh rate on e-ink it does not really matter if the market wanted it, it is just not possible...
Ask HN: My take on an science fiction short story
Hello, I've started a science fiction short story that I have not finished yet. Before today, I intended to finish and then share, but because I'm a lazy bastard who likes to leave personal projects behind to work on some newer shiny thing, I decided to share before I finish. So I^Hwe can finish it before i dump it for the eternal eternity.

I'm not a native English speaker, so this is really hard on me. Please be kind and constructive. I would really like to have your opinions and refactor if needed. And be very glad to finish this story with your help. I started working on the story on etherpad so you can see its morph from zero to this stage. Also this gives us the chance to collaborate on the story.

Story's name is "The Last Chance", but may not be the last name.
Story's plot is: The Sun has came to an unpredicted end. It shows some weird temperature increases and turns out it's going to explode into a supernova. It has it's time but earth is not viable as habitable for our kind. Humans have evolved politically, todays states descended and there is now no state. But order is policed by UN Council having counselors elected by continents. Human beings are turned into two classes, upper and lower. The Council has some concerns about the sun and having a hidden agenda of habitating on other planets before earth is no more leaving lower classes to their deaths.

There is a new religious group called Gaians who believes they are part of The Earth and should die with it.

My Intentions for the story was, to work on "struggles of human beings, whereabouts of a dooms day" and "the religious irrationality".
Seems like I'm not yet there.

http://etherpad.com/ep/pad/view/ro.Ewn6BELOoOh/latest
iamelgringo, how on earth did you figure this out?
Working with (Apache) Web server logs
Hilarious, until you think it's possibly also happening in reverse.

The weeksie doppleganger is probably over on a fox news forum talking about how the communists at Google are pumping him with their liberal agenda, sending through masses of material about 'brainwashing' and 'criminal gangs' (I mean 'programming' and 'Hacker News').
Assuming you could sneak a supercap onto a plane (roughly 30Wh/kg), using the maximum of your carry-on-weight and not exceeding it (usually ~10kg), you can easily have an energy potential equivalent to ~1/2 a stick of dynamite. How much you'll get out in the form of explosive force is debatable, but is certainly to be an order of magnitude above a battery as the discharge rates are several orders of magnitude faster.

However, the expected explosive force of home made liquid explosives is only on the scale of a stick of dynamite, it's certainly less obvious though.

Both explosions randomly placed are unlikely to down a plane, and are likely to be better used breaking into the cockpit than actually downing the plane.

I believe almost a 1/3 KWh high voltage power source could be of much more use than in its explosive force for an organised terrorist attack. However, most anti-terrorism procedures aren't designed to prevent organised terrorists, they're designed to prevent the many more morons with access to explosives.
The professionally acceptable term is "candy"
Well, for what it's worth, I just bought a copy. It doesn't look that amazing, but it might be fun.

Lesson: Putting stuff in the app store won't do anything for you unless you market it outside the app store. Not sure that's a very original lesson. Surely that's obvious?
I hate to be pedantic, but I think "negatively correlated" would be more correct. Even though people know what you mean, it gives the phrase less meaning in case you meant to use the technical definition.
Are you reading between the lines here? I didn't read fake business name. I read 1) business name 2) personal account.
It would seem to me this young man has already set the gears into motion by knowing he doesn't have the answers and by making an effort to question his life. Many of the responses in here speak so matter-of-fact-ly that one person's opinion is right or wrong, but the truth is, no one knows the secrets behind what makes for a good life.

Life happens and it's all about how to take it in. Be it thrusting yourself into hard, difficult situations or taking it easy to learn and enjoy the subtle nuances of life. There is a particular equifinality in life where the same solution can be derived through different approaches. No one here is in the right or the wrong.

My personal opinion is that "getting lost" is less the solution, but rather the gentleman should "stay open," if you will. Wandering is merely one action that tends to incur openness, but it may or may not be the correct approach for any one person in particular. Learning to appreciate life is what he's learning "the hard way" currently and I would venture to say he'll experience that 'click' in his head sooner than his doomsday-ridden mind is anticipating.

Realizing how fortunate we all are to be here in this cultivated "world" of intellectualism--of the attitude we all have developed through our own stories similar to this boy's--discussing the merits of self-realization (who I am) the requisites of self-actualization (what I can do) is what is important here. It's quite the privilege.
A group I'm invovled in did the same thing.

"This is a mailing list, not a discussion forum. Just post it to the Google Group."

I was really, really confused.
We can't fight any more wars if we're all too busy circlejerking on each others' walls.
There's no such thing as being brilliant. You can do brilliant things. If you feel you have a talent that other people don't then pursue that talent. That's what 'brilliant' people do.

If all you have is good grades and no ambition, you're not brilliant, you're an idiot. Now start doing something about it.
This can be further generalized. Trying to argue a policy with a bottom rung employee at any organization is ultimately counter-productive.
That's odd. Or, I guess I'm odd. For me, it's sleep on my right side to avoid acid.
Move to England?
Maybe, but we can still fight plenty of mob wars that way.
To all the commenters here saying "it's not a bug it's a feature":

Ok, but how did the other michael sign up with the non-period name? That's the bug, surely?
Thats what the first startup is for.
After Amazons PR disaster when they retracted ebooks? Apple isn't that stupid.