skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They haven't yet done spectroscopy on it. It's mentioned as a future possibility, but right now it's not feasible to do spectroscopy on an exoplanetary atmosphere -- the signal-to-noise you get when you try to measure something as tiny as the effect of a transiting planet's atmosphere on the spectrum of a star is too damn small to be measured with today's instruments. (I just happen to have heard a talk on this very subject a few weeks ago).

Maybe in a few decades, though.
I think there's a big difference between implementers working in the open to write standards and create test implementations and keep the public informed about the progress toward standardization - as Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and Microsoft are doing with HTML5 and related efforts - as opposed to developing in secret, and launching new features fully-formed into the wild with no chance for discussion and usually no adequate spec, as both Microsoft and Netscape did during the browser wars.
Tell me about it...

Wish I could drop who it was but I'd rather not burn the bridge.

It was a ridiculous project, they had an India team that took the "just like Etsy" wording so literally that if I designed a screen that didn't look & function 100% identical to Etsy (ie: I improved it) they would have a hissy-fit. I have over a dozen emails that say "please revise to work like etsy.com. we can not move forward until design looks like etsy.com"
heard of http://stickstickbangbang.com?
Another major player I find the list missing is collectd and the plethora of various other RRD tools (even though Cacti and Nagios are there). But to be fair, his list seems ore of 'current snapshot' stats instead of logging and monitoring over long periods of times.
Do they allow in people of Indian descent with non-Indian passports?

Would it be OK if they said, "special preview for those residing within a 10-block radius (must show proof of residence)"?

It's a curious choice, but I'm not sure it's a nefarious choice. Implying it's wicked and thus broadcasting it everywhere may have done them a favor -- even if some Indians now boycott the store. What if the people prone to take offense and boycott are exactly those they don't want associated with their brand?
An anecdote is not proof, but I personally went from hating my job to loving my job, while working for the same company and doing mostly the same work for the same pay.

The difference? I went from working alone under a manager who seemed indifferent to my creative ideas and hard work, to working with a team under a manager who said "that's awesome" when I showed him my work.

Guess when I got more cool stuff done?
No, they didn't -- getting the absorption spectrum of a transiting exoplanet is an order of magnitude or two beyond the capabilities of present-day instruments. They just measured the density.

From the density, though, you can get a pretty good idea of what it looks like. There are three basic ingredients which go into making planets: rock (including pure metals), "ice" (a catch-all term which includes all phases of water along with methane and ammonia) and hydrogen/helium mixture. Everything else is too rare to worry about. Knowing (basically) the density of each of these components, plus knowing the fact that H/He mixture won't accrete to a body until its mass goes beyond a certain point, you can put pretty good constraints on what the composition of a planet of a certain mass and radius should be.

Of course we could be wrong -- it could equally well be a ball of pure argon or something; however it's hard to imagine how any such thing would form.
I really like the site, however, I would like to give this as a gift to someone and you don't seem to have a build in gift card interface. I know it's not that long till X-Mas, but it seems like a great tech gift for a reasonable price the only problem is the cool part is letting them pic the picture.
> Why then the persecution of Kulaks?

You do realize that "what Marx actually preached" and "what happened in Soviet Russia" don't have to be the same thing, right? Do you really believe that Marx preached power-hungry, paranoid rulers that execute anyone that disagrees with them (or is just 'suspected' of doing so)?

Arguing against "Marx really stood for Y" with "but X happened in Soviet Russia" is intellectually dishonest.
I thought this part was insightful: "three things that are critical to engagement: first, the scope employees have to learn and advance- are there opportunities for them to grow; second, the company’s reputation and its commitment to making a difference in the world- is this a company that deserves the best efforts of its people; and third, the behaviors and values of the organization’s leaders- are they people employees respect and want to follow?"
It scrolls faster, yes.
Half the world's languages in danger of dying out
Seems really cool. I clicked around though, looking for the price, and couldn't find it.
My grandpa was sent to labour camp merely for being a professor and having relations in Taiwan, he wasn't even very vocal about politics. My grandma avoided it by being on an expedition at the time. From their account, it didn't seem like that people were merely tricked into criticizing the state.

During the civil war, the communists has substantial support from the academics and intellectuals (think Spanish Civil War). This combined with successful economic policies during the early 50s made Mao overly confident of his support base.

At the time the Nationalists in Taiwan was still recognized as the legitimate government of China on the world stage, so Mao wanted some vocal support. To his surprise he opened the can and worms came out, which caused huge embarrassment, and he blamed it on rightist infiltration.

As a reaction he locked up "naysayers" and implemented radical ideological-based economic policies that ended up in disaster, so he stepped down for a few years. During the time his rival Liu Shaoqi became the chairman, who played with the idea of market economy and was warming up to the west.

This infuriated Mao as it implied his failure as a visionary, so he out-maneuvered Liu and launched the cultural revolution to manufacture support for his vision on a large scale. It helped him to maintain power til his death, but at the cost of running the country into the ground.
Sure, Michael says this during his testimony when talking about the DMCA.
The Surge in Electric Cars
Indeed, perhaps it would be a better way to model the problem, I considered it but perhaps rejected it incorrectly. By default Clojure uses a thread-pool for atoms so it wouldn't be a new thread for each request, the overhead is just a queue push which is not that great. It would mean serializing all the updates, but you could use fine-grained agents like I'm using fine-grained atoms.
I believe what you describe is the traditional view of management, one that is possibly on its way to being outdated.

I think that going forward, management and leadership will have to be the same thing. If either one needs to drop by the wayside, it will be the management portion. In today's world of greater efficiencies and flow of information, the traditional "manager" becomes a bottleneck, in much the same way that traditional newspapers have become bottlenecks in the transmission of news.
That's a powerful mind trick - more optimistic than the 'as if it was your last day' certainly.
> You do realize that "what Marx actually preached" and "what happened in Soviet Russia" don't have to be the same thing, right?

Looks like the no true Scotsman fallacy?
Orion Web Services for quantum computer - solves MAX-SAT,SAT,BQP,MIS,MX,CLQ
This is an Alpha release of Orion Web Services designed to introduce users to our APIs and to solicit user feedback on the usability and functionality of the system.

Orion web services allow you to formulate a wide range of problems that are amenable to quantum acceleration. Note that D-Wave’s quantum processors will not be made available in this release. Several specialized software solvers targeted at this same set of problems are included in this release so you will be able to formulate and solve problems using Orion software.

We are providing early access to our interfaces to help you learn how to use our APIs and develop applications which leverage our solvers. When the quantum processors become available your application will be able to call them by using the same APIs and program calls.

We are very interested in your feedback on the usability of the system and appreciate any ideas you have for improving the system.

Web User Interface - http://apps.dwavesys.com

Documentation is available at - http://apps.dwavesys.com/docs/orion/rest/latest/html/
blaming citizens and not government doesn't make any sense. This would imply that Americans are on average worse citizens then let's say Germans because they die in shootings 6 times as often or in car accidents 9 times as often... and what about banning guns and building safe highways? The same way in Detrit - what about giving opportunities to youth, so you don't end up with a band of criminals?
Learn to let it go ...
I've found myself watching the item numbers here on Hacker News having realised some time ago (before the item that mentioned it) that it was getting close to submission/comment number 10^6. I found myself thinking: OK, in the past M minutes there have been S submissions. I can linearly project that to predict when numver 10^6-10 is submitted. Then I can write a script that checks the projections, and when 10^6-10 has been submitted, submit 20 in a furry. I can delete the 19 that got it wrong, and I'll have the millionth submission.

So I'm sitting here not getting anything done, waiting, planning, getting ready, and this voice in my head says ...

Let it go.

Sometimes things aren't worth the effort. Sometimes the reward doesn't match the work invested. Sometimes you simply have to let it go.

It's a bit like the "Greybeard Stories" stuff I've been doing. They've disappeared without a trace here, in the very forum where I thought they would get their most appreciative audience. I guess no one really cares, so I've got to learn to let it go.

Maybe I'll come back and write more later, and maybe I'll follow the suggestion made by DanielBMarkham and gather them into a book. Or maybe someone else will do it.

Right now, I've got other stuff to do, stuff that's probably got a better reward-for-effort ration. So I'll go do that. I won't try to get the millionth entry, I won't polish my next Greybeard story. I'll go back to writing code for my project/startup.

I'll take another step towards learning to let it go.

When it's the right thing to do.
Australia provides a .id.au for individuals. .com.au is reserved for "businesses". (Since no-one (outside of places like HN) has ever heard of .id.au we either use .com or register a bus. name to get the .com.au)
Angel Financings: Five Tips for Entrepreneurs - Part 2
The way the DMCA is currently commonly interpreted, as soon as JTV makes its own decisions on what content can be on the site, it loses DMCA safe harbor provisions.

Unless that editorial control is 100% accurate and 100% effective, any error whatsoever will make JTV liable for damages.
Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster on the 2 Meg Whitmans
Something about watching Justin.tv on CSPAN doesn't feel right.
How did such a law get passed?
I'm pretty sure my cat has a plan for this. Good thing I keep him in the house.
I am always amazed at textbooks that introduce axioms and then later (or never!) show why they are interesting. Do any mathematicians actually think in this way?
Your comment "Why then the persecution of Kulaks?" implies that are you arguing against a "what Marx preached" argument with a "X happened in Soviet Russia" response. Am I confusing something here?

The "no true scotsman" fallacy would be closer to redefining "Communism" to "Marxist Communism." That's not the case here because this entire thread has been about what Marx himself believed/preached/wrote.
I was once told that the purpose of a business is to make money. I don't believe that any more. Now I believe that the purpose of a business to to make its employees happy.

It is pretty much a necessary condition, then, that you do make money, but making money does not, of itself, make your employees happy.

I'd rather have a company that makes its employees happy, and makes money becuase it's a necessary condition, rather than to have, purely as my business goal, to make money.

Management similarly. People think the role of management is to get people to do work. It isn't. It's to make people happy. If you do so without them doing any work then it won't last, so getting them to do work is necessary, but that's not the true goal.

(Note: I don't actually believe the extreme position as stated, but it is the mindset I strive for and occasionally achieve.)
Here's the jQuery branch he talks about with the new jQuery.require() asynchronous code loading function:

http://github.com/jquery/jquery/tree/omgrequire/src/

And here's a direct link to the function itself:

http://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/998cb005fc378188b3bae31...
fking LOVE it. love that guy.
Most corporate managers are fighting the last generation's war, operating under a mentality that is outdated, but pervasive at all levels of corporate America.

If you're running a plantation or a coal mine, the work is physically difficult and the rewards are minimal, so you have to be either (a) generous or (b) brutal in order to get people to work. Historically, the latter option was more popular.

Thus, we end up with the entrenched (but increasingly wrong) idea that people have to be intimidated into working, or they'll shirk: "Theory X", in management parlance. It works if you're running a coal mine; not so much for a software shop.

Of course, most bosses would rather be "Theory Y" (nurturing, encouraging) than X. Few people want to be assholes. The problem is that a manager who's permissive and nurturing will be regarded well by his subordinates, and held in good regard during good times, but if something happens outside of his control, he's likely to take blame from above for having been "too soft". Follow the ladder high enough, and at some point you're likely to encounter someone with the old mentality (or an egomaniac, or an asshole).
It's not as simple as "kill the mosquitos." What if "kill the mosquitos" meant "burn down all the forest and destroy all of the wetlands." Are you about to destroy the world to save your child?
Looks great! The custom designer works well and the available artwork is fantastic.

One thing: maybe this is just me, but the account verification email got caught in my spam filter. If I had to guess, I would say it's because the title was "hello" - kinda spammy sounding.
Compassion doesn't mean you have to throw away buckets and buckets of money. You can't claim San Francisco is doing a good job of taking care of its less fortunate unless you can back that up with some data. Even the city can't.
Close, but not quite 10^6

This would have been quite ironic if you did hit it
29 away ;)
I really like JavascriptMVC's "include" function, which can be used in two modes. In development mode it works much like "require" and loads an external script. But there's also a production mode where all "includes" are processed ahead of time and used to compile the whole application into a single file.

Obviously you need to restrict the use somewhat for this to work (no conditional includes, for example).
I strongly disagree. "Manager" is short for something longer like "Project Manager". It grates on my nerves when someone talks about their "boss", because that's exactly what a manager is not (although many happily exercise power that's not theirs to exercise).

I agree though that it's dubious to think that a manager is going to inspire. The best a manager or executive can do is to refrain from exercising power (at least as long as we have pyramidal power structures), since a lot of damage is caused by people feeling intimidated or withholding opinions.

Perhaps if a manager can be fired by non-managers as easily as a non-manager can be fired by a manager, things would be different. That's a world that I'd love to see.
How A Freshman Built CollegeHumor Into A Profitable Cultural Phenomenon
In the more common cases, you get indexes on foreign keys for free. For example, using MySQL with InnoDB, declaring a FOREIGN KEY constraint will automatically create an index on the referencing table: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-foreign-key-co...
You can dress however you want, men can wear nail polish, etc., and nobody bats and eyelash. One should not underestimate the importance of this sort of tolerance.

Ah, but try wearing a "Bush/Cheney 04" t-shirt and see what kind of reaction you get. One should not underestimate the importance of this kind of intolerance. Who cares about wearing nailpolish when you'll be ostracized for having political opinions which anywhere else would be perfectly mainstream?
Don't let ads kill your site
Dozens of accidents blamed on new traffic lights; non-melting of snow and or ice
Agreed. Except for the part where nobody seems to consider these "test" implementations. I'm not so much critical of the process as the apparent developer community attitude/reaction/expectations to a work in progress.
I'm talking about Microsoft being screwed by the contractor.

I don't disagree with that. All I was saying is that the tremendous kudos some people are giving Microsoft for this response seem to be misplaced.
Ada Programming/Generics
Justin.tv is looking for a designer who loves working on product!
Debugging the Kernel using Ftrace
Great. Now you have me watching it.
Same way as all the other terrible laws that get passed.
A Standard for Robot Exclusion
Avi, do you use Pharo as your main development environment?
And that's not a good thing -- totally trivial.
it was 8 away
Hacker News Item 999,999
sweet!
Feral humans are people too.

Can you explain to me why only rich people ought to live in cities?