skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience with working in academia was that I created some software with big ideas, almost laughably poor quality of implementation, and which (mostly) ended up filed away with a grant application which has been forgotten by probably eight of the ten people who know it exists.

My experience with creating software in the Real World has been that I do mostly boring things with periodic flashes of insight, that in a period of five years I went from being useless grunt labor to actually making meaningful decisions (almost enough time to be allowed to tie your own shoes in academia without a PhD supervising you, as long as you give all the credit for the shoe-tying to the PhD who isn't supervising you), and I can point to actual people whose lives are measurably better for me having done the work.

(Among them myself, since I no longer make $12 an hour. Not that us Japanese salarymen are rolling in it, but it is a pleasant change to not worry about how I am getting home for Christmas.)

Sadly, my ability to express this comment in the form of a witty stick figure sketch leaves much to be desired.
According to Microsoft, there is no rest of us. At least, there won't be for long.

I'll flag the article as it looks an awful lot like Microsoft astroturfing. I suggest you do the same.
It was modded down, probably because if you haven't read this book (which I haven't), the suggestion is unsupported and means little - why should I read it?
Personally I use (and recommend) Kohana. Especially in recent versions they have made a lot of improvements to the MVC model for PHP.
I work for Windows Azure. I'm going to try hard to not make this into a marketing thing. I want to clarify a couple of things from the blog post

- The web platform installer is really quite distinct from Windows Azure. The WebPI is a nice installer which gets all the right SDK+ tools installed to get you up and running with MSFT's web dev stack Windows Azure can run any code that runs on Windows Server (with caveats) and it just so happens that the webpi is a nice way to get something running.

- Windows Azure isnt really MSFT-stack specific (.NET/IIS) though that works real well. There was a bunch of content at PDC this year on how to run MySQL/memcached/php/python/RoR/whatever. Matt Mullenweg did a keynote demo running Wordpress on Azure for example.

- The blog post 'Microsoft is taking applications but in reality, you can just go and sign up and get a token in a very, very short time. After January, the platform billing kicks in so anyone can sign up anytime.
A minimal C unit testing framework (only 3 LOC)
On newsley, I don't think making the description a link is a good idea. Digg does this too and I find it very annoying as I'll accidentally click it sometimes (for example, if I want to copy and paste it). I'd also suggest making the description text a lighter color so the titles stand out a bit more.
A GAE application marketplace would be a great idea.

Is anyone from Google googling this?
Free hacking tools and tutorials learn hacking free
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Nope, it's exactly the way it should be. Fedora is aimed at contributors, not users. If you're not satisfied with it, come and contribute!

Fedora has all the latest, sometimes unstable programs that the FOSS community has to offer, it's a distribution meant for testing new things and contributing.
If you look at the data here: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/16593104/Recoverys-Phantom-Distr...

You'll also see that lots of districts are getting millions of dollars and creating ZERO jobs. Look at Ohio as an example.

I suspect the obvious explanation is: data entry error, however, any rationally developed system should have input constraints and integrity checks to prevent these kinds of errors. I would like to know what the mistake is. Is it corruption? I don't know. Probably a bit of it is, yeah.
Yeah, I was really expecting GAE to turn into this. But it would be a first of Google bringing a side project to it's full potential, I guess.
In my opinion, both outcomes are sad and unfortunate. Who has benefited from the engineer's genius? Well, a bunch of journal articles got written and perhaps someone wrote a dissertation or five, alternatively a few thousands of dollars got written off the bottom line of some mega-corp.

That's when the entrepreneur steps in. Either the dinky program fix, or the obscure (or not so much) journal article can be turned into something that is brought out to people, for the entrepreneur's profit, which is wholly contingent on convincing people that they have benefited!

It's sad to me that there really are large quantities of brilliant people who could be the guy in the first two panels who truly think the two outcomes on the right are the only possibilities.
Er... No.

Isn't it a bit weird to claim that a particular physical location is the future of a global communications system? The Web is the Future of New York city would be equally cringe-worthy but potentially more likely to happen.
old Unix person highfive

I actually got into Linux 11-12 years ago - and determined my future career - after seeing a screenshot of Enlightenment. Funny thing is, I did exactly the same, using a combo of minimalist environments and full featured desktops (annoyingly the minimalist ones never bothered implementing freedesktop.org standards, which meant users had to recreate all their shortcuts - AFAIK most of them still don't).
Pests Menace As Rampant as Ever
All of us would have experienced pest related problems at least once in our life. Some of the pests make us feel so helpless when they plague our premises. Pests come in a variety of shapes and sizes and all of them are equally problematic. Whether it is mice, flees, bed bugs, moths, termites, rats or roaches, all of them make our life difficult.
From the referenced Google Code Blog http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/use-compression-to-ma...:

Anti-virus software may try to minimize CPU operations by intercepting and altering requests so that web servers send back uncompressed content. But if the CPU is not the bottleneck, the software is not doing users any favors. Some popular antivirus programs interfere with compression. Users can check if their anti-virus software is interfering with compression by visiting the browser compression test page at Browserscope.org.

Serious? Anti-virus software that is doing that is acting almost like malware doing what the user didn't ask it to do. Does compression have any even minor security implications that would legitimize this? And anyone know which anti-virus does this?
Adorable self-congratulation.
It suggests that Europe will take it up before USA, for cultural reasons.

I'm european, and I seriously doubt that. I'd say that the US would pick it up before Europe. In Europe, we are much more wary about "unnatural" way of growing things, you just have to see with GMO ...
Lets see, their previous killer apps also either required Windows, or WAS Windows. I don't really see how being platform specific affects ability to be a killer app.

Obviously depending on how a "killer app" is defined.
Doubtful, his company probably owns the right to it since he developed it at work.
> There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.

Excuse me, but how exactly will releasing another Android phone reduce splintering of the platform? That doesn't make sense at all.
I'm not sure about you guys, but how many ads for teeth whitening are there on this site??

http://grab.by/DQY
I'm not sure what you're getting at, that I wouldn't speak quite so glowingly of that third option if I weren't an entrepreneur myself? If you mean it in the sense that I am glad I'm doing what I'm doing and would like more people to make a similar choice, then, sure, yeah, you're right.
Given that Microsoft has anywhere between 25-45% market share (depending on where you get your numbers) on servers obviously someone is trusting them. And it's not like the Unix world hasn't had its share of "braindead misfeatures" over the years.
'Hi-tech' farming in Japan
Without going all Matrix esq, this is fascinating.

1) The potential to grow food anywhere. ( Spaceships, submarines, cave systems )

2) From a green perspective, it would reduce many a carbon foot print in terms of travelling.

Still to conquer would be the electricity bill.

A country like Iceland tho, could become a major food provider with its almost free electricity.
We're slipping into Digg territory here - we're not going to go down the "posting all xkcd cartoons" route are we? I love xkcd incidentally.
If you are a philosophy person like me, this one is for you:

Classic Drucker: Wisdom from Peter Drucker from the Pages of Harvard Business Review.

It shows you what and how a pioneer in the field of business thinks of business itself. Learn from his thinking and learning pattern. They are just like common sense for business (like DStruc and Algo in programming).
China orders Microsoft to halt some Windows sales
It could become the defacto standard for Android devices. Mostly screen resolution & a baseline CPU/memory expectation for developers to target. This could reduce splintering by simply making Android a far less attractive option for use outside of the ARM mobile phone platform. Ultimately I think this is Google's goal. They want to keep Android a mobile phone OS and position Chrome OS for netbooks, tablets, etc.
I disagree. There is no deadline, especially not in a market where people purchase new phones every 18-24 months.

I can see Android's sales continuing to trickle upward as prices drop on phone hardware, as companies use their brand loyalty to push Android phones on those upgrading, as new manufacturers enter the fray, and as the public are clearer about what 'Android' is.

I think people expected too much from Android on day one. Android's only been a multi-manufacturer platform for about 3 months and before then were only two rather clunky handsets which were both basically rush-released. It was never going to have the immediate impact that the iPhone had due to it being later to market, not having sales of the iPod to drive it forward, having less brand recongition and less marketing behind it. The nature of the beast is that it was always going to be a slow burner.
It's doing a Google image search, grouping the images by similarity (either by context or image similarity, or possibly both) and then displaying them, complete with links presumably based on that similarity.
Dup:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=120379

:-)
Embedding Data in the Everyday
Border patrol already have access to all this information and much much more from various surveillance equipment they use. If you make it across the border without being caught by border patrol then it is purely due to lack of manpower and other priorities by the border patrol and not due to lack of intelligence on their part.
Alternative Business universe:

"My god .. this will mean a new feature in our next version, an email blast to every industry paper, blog and publication, a massive user-drive, and after we juice it, we can let our R&D spinoff company license the tech to other companies, but if we keep it, this will be an strategic asset and a big bargaining chip in any acquisition talks .. really, this puts us in the same market as the big co that has been looking for an acquisition."
Doesn't this mean that the technology is basically the same as eMule or Kazaa now?
Under. John is known for his insane optimizations, achieving speed ups of up to 800%. http://blog.jquery.com/2007/07/01/jquery-113-800-faster-stil...
Do you need biology knowledge?
I have studied in school a little about genetics, Mendel's laws and things like that...
Palmdale/Lancaster, CA Police Scanner - SHOUTcast Radio Player
It's the "In-vitro kits" that really get me thinking. I wonder if they will be as magnanimous as the author suspects or if they will simply be another tool of third world oppression. Like with how GMO crops sometimes have a built in dependency on a nutrition product sold by the same company, or how they can be made infirtile so the farmer cannot reseed the same crop. It all seems like another rift in the Socio-technological Divide, to me!

On a side note, what would in-vitro mean for Halal/Kosher meat? Anyone care to speculate?
He's right "it might" if my marginal cost is lower and I'm making a living I don't have to price gouge. There are other motivators than profit.
U.S Patriot Act Miscellaneous Provisions
A T and T is not really a concern in most of the world, so at best that concerns the US market, which has been, until the iPhone, a bit of a backwater in terms of mobile phone stuff.

I see Apple conquering a nice share of the market, maybe even larger than anyone else, but still well under 50%. If everyone has one, they lose their cachet. Also, Android will probably never be quite as beautiful, but if you combine 'good enough' with a far more open system, and a platform that people can innovate on, I think that, long term, it will do quite well.

I sure hope so; I'm simply not interested in owning devices that I can't load my own code on, and that also require the ownership of a Mac just to develop on.
Some guy on Yahoo Answers gave an answer for Kosher: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090519173621AA...

In short, no, it wouldn't be kosher, but meat grown from modified genes could be kosher.
Healthcare it
McKesson is the longest-operating company in the healthcare services industry today. Over the course of its history, McKesson has grown by providing pharmaceutical distribution and medical-surgical supply management across the spectrum of care; healthcare information technology for hospitals, physicians, homecare and payors; hospital and retail pharmacy automation; electronic medical records; and services for manufacturers and payors designed to improve outcomes for patients.
Do most people regularly walk into a restaurant they've heard nothing about? Personally if I'm going to pay a large chunk of cash for someone to cook me dinner I'm first going to make sure they know what they're doing. I very rarely visit a restaurant that I haven't heard at least one good review about, so as such no review and bad review amount to basically the same.
Free version of the Agile Platform 5.0 released today
OutSystems is pleased to announce the release of the OutSystems Agile Platform 5.0 today.

It allows IT teams to develop and manage web apps and business processes, using visual models, bringing together application development and business process management into one single, unified environment.

It can be used to integrate existing systems, compose and automatically deploy new applications, manage them centrally and drive change during their entire life-cycle.

It's now available in its free Community Edition <a href="www.outsystems.com/download">here</a>.

There are a series of <a href="www.youtube.com/outsystems">demos and videos</a>, plus <a href="http://www.outsystems.com/gettingstarted/">tutorials and how-tos</a> for those new to the OutSystems world.

The full <a href="http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20091117005547&newsLang=en">release announcement</a> has details on the major features, and the <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/22686730/What-s-new-in-the-Agile-Platform-5-0">What's New</a> document contains comprehensive information on changes in this new release.
Interesting -- assuming that it's a true cloud compute environment (mostly application and language agnostic), is there a reason why the "installer" is Windows only? Is there a way to install and configure a compute node without using Windows?
Platform specific does effect the ability to be a "killer app".

Ms Windows being a killer app was in a completely different time period. Any app that has to have game changing ability has to be cross-platform or perhaps run on the web. Anything else and its not a "killer app". It might get the bills paid and be profitable but "killer app" it ain't.
This is good news!!

I started using e long long time ago. Now I use gnome(ubuntu). I love e, but it was not practical for me:

+ I use (and program) a lot of gtk-qt that looks so bad under e. It needs a wrapper that uses e widgets.

+ Raster is over perfectionist. He didn't wanted how skype and other icons looked in the notification are. His solution? Remove the system tray(notification area) and make impossible to use apps like instant messenger or amarok(I'm sure there must be a way, but not easy).

+ If you look at raster and e team screenshots you will find they use (and care)the terminal, gimp, inkscape a mIrc program and a memory mapper, so it's difficult for them to understand other people needs(not developers).

+ When compiz was introduced again raster thought it was not a good idea to include it. Other people included it, I don't know if raster dropping the link to elive(http://www.elivecd.org/) in his personal site have something to do with that.

+ Raster default widget theme was a little... how to say it?, I don't know if this is the word in english: tacky.
Is your PPC campaign groomed for Christmas?
It's that time of the year again and the shopping spree is about to begin. While the National Retail Federation (NRF) is predicting that 2009 holiday sales would be 1% lower than 2008, it still works out to be a whopping 437.6 billion dollars. There is a definitely a lot of money to be made.
Probably this would be illegal, but crowsourcing the position of border patrols is another use. It would add social network capabilities to the app.
I'm simply not interested in owning devices that I can't load my own code on

The average consumer doesn't care about this.
Good for them, I was talking about myself in that phrase, which is why I prefaced it with "I sure hope so".

I do think that open tends to win out over closed, though, with time, because the advantages for developers and businesses translate into advantages for everyone.
http://www.netmba.com
Needs more than four empires. I want to see Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union bloat and disappear, and the growth of America.
I don't think "posting all xkcd cartoons" is near happening in HN at all. This one it's pretty close to the HN main interests (academy research and/or entrepreneurism)
[...] they used to have a person that would taste the food [...]

"The surnames of the Maltese Islands: an etymological dictionary" by Mario Cassar (http://bit.ly/assayer) confirms what I'd read elsewhere, it's called an "assayer". "food taster" is most commonly used though.
That's based on Codeigniter, right? How do the two compare?
Where's Apple going to go? T-Mobile? They have even less 3G coverage than AT&T. They could go to major effort and redesign the radio to be able to get on Verizon or Sprint, but considering every other worldwide market they target is GSM I don't really see that happening (other than a few prototypes to light a fire under AT&T).
Jack Welch Management Institute
Well it was originally a fork of CI. Version 2 was a recode but using the same inspiration. Version 3 is another rebuild but a more developed version of the idea (i.e. unrecognisable from it's CI origins).

It's about preference I guess: Kohana takes advantage of a lot of the PHP5 extra's and also unfucks some of the "gotcha's" CI had (especially in the area of loading stuff). Also it is updated more regularly and is community developed.

CI is still good, I personally prefer Kohana's way of doing it.
Microsoft to open up 'black box' programming languages
I agree that advantages for developers and businesses are key to success in the long term, for any platform.

But I don't agree that openness of the platform is necessarily the exclusive nor primary way of doing that — it's just a way of doing that.

Right now, Apple's platform is clearly offering key advantages to developers and businesses, in spite of not offering a very open platform.

Personally, I hope both Google, RIM and Palm manage to catch up in this department. Strong competition between these vendors should offer plenty of incentives for them to improve their own platforms.

Apple certainly seem to need a bit of extra motivation to improve the train-wreck that is the AppStore approval process — right now I think their success is blinding their ability to see many of their flaws.
Does compression have any even minor security implications that would legitimize this?

The quote you gave said that anti-virus apps might do it to "minimize(sic) CPU operations" rather than for security reasons.
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Free Download: 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss (Audible)
I think you'll find that programming ability and vision go hand in hand. So when you talk about "brilliant people ... who truly think the two outcomes on the right are the only possibilities", by definition they are unlikely to exist in significant numbers. Brilliant programmers don't believe that academia and large corporations are the only two possibilities. They wouldn't be great programmers if they couldn't see past two obvious possibilities.
The Two Switches
> Right now, Apple's platform is clearly offering key advantages to developers and businesses, in spite of not offering a very open platform.

It absolutely blew the competition out of the water, so yeah, that's what the 'key advantages' are. Everyone had been muddling along with their fiddly Nokia interfaces, which aren't bad, but nowhere near as nice or cool as the iPhone.

However, Android looks to be 'good enough' in terms of competition, much like Windows was 'good enough' when competing with the Mac, and much more open in terms of what it ran on. The big open question for me about Android is fragmentation. With j2me staring them in the face, it's something they have to be thinking about a great deal, and I'd really love to know what they actually think about it.

In any case, between a closed, proprietary platform and an open source one, I know where my own loyalties lie. There is tons of work in this field, and I will simply not bother with mobile if it ends up being 'owned' by Apple.
Do tell, I hadn't heard about it until now.

http://hadoop.apache.org/avro/docs/current/
"Avro is a data serialization system."
The definition of a killer app is one where somebody will buy the platform just to use your app. By its nature it makes you choose a platform.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application
There have been more than a few studies on the way the Washington Times news room works. This is the Moonie owned paper we're talking about here. And while I'm hesitant to beat a dead horse lately about posting and trolls and the subjective nature of what constitutes news for hackers, this doesn't exactly jump out at me as hacker news. It looks like political trolling.
Actually we've been through that. Not sure why it (thankfully) stopped.
Here is the sieve of erastosthenes in logo:

http://logo.twentygototen.org/HxD0BYNH

And this is rather surprising

http://logo.twentygototen.org/PQD5ksVB
Top Twitter Lists for Tech
They've been cropping up on just about every site (with adverts) that I visit recently. Im glad it's not just me!
Are really all of us hackers superhumans? Hands up, who has created a revolutionary new algorithm as part of his day job?

I've really started to dislike this self-congratulory style of postings ("managers are stupid, hackers should rule the world").

So we can understand computers. Guess what, it isn't rocket science. OK, maybe it is kind of rocket science - but the reason other people don't understand it is simply because they are not interested, not because they are somehow inferior.