skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
new programming languages. Here's one that really gets me.

New programming languages aren't really coming up with anything that's particularly new. They're just solving the same problems in different ways. This is one area where I would be absolutely against taxpayer funding.

Consider if we decided to constantly invent new spoken languages, in order to communicate with each other more concisely. Maybe English 2.0 would come with 50% less ambiguity and 20% less verboseness. Maybe version 3.0 would do away with the letters Z Q X. Would that be a good use of taxpayers money? Shall we also fund all the translation of libraries books to the new language?

Constantly inventing new programming languages (I would say) often does more harm than good.

The issue is that furthering science clearly has benefits to society. Making yet another open source hip language probably doesn't.

People enjoy hacking. Things get built usually because it's enjoyable, or because there's a real need for it. I think the current situation works pretty well.

Just my 2c on the subject.
Not to mention that when the topic is "whacked-out product ideas some people speculate Apple is making", the most reasonable assumption has been vaporware.

And yes, the most reasonable assumption has not always been borne out - Apple has released items like some wild rumors now and again. On the other hand, Google announced Gmail on an April 1st, but I hope nobody is waiting for a call-back on eir application to work at the Google moon base.
Technically speaking, most corporate leaders are psychopaths, not sociopaths.

A sociopath has conscience, empathy, and ethics but his differ radically from those of mainstream society. For example, a gang member who'll kill someone in a rival gang-- breaking the law in most societies-- but would take a bullet to save his mother, is a sociopath-- not a psychopath.

Psychopaths are selfish and devoid of any conscience or empathy. However, they're very manipulative and often skilled at playing within society's rules, which sociopaths rarely do (because they have so much contempt for society). Dr. House might be considered a very mild sociopath, but he's not a psychopath: he's never cruel, and he has very strong ethics, but absolutely no regard for the ethical principles society expects him to hold.

The difference is that sociopaths reject society's superego and conscience but still have their own. Psychopaths have none. So the corporate barons and media moguls are correctly typed as psychopaths, not sociopaths.

Otherwise, good article.
The ACPO (Assoc. of UK Police dept's) doesn't ban live recovery, it just says you have to do it with an approved process and an approved tool, which rather validates the basic idea behind Cofee.

Suffice it to say, the US isn't as weird about live recovery. The idea that an untrained LEO should unplug a target computer from the wall is very 1990's-era guidance.
A key sentence lurks at the bottom of the article:

"The hackers, however, have not released source code for the program, which would make it easy for anyone to see if the program contains malware that might also harm a computer or allow the attackers to take control of it."

Hmmm.
>> "Because if the elements are images, they can be cached locally or called remotely -- thus speeding up the process of zoom in real-time."

Can you explain that a bit more, I don't understand at all what you're saying.

CSS: Create a ton of elements to have a :hover style that adjusts the background image positions.

JS: use a mouseover handler and adjust the background image positions. No need for all those extra elements and :hover rules.

>> "there's nothing that JavaScript can do that CSS can't do better."

I'm not really sure if you're joking here or what.
This is a great photo essay on bicycles in Amsterdam:

http://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/
I used carbonite in early 2006 and the software was horrible. Eventually, I tried to uninstall and the process failed. I got a half installation that wouldn't work and couldn't be removed. I didn't try too hard after that, because I was planning to format and start over.
Wherein Aaron Swartz further confirms his status as a petty intellectual tyrant, pathologically obsessed with setting up nonexistent us-vs-them, good-vs-evil dichotomies.
> You assert that the discussion is immediately over once the word 'sexism' is mentioned, with no proof to back up this assertion.

Once people agree that sexism is the problem, useful discussion ends. You can still argue about whether it's sexism, or you can argue about solutions for solving sexism (see: Gender Studies). Neither one of those are likely to help you discover the real reasons why this particular woman found so much more success with a male pseudonym.

As for proof-- see most of this thread. Rather than discussing solutions or looking for explanations, it's mostly attempts to challenge the assumption I quoted.

> Why does 'sexism' immediately and irrevocably equate to "vague 19th century ideas about gender"? What word would be more productive? Why?

The article itself doesn't actually use the word. neilk used it as a fairly accurate summation of what was implied by the article.

She suggests that activism is the answer (and goes on to say she doesn't have the time for it). Activism against what? Apparently, according to the article, 19th century stigmas, which are defined circularly as whatever made people not hire her until she chose a male name.

I'm simply doing what most of the posters here did subconsciously and am challenging the assertion that "sexism is the problem," not because it's wrong, but because it's not meaningful.
FTFY: Edward Robinson
Doesn't this depend on where your definition is taken from? I remember reading in something reputable (or it might have been a BBC Radio documentary) that at one time they were synonyms for the same thing, but that one was used in the USA and other was used elsewhere. This has to be taken with a pinch of salt as my memory appears to be very vague on this. I'm sure though that historically they have been used to describe the same condition and that differences in their usage have only appeared recently.
Very nice job on a $4,500 budget. I am impressed with your results.

It stands to reason that everyone is different and some people will not care one way or the other about this, some will hate it and think it’s dumb, and some will think it’s heaven on earth. I think when you hire if you look for the type of person who truly appreciates this type of environment as much as you do you will have a much better team for yourself. I think that someone who finds this workspace as invigorating as you do will excel in this environment more than they would in a drab one and may end up producing at a higher level than someone who does not.

This color scheme and attention to detail is not for everyone, but it is for you and your company--it sets you apart. It really seems to set the tone for your company culture right now and I think you should stick to your guns on this plan as you grow larger and try to hire those who share your appreciation for it. Build a GOOD TEAM.
Depends what happens after death.
Are you working on this film, or in the industry?
That's also the story behind the name of "Blondie24", the AI checkers bot. They started with some handle like Jedi123, but no one would play them online...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blondie24
10 years ago there was no iPod. Even mp3 was not that popular. It was when Napster started.

10 years ago there was NO way you could have video on the internet. Real streaming was a joke.

10 years ago, people were still using Altavista and getting internet access through AOL CDs.

10 years ago, Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB of space.

10 years ago, there was no genome sequencing complete.

10 years ago, cell phones were small, but they couldn't do much besides talking and texting. Remember how they looked like? Motorola's Startac was pretty modern, and it didn't have a LCD screen. Color displays were a dream.
I'm fairly certain that won't work. With a field strong enough to erase media in a doorway sized opening, you will feel the effect on objects you are carrying. The keys in your pocket for instance.
[ ] Your normal people do use Mac OS X Leopare
[X] Your normal people do not use Mac OS X Leopard

Time Machine is the solution: everyone gets it (at least the normal people I introduced it to).
Yeh I know you have an easier time of it in the US.

ACPO guidelines are awkwardly worded at best; CPS asks us to steer clear of live work. This is the crucial line: In exceptional circumstances, where a person finds it necessary to access original data held on a computer or on storage media, what person must be competent to do so and be able to give evidence explaining the relevance and the implications of their actions.
LEO's hate the idea of what exceptional circumstances could mean. And for the most part none of the police seizing machines have the competence to explain what they did and the implications.

Most of the hi-tech crime SOP for law enforcement here (which was co-written originally by my current boss) asks to avoid live acquisitions.

I obviously cant be specific but very few cases involve live data (of this type) and those that do usually never make it to court or are dismissed fairly quickly.

(the main problem are defence teams with no technical knowledge who hire "specialists"; they will nitpick at every process undertaken if they can't pick at the evidence. This happens a lot and live evidence would be a field day for them)
According to this:

http://www.mental-health-matters.com/index.php?option=com_co...

Psychopath is not a technical term.
That logic is quite odd. I'd rather have a data point saying "I sold a house like yours for $300k", than a smiley face. What does a smiley face tell me?
Does anyone understand why?
The 1990->2000 change seemed more impressive than 2000->2010 because we'd come to expect rapid change after the '90s. So nothing that has happened in the past 10 years was especially surprising in the way the Internet would be from a 1986 perspective. (When I first learned about the internet, as a 6-year-old in '89, I never thought I'd actually be able to use it until college, which seemed ridiculously far away.)

I think we're accelerating on a linear graph, but decelerating on a log graph, due to a lack of investment in science and technology compared to previous eras, and also due to the social and economic catastrophes that were seeded in the '80s and came to roost in this decade.

The 2000s was a "weak" decade, but still not a bad one, all considered. This is similar the 1930s were better than most of the 19th century, but seem awful by comparison to now (or even the '50s). Technological progress has finally reached a point where even society's "bad" decades (e.g. 2000s) are good.
Jury is still out on that one.

There's a good chance the so-called "Google Phone" is just going to be another unlocked device Google sells to developers (the third such device), not some kind of game-changing phone retail strategy.
Paid ? Seriously.
Shrug

He said the article was based on speculation... and it was based on speculation. It was a weak article. It just happened to turn out to be correct.
Red, White and Sacrebleu: How American Wines Shocked the World
Funny, I noticed the game-like quality of the ads, but assumed that it meant they had finally reversed the relationship between games and movies. Like, they were releasing a very expensive game and the movie was just a giant ad.
It's helpful to boost signal for this message. It's an old message, but planning and practicing system restores can be as expensive in terms of equipment and manpower as actually making the backups. This leads to a lot of neglect.
Fireworks do an almost as solid job with a mechanical trigger; though you do risk hurting someone (and the legal consequences therein).

We had a machine a while back with a Firework strapped to the underside of the HDD and something like a lighter mechanism attached to the case side (it was a dell). Must have been hell to put together safely but when pulled apart the firework lit and went off. Fortunately it dropped off the HDD before exploding properly so the drive was only partially damaged (the platters were ok).

With a bit more of a solid construction it might have been successful.

A low tech solution anyway :)
A Government Program that Save US Housing Without Costing the Government a Dime
I've recently given a lot of thought to shifting from "Joey" to "Joseph" as my day-to-day name. I'm reluctant, but if you're theory is right, it seems like it would command more respect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBUc_kATGgg

I dedicate to you the 4-th verse of this song.
I've read all of the series in ribbonfarm, what I was looking for (in my poorly phrased english) is pointers to other related resources.
the "Art of Operations" suggests a book or similar that you are referring to - is there one, or am I reading too much into some double quotes?
a little while back, possibly through hn, i found an artist who took 2 or 3 still photos simultaneously from different perspectives. kind of like a...dang, i'm failing at google and wikipedia today....you know the camera with two lenses that provides a 3d effect, only that requires looking at each image separately with each eye.

the artist in this case turns the two images into an animated gif.

spooky cool effect. i'm trying harder to find the link.....(eit)

still can't find it!!!

a much cooler post by the OP

http://www.romancortes.com/ficheros/starry.html
I don't agree. Nowadays I'm practically forced to communicate with people using Gmail accounts, which means that my mail is scanned at Google against my will. This is not much different from being forced to communicate with people using Word documents.
Your basic points are good ones with which I don't disagree (the studio system did turn out a lot of junk and classic story-telling does stand in a class by itself). Insofar as I implied otherwise in favor of what might have come across as a nostalgic view of the past, I stand corrected.

If I were to rephrase my basic point, I would say that (in my view) technology, however good, is less important to good film-making than are other creative elements such as good story-telling. Thus, if film producers have limited resources to devote to a project and pour most of them into expensive technology as opposed to paying for quality scripts, story lines can and do suffer, as do the films associated with them. I think that has happened a lot in recent years but will grant that it is subjective on my part (there are, of course, a good number of original, quality scripts around in today's movies, with Pixar's output coming to mind among others).
I might be wrong, but doesn't this describe Google Go's interfaces as well? As in, the data structure of an object is independent of the functions/methods that can operate on the object. At least that's how I understand it right now (having never used it). And the type of a thing is related to the set of functions (matched by name) that are expected to work rather than the data's memory structure.
http://web.archive.org/web/20071214194820/http://feayn.org/~...
Another good point is that fairer skin is, and has long been, a sexually desirable trait. A pharaoh has his pick of anyone he wants.
This is incredible. Have there been any other documented cases where a MSFT,GOOG,etc. has been caught stealing code red handed?
What about the wall on the right? How did he do that? It's as if it's an animated image, just just changing positions of an image.
Dynamic linking feature is huge. One of the reasons C simply cannot go away is because it's the only fully portable medium for implementing algorithms and generic libraries: everybody loves talking to C libs. (zlib, cairo, libcurl, high-perf drivers for databases and so on)

Dynamic linking allows Haskell to graduate from the ranks of "glue languages" into a truly universal medium to develop libraries in. I just hope that Haskell-generated .so files can automatically initialize their runtimes (is there a Linux version of Windows DllMain?)
involve nearly everyone involved no matter their position flying straight through the actual words on screen into some higher dimension...

Yes, I am frustrated by the same thing. That is exactly why I was disappointed by the article, because the comments about activism and 19th century stigmas lead directly down that path.
On 99designs
Could it be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy
Probably this one: http://www.cssquirrel.com/2009/12/04/the-parallax-header-how...
You just can't copyright a design -- and that is why there are so many knockoffs.

That's because design is an area covered by trademark, not copyright. You can trademark a design if it's distinctive or innovative enough, at least in the U.S., and have protection from imitation. You don't even have to register a trademark to establish rights, you can declare your rights simply by using the (TM) symbol, although you do have to register in order to defend the rights in federal court or claim international protection.

http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/register.jsp

From a whois check on their domain name, however, Plurk Inc. appears to be Canadian. Anyone have details on the what differences there are in the Canadian trademark system?
> so we're satisfied with getting Twitter-sized updates every 10 seconds on a thousand different topics.

At least for local news, I'm happy about twitter-sized updates. This way I can get a gist of what's going on without the unnecessary details. For example:

Gunman shoots 3 people in X town

I now know that a gunman shot three people in X town, but I don't have a name, face, etc. If I end up on a jury I'm less biased towards saying that the defendant is guilty. Normally local press would try to pack as many details as possible into this report, when a gist is really good enough (at least until there's a trial).
Y Combinator: Bookmarklet RUNESCAPE
GP didn't dis comics, he's dissing filmmakers who can't tell the difference between a comic and a movie.
And what happens when the immigrants default on the loans?

Oh yeah, the taxpayers will just pick up the tab!
So I guess he's correct, his idea does not cost the government a dime. It just costs all of us a quarter when it goes south.
I agree. Those characters make me feel like this movie is a Sci-Fi Channel Original.

Definitely excited to see the new film techniques though.
good article, worth reading just for this quote by bill paxton:

“The words ‘No’ and ‘That’s impossible’ and phrases like ‘That can’t be done’—that’s the stuff that gives him an erection"
I had a similar yet strangely opposite experience. I was able to get a job this summer after a lot of persistence on my part. Only after a week or so they bring out the paper work which I would need a parent to sign. They thought I was 13.
Today's URL shorteners are yesterday's redirect links. Used to be that we hated redirects and avoided them if we could; now Twitter has suddenly made them cool. If you get people to use your redirects/shortener you gain access to all those delicious traffic analytics on where the eyeballs are going today. Hence the land grab by google and fb in what used to be bitly's private domain.
> Of course a few dissidents who were turned in by Google to face long prison sentences in countries with oppressive regimes might have something to say about the track record of the "do no evil" policy, but somehow everyone already forgot about that.

No offense, but saying that they were 'turned in' is a little loaded. The governments queried Google for identities and got them. I never heard of a story where Google was actively searching for dissidents to turn into the government like some sort of bounty hunter.
Best read of 2009!
The title is "On 99designs" and the article contains no swear words.
Quite:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Female_authors_who_wro...

Although, Anne Rice is on that list and her real name is apparently Howard Allen O'Brien, despite actually being female: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Rice
Not over any significant length of text and it's not going to be tremendously aberrant. The text of Gadsby is easy to google, try tossing a chapter or two into a letter frequency counter. The resulting histogram still looks a great deal like what you'd get for plain English.
do you mean include a plain text and html message...and only one will shop up depending on the email viewer? where can i find out more about this and other best practices wrt sending email newletters and progress reports to users?
Blaming iPhone hardware or AT&T's network misses the point
A poor backup becomes a poor restore, while a good backup isn't necessarily a good restore. It's like quibbling over whether I said, "his car was completely totaled in the race" rather than, "he didn't win the race." No one thinks that not crashing your car implies that you've won a race, but you can't win a race with a crashed car.
You can count on it!
Industry. I wish I worked for James Cameron!

EDIT: here are the articles I had wanted to include earlier. Variety interview with Cameron is light on technical detail but addresses other filmmaking concerns (like how it affects the editing process): http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117983864.html?categoryid=...

And this white paper from Autodesk (who supply software tools for this, and who are a primary tech vendor for Avatar): http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/stereoscopic_whitepape...
I think you're right, and diN0bot was referring to "Wiggle stereoscopy".

Here's a few more examples, that to me are more effective than the one on the wikipedia page:

http://www.stereomaker.net/sample/ani/ani_e.htm
> land grab by google

If anyone else was confused by this, I believe it is in reference to http://goo.gl

I had not heard of that project until just now. It's nice to see they're giving it some thought rather than just slapping something together, but I'd love to see "longevity" added to the project goals.
> Microsoft didn't ban other office suite products from working on Windows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
You should give this post a useful title.

Also, what do you mean by "signage"?
I think it turns into a space once one of you gets funded: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/look_out_tinyurl_bitly_...
Commuting: The daily drudge
I couldn't read the non-English portion of the post, but I took it only for the face value; being clever. Not necessarily better.
Cool effect. Creating this type of 3D effect for any arbitrary image, however, is much harder since you need to manually splice out individual images and sprites, compute position coordinates, and generate the various CSS3 styles and DOM elements.

It would be cool if there was some kind of utility/library to help do this.

Also, I'm not quite familiar with all the new features of CSS3. Which CSS3-specific constructs are being used here? Looking at the source, the main things I see are just many hover styles being declared, with specific positions and dimensions.
I'd like to read about the sources for your views of these two terms. I have never been able to find a clear definition of the difference. Wikipedia for example, redirects from Sociopathy to Psychopathy. So there at least, the terms seem interchangeable.

Your take is not one that I have heard before, but I am interested to know more.
Not sure what you mean, but as far as I can tell, you're saying that images loaded with JavaScript won't be cached by browser(>>cached locally<<)? Though I'm not a JavaScript Ninja, but I think that JS loads images by manipulating the DOM of a page: creating new elements, changing attributes/style. If that's what you mean, then I'm sure that all modern browsers cache these images as well. Or have I completely misunderstood you?