skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That IS scary. I too rely on Google Calendar completely. Thank you for the alert. From now, perhaps I'll check the 'agenda view' first thing in the morning every day.
Kiko resurrection?
I haven't seen the study, but I could believe it. This isn't really what the article talked about, but I caddied for 6 years as a teenager, and during that time, I developed an ability to read the distance to the pin within 5 yards before I even looked at the yardage. I was this accurate from up to 230 yards out. I'm in my mid-20s now and I play golf maybe once or twice a year. I've found that I have lost all distance perception then, even though my vision is still 20/20.
How old are you?

Next month I'm turning 30 years old and a couple weeks ago I was diagnosed with myopia. 0.25 of it, and 0.50 of astigmatism.

The doctor said that I should only wear glasses when on the computer, and I thought "shit... the whole day then".
Infrared space telescope launched from California
Search clearly isn't the answer. Can you create a search term that encompasses all of your interests? I hope not.

Surely filtering the "fire hose" with the query "programming news" will not yield satisfactory results.
I am never surprised to see that software patent trials are always filed in the eastern district of Texas. I wonder how successful these would be if done in any other court district.
This is my favorite part of the article:

Intellectual property is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy. The primary reason for this has been the success of the U.S. patent system in allowing the innovative company in a field to develop and market its new inventions without having competitors unfairly profit from the innovator's hard work," says Dr. Doyle.

As far as I can tell, this company doesn't market or sell anything, except patents. So who are their competitors?
The nice thing about Google Calendar is it supports iCal and various other standard protocols to get your calendar out. You can even import it to Windows Calendar. So you are not limited to relying on Google for updates, just set up synching with any service or application that supports iCal and configure that application to give you alerts.
The point is that MM/DD/YYYY is really terrible idea, and that either one of these suggested options are FAR better than the posted date.

Guess what, DD/MM/YYYY is widely used and much easier to read than the american standard. So don't be a dick.
They are fighting against Google, Adobe, Apple, etc. That is ridiculous. Even the independent programmers and hackers of the web are sure to outraged over this.

If they do succeed will every site that uses AJAX have to pay them a fee? I don't think that even makes sense.
I totally agree with mahmud about uniformity of syntax and the fragility of doing things like this.

However the original post/gist was just a bit of fun! So here is the same bit of fun in Perl: http://gist.github.com/256992

use Modern::Perl;
use Url;
use JSON qw(decode_json);

# output the json as is
say http://twitter.com/statuses/show/6592721580.json;

# => He nose the truth.
say decode_json( http://twitter.com/statuses/show/6592721580.json )->{text};

First time I've played with Devel::Declare module (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Devel-Declare/) and I found it to be straightforward & an extremely powerful beast for mangling with the perl5 parser in a robust and safe way.
Ah yes, the persistence hunt: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557452

The nightmare concept of a relentless, unstoppable killer (as in zombie movies and the Terminator) appears to be based on us.

Our bipedalism and big brain from a high protein diet also seem related to this. It seems to have given us our human qualities, yet also feels so very unrelated to those human qualities.
Google Releases API for Cool Visualization of Data Mashups from Many Sources
thanks. I'd upvote your reply to me, but my upvotes don't count hint, hint
There was a story not long ago about an octopus in a German aquarium. Apparently, the museum noticed that a particular lamp was always broken. With the help of surveillance, they discovered that every night, an octopus in a nearby tank would climb his tank to an elevated position and shortcircuit the lamp by spitting water on it. The lamp had been disturbing the squid's sleep, causing it to take active measures.

They display extraordinary intelligence for such a 'different' creature. As far as I know their nearest related species is the spider, which also displays a very high degree of aptitude for its kind.

Edit: Here's the story: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3328...
More foreign-born professionals leaving the U.S.
Google moving forward on Nexus One smart phone
Well... there are two ways to ensure that there are no modifications to the original software. One is to ask politely. The other is to enforce the license. I get the impression that if it was never enforced, there would be some companies who simply say - "yeah, we're using the original source, go away" whether they modify it or not. Since publishing the unmodified source is neither hard, nor time consuming, I think it's perfectly reasonable to enforce it on everyone.
I don't think computers can help anyone find truly interesting things. An algorithm would have to be really complicated to discover the fact that just because so many people are interested in New Moon, or Tiger Woods, that doesn't mean I am.

When "relevancy" algorithms are attempted they don't do nearly as good a job at serving niche groups as "community" moderated algorithms such as HN.

HN is an algorithm, in which each person's brain is an equation that estimates the "worth" of piece of information. As a result the final product is an extremely complicated result of "equations", as it were, that are good at finding relevant information.

I don't expect computers to be good at doing that for another ten years or so.
I read the headline completely wrong (metaphorical nearsightedness) and expected an article about why everyone is taking actions that hurt them in the long term...
In C# you can do thing like

users.Where(u=>u.Score>1000).OrderBy(u=>u.Name);

That would be pretty verbose if you had to declare each function seperately.
The Atkins Diet
Tesla hopes long car trip ends 'range anxiety'
I bet their millions make them sleep very comfortably.
I wonder if taking on so many extremely wealthy defendants will precipitate a real shift in US IP law. It is noted that Eolas beat Microsoft in court on this patent, but now they are basically daring the defendants to unite and defeat this one way or another.
only for google products at the moment
Why Betting on IPhone Over Android Is Wrong
Im guessing $500 Million makes a fairly comfy mattress :(
Because a lot of the sports they screen illegally are
pay-per-view.
When I was in Boston I loved my ~30 minute bike commute. That could be extended if I wanted to take a long way home and see a bit more of the Charles.

I now live in Toronto, a few hundred yards from where I work. I really miss the bike commute. :(
A second-generation Nigerian scam!

Apparently so many people have been taken in by the original, that it's worthwhile trying to target them specifically in a second round.
I've had problems, but only with recurring events; I wasn't getting reminders for those so I made them one-time events and dragged them to a future date upon notification.
In the same way that everyone stopped driving their cars when seatbelts became mandatory?
Be double sure and set up an SMS & email reminder & confirm that Google calendar forgot about it altogether, or just that something went wrong with the email somewhere
Foreign-Born Workers Finding Better Jobs, Lower Unemployment Abroad
Dosh Dosh: How to Create Successful Product Websites that People Love
I don't think computers can help anyone find truly interesting things. An algorithm would have to be really complicated to discover the fact that just because so many people are interested in New Moon, or Tiger Woods, that doesn't mean I am.

I don't see why, in principle, the full Bayesian inference couldn't be done. In other words, automatically compute how interesting the item is based on how the masses liked it in aggregate, how individuals with similar tastes to you liked it, how similar the item is to other items that you have liked, etc.
This is a good point -- I'm several years your younger, so I guess I have plenty of time time ruin my vision between now and then. :)

That said, in my family vision seems to either go early or stay with you forever. My brother has been wearing glasses since he was about 8. My mom wore glasses for a while back in the 80's when she was working as a secretary (I think? Something that put her in front of a computer all day...), but after she left that job her vision quickly restored back to 20/20. Now, as she's getting older, she sometimes needs reading glasses, but I think that's more a function of age than anything else.
That's pretty much what we have now, except we haven't really made it so that the monkeys picking out the good information are being rewarded proportional to the value they create. Right now, it's the monkey who can put the most ads in front of the most monkeys who gets the banana, not the monkeys who find the most worthwhile information from the most obscure sources.
Depending on the reading of the patent, one could argue this covers the entirety of the browser => server request cycle and not just AJAX. Obviously this is absurd, but perhaps more so is that the patent system upholds this kind of nonsense. I wonder if the patent office reviewers have any perception of how their collective foolishness can disrupt the marketplace for good and evil. I was hoping to argue that this lawsuit may further the adoption of WebSockets (http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/) but after reading portions of the patent I have to say that I wouldn't be surprised if Eolas claims WebSockets fall under their ludicrous jurisdiction of "clients manipulating data objects".

Here's a decent sitepoint article on the matter: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/11/05/violating-eolas-aj...
Typography in Art
Did MS actually pay out the $500m yet?
I know... what bugs me is that they found out about it so easily, I thought I had my tracks covered pretty good.

Better pay up I guess.
I thought Justin.tv did away with popup ads... and yet there they are again?? :)

Anyway.. a lot of the channels they must know about! they broadcast film/tv regularly...
As far as I know their nearest related species is the spider

A cephalopod's ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod ) closest relative is an arachnid? I don't think so.
An algorithm would have to be really complicated to discover the fact that just because so many people are interested in New Moon, or Tiger Woods, that doesn't mean I am.

A Naive Bayesian text classifier could easily learn that. If you fed it news stories that you are interested in it would quickly discover that you never click on stories about Tiger Woods.

It would then classify incoming news for you.

In fact, my old email project POPFile has been adapted to support things like RSS and NNTP filtering with ease.
Simple doesn't mean Easy.
R Graphical Manual
They have more humanity than their creators; a common SF trope. That does make me wonder how long it'll be before they start hooking up cleverbot to disguise their links in legit-sounding replies to other comments.
If I were trying to scam someone in, e.g., France, I would not bother to invent a plausible-sounding department and name. I would just use Google to find a story about a French financial scandal that quoted someone I hadn't heard of, at a particular department.
US patent office must be full of idiots.
I spent most of my childhood either running around outside or reading books -- I barely watched TV and never touched a computer until I was 12.

I'm pretty sure that has a lot to do with my perfect vision. All of my friends wear glasses, and they all grew up watching TV and playing console games. Not only were they indoors, looking at a screen a few feet away, but that screen was very fuzzy, not even requiring or allowing them to focus sharply.

I'm really interested to see if the advent of HDTV will actually help in the future.
Once you've trolled a couple patents, you come up with catchy platitudes that make the issue seem less one-sided to the uninformed.
iPhone and Snow Leopard Server's failure to communicate
A "good programmer" hasn't been defined, has it? Does it mean an architect, designer, tester, integrator, debugger, coder?
Each of these requires a different skill set. Very few have all of these skills. Some are nearly mutually exclusive.
I know for instance that a good tester (worth their weight in gold) has almost completely orthogonal skills to a good developer. The tester focuses on regression, corner cases, code coverage, etc. The developer is sprinting toward a goal.
I've had some limited experience hiring - 15-member teams for startups. My approach is to fill out the skill set, put them in a snug environment to promote communication and collaboration, and then monitor the heck out of the progress. My job then is to keep them on track, make sure all the holes and cracks are addressed, and mediate disagreement.
I've repeatedly hired (different startups) a plodding, methodical, university-educated, by-the-book programmer to crank out database schema with its 200-plus-dialog query frontends. And an inspired, chaotic, brilliant, chronically sleep-deprived developer to write the 100,000+ lines of code a year we needed to get to the next funding stage. In the same team. In the right environment these guys even learned to respect and admire each other.
How does it work? Technology itself
dates back at least to 1999 when XMLHTTP ActiveX control for IE was released, or even 1996 when IFrame became available.
Poster-boy for AJAX—GMail—appeared in 2004, the term itself was coined in 2005.

They were able to get patent for it in 2009. Hmmmm.
Services like Amazon's S3 and Rackspace's Cloud Files are well worth the $0.15 to $0.30 a month that it takes to keep a backup of most websites. Better yet, keep a copy in each service and avoid problems that could occur from either service. If your website is static then you could actually serve directly out of either service in case of an emergency.
Of course, even if it's limited to the exchange provided by XMLHttpRequest, the proto-AJAX technology was released as an ActiveX object in 1999: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmlhttprequest#History_and_supp...

So, considering that they filed this patent in 2002, there are three years of prior art to consider.
Same here never had an issue.
I completely agree. How could this point have been missed by the USPTO? Does copyright really not factor into patent decisions? It's infuriating.
Reuters: Google phone with T-Mobile contract in Jan
The U.S. Civil Rights Movement as an Insurgency
Cross post from TechCrunch:

Justin.tv employee here.

I want to clear up two things. First, we get more uploaded video than YouTube by about 30% (yes, I am serious) and monitoring all of it is not feasible. Over 150 copyright holders (ex. MLB, ESPN, etc) have access to a tool that lets them instantly remove videos. The request is filed as a DMCA take down notice and processed immediately. We do not take any delay for human processing, it's immediately removed. We could process normal email messages, as other companies do, and take down the videos several hours later. That offers a substandard solution for live content though, so we added this extra level of protection.

Second, the live fingerprinting is a double trigger system. We send our scans to Vobile, who matches it against copyright holders who have allowed us to scan for their content. That is running with Fox and has been tested with the NFL/NBC.

In the screenshot you posted, many, if not all of the rights holders for those broadcasts could choose to remove them instantly.
use rememberthemilk.com

its very reliable, also it can remind you via IM or SMS
Why the editorializing in the headline? The article itself makes no mention of the phenomenon being "perplexing." In fact it identifies a likely (and fairly obvious) cause -- increased computer usage -- right there in the subtitle:

> A study finds that 17% more Americans have myopia than 30 years ago. Close-up computer work could be a reason.
Breaking a rule or two (or turning a blind eye to users that are breaking a rule or two) in an attempt to get large is a tried-and-true startup strategy. If you get large, you'll hopefully have access to the resources required to figure out a way out of your mess, and if you don't - well, most startups fail anyway. This is actually an area where startups have an advantage, because more established competitors have something to lose.

An example: the online mortgage lead generation companies were breaking every regulation in the book when they started - mainly due to ignorance. (Who has time to read state mortgage law?) But by the time the attorney generals of various states started suing them, they had the cashflow to begin the very expensive process of getting registered as a mortgage broker in fifty different states. Worked out rather well for the bigger parties.
Somebody should keep track of all the new and unusual spam emails over the years. I think it would be very entertaining. They're obviously adapting somewhat as the internet audience becomes more sophisticated.

I find it interesting the different psychological and sociological attack vectors they use. Over the years I've become a bit of a connoisseur.

Of course there's the old dead-relative-in-Africa one (my relatives have a tendency to tour Africa and drop like flies, it seems). And the old must-escape-country routine. And the bank-account problem ones. But then there's the spammers who are avant-garde. I've gotten one from (supposedly) an elderly Christian woman just looking to give her money to a good cause and asking me for help. I had one the other week telling me that they had been conned and asking me for help retrieving their money. Then there was the one supposedly from Hotmail telling me my account was open to spam (which would make sense since the email itself was spam) and telling me to go to a special site to fix it up.

I won the Google email lottery yesterday. Good thing they're keeping up with Microsoft on this front.

I get really angry at these guys. But at the same time, it's a fascinating look into the greedy, sleazy side of humanity. There's a bit of cleverness in there that, while definitely not admired, at least should be recognized.
More ridiculous is that they're fighting against JP Morgan Chase. With a net income of 5.6 billion dollars in 2008. And assets of ~$2 trillion.

JP Morgan probably has more legal counsel than the rest of the defendants, combined.
You could easily design language that would prevent most cases of sql vulnerabilities.

It would only need SQL as first class datatype with it's own literals (let's say sql""). It should not be concatenable with strings. Strings should not be easily convertible to SQL datatype. Any other data should mix with SQL only trough formatting operator (let's say %). Formatting operator should of course provide proper escaping by default.

You'd had to write:
mysql_query(sql"SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = ?" % $id);
instead of
mysql_query("SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = ".$id);
because mysql_query() would require parameter of type sql (not string) and you could not concatenate sql with anything else.

Similarly you could prevent XSS attacks by making HTML first class datatype. You could even have native simple templating engine built into formatting operator for HTML.

Stored procedures are bad because they are not straightforward. You can't expect people to keep off the grass and walk around while the shortest path leads directly through the lawn.

Guy responsible for PHP coming up and saying to PHP developers "The Web is broken and it's all your fault." (http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3631831 ) pisses me off a bit.
Google founders are sociopaths cooperating with censorship effors of any government - including Chinese - that will ask them for that. They just have cool image, that's all. Between surfing and travelling these dudes like talking about "if there's something you need to hide, probably you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"... what is it with this naivete in the American society?
Not quite. From Google's PR: "Google URL shortener is not a stand-alone service; you can't use it to shorten links directly. Currently, Google URL Shortener is only available from the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner. If the service proves useful, we may eventually make it available for a wider audience in the future."

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/making-urls-shorter-f...
Tim Sweeney raises some PL flamebait:
--
"Are games at the forefront of physics and computer science research or forever lagging behind academia?

Sweeney reckons it's a bit of both: "Game development is at the cutting edge in many disciplines. The physics in modern games includes rigid body dynamics and fluid simulation algorithms that are often more advanced than the approaches described in research papers. Over the past 15 years, games have caught up with 40 years' of graphics research and are now leading the charge in some domains, such as practical lighting and shadowing techniques.

"In other areas, we're still stuck in the Stone Age due to ingrained technologies. The C++ programming language, used in all modern games, was hastily conceived in the 1980s as an extension to the 1970s C programming language. Many of the problems that plague computers today - security vulnerabilities, viruses, and so on, can be traced to problems in this language."
It doesn't matter when the patent was granted - it matters when it was filed.

Of course, in this case, it was filed in 2002. The patent is completely bunk.

Considering, however, the eastern district of Texas - it'll probably make it through. That is, if JP Morgan Chase doesn't fight it.
ThinkFlood Opens The Flood Gates For The RedEye System On The Rackspace Cloud
I sillily responded prior to reading the sitepoint link - that is a much better article than the OP.
Well, yeah, except you used to be able to throw up an endpoint as an asmx file and it just sort of worked. Now you are guided to create a separate WCF application. So you get a book on WCF and start reading. You create a "hello, world" app but it takes three days of playing with the config file and reading half of MSDN to get it to work. Now that you know all kinds of stuff about message and service contracts, you can't do things like pull the raw HTTP headers because it's not necessarily bound to HTTP (who's using those other protocols, again?) And, you can't latch on to just any point in the request handling because it may be any sort of request. Another week with MSDN and you've finally gotten something kind of close to what you want, which involves running with aspNetCompatibility and might as well just have been an asmx endpoint, and which would have taken about half a day's work with the old toolkit.

Not that I would know from personal experience.
Why on earth would patent-trolling Microsoft be acceptable, even 'decent'?
It has to do (I assume) with markets. They can control who sees what ad based on where they are. Not so with the internet.

Well, they can even more so with the internet, just not when people pirate via justin.tv and ustream.