skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, they say confession is good for the soul...

I've got four great kids. They're bright, curious, fun and I love 'em to bits. Thing is, I absolutely suck at being a Dad. I'm lazy, vague, inconsistent, moody and I find it all to easy to go hide in the study and respond to interruptions with "Go and play. Can't you see I'm busy".

I don't want to be like this, not one little bit, so my one goal for this year is - no excuses, work at becoming a better Dad.
When looking at birds and insects vs the way airplanes take off and land nature certainly has something to teach us.

Hummingbirds in slow-motion are amazing to watch too (and in real life of course!).
So it looks at emails and sorts them into a pile of people to contact and people to follow up with?
- move back to NY or bay area

- climb regular northwest face of half dome (currently planned for august)

- finish my data visualization project/start a new one depending on feed back

- implement an idea i've been carrying for over two years

- decide what makes me happy.
I bet he can be reached by people he considers more important than Wired journos.
It's just too bad they don't have unit tests and (thus) people are afraid to mess with the code.

Not always connected. Of the software I am using right now, only xmonad and rxvt-unicode have unit tests. Everything else, including the OS kernel, networking stack, filesystem, etc., is completely untested, but is still pretty easy to modify without breaking things horribly. I always unit test my software, but they are not necessarily essential.
VideoLAN Media Creator coming soon from the VLC people
Apple Tablet Finally Arriving in January?
Auto Parts Warehouse
Auto Parts Warehouse sells auto parts and car parts at low prices. All orders over $50 include free shipping.
Enormously long and complicated, and very hard to figure out what's going on. Many technical terms, some explained, some not, it's all rather a mish-mash, and hence totally unconvincing. Too much time and space for hidden effects.

If people want to demonstrate a perpetual motion machine it's easy. Put it in a sealed box and get energy out. For a long time. When someone doesn't give a black box demonstration, be skeptical.

If someone does have a real perpetual motion device, I have ideas for how to convince people that it really works, avoiding this problem:

http://xkcd.com/570/
I'd reword that "sales scheduling, email to crm syncing, customer followups" like this:

Schedule sales
Sync email to CRM
Follow up with customers

I think bullets would be good too, because I thought it was "sales scheduling email to CRM, syncing customer followups" or something like that. It was confusing.
Just had another look after first looking at it a few hours ago. Wow! what a difference.

Changes I noticed:
* Looks far less cluttered
* Video now works for me (didn't work previously)
* minor text/layout changes

All in all looks much improved. The video explains things much better then the page itself, I think, although I'm not exactly target audience.

Good luck :)
Google DNS tool to check your DNS servers name resolution speed
yeah, nice point. The standard way to give credit in academia is to list references throughout a work.

It's funny that on the proof it reads - 'By ANDREW WILES*'. So even there he was giving credit. It also mentions Fermat in the title, and within the first paragraph references a bunch of others.

Many open source projects use a section in their README, or a CREDITS file, or a credits link on their web pages... or a 'powered by X'. Many do all of these things.

Web pages often have a tiny link with 'made by X, designed by X, or powered by X'.

The business world often does not have this credit giving culture. Some times you might see 'coffee beans roasted by X' or other little notes on shop windows. Perhaps the employee of the month is another example.

I guess the main point of the original poster is that they would have liked to be given some credit for their work... and that they felt sad and a little depressed to see google taking their credit. They want people to know that they made that and not google - despite what the google marketing machine is telling people.

-- merry xmas
Tell HN: If it is an ideal solution, it will be costly
This has been repeated many times and it has struck me just now, so I wanted to share it. Whenever we find a contractor to do work for us, if they are the right fit for the work their price will almost always be higher than expected (i.e. very high). From now on whenever I find a provider that looks ideal, I will think about the cost implication before going ahead.

Normally I would choose to go for an expensive provider without hesitation, since the work would require less management from our side. But now I feel that a more refined plan of action requires taking that it will be 2 or 3-fold more expensive as granted, and thinking whether it is worth paying that much more. What do you think?
New goal for 2010: Make more out-of-band relationships with HN members. So far, everyone I held contact with outside these soothing orange and tan pages has been nothing but fantastic.

Happy holidays and a happy 2010!
Transparent Dynamic Optimization: The Design and Implementation of Dynamo
Why did RouteGuru never submit to Hacker News? Did they submit to Reddit, or Digg? How was I supposed to have heard of them?

However, I can feel the pain in a way: a lot of possible projects I can think of are in danger of being made redundant by some Google project or other. Sometimes I worry about my own future - will there even be things to do in the future, without the backing of a huge corporation with ginormous data centers behind it? Should I do everything I can to become part of a giant corporation now, to be on the save side?

But as Yoda says, fear leads to suffering, so probably it is best not to worry about it too much.

Also, I suppose there will always be customers who don't want to use Google out of principle. But Google will probably have the lions share.

And, Google seems to be strange in a way: they do a lot of things, but only a few things properly. Many cool projects they have just end up being incomplete and poorly tended to.
single page link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/business/24trading.html?_r...
Only way to get Japan's eMobile service working is with pon scripts, or WVdial. The redialing support is fantastic.
Also I think that the rate of descent is controlled by equalising the optical flow over the convex surface of the eyes so that it appears constant. This produces a gradually decreasing velocity profile as the insect comes in to land.
So what did you tell your friend ?
Senate approves health care reform bill
Discoveries of the Decade
about:credits
Start eating a proper breakfast.
Close some of the prospects we have; lock-in our angel round (we've been talking to them for months) and get well down the path towards series a.

Now that would be a good year.
Which plants aren't autotrophic?

As for the autotrophic non-plants -- I guess you are referring to algae and some bacteria?
And Obama is talking to the press at 8:45am EST, for those who are awake: http://www.whitehouse.gov/live
Two logic puzzles
I know that many, perhaps most, of you hate logic puzzles, especially as selection or hiring criteria. And that's fine.

However, the second puzzle on this page is, I think, particularly nice. Feel free to ignore it.
Once or twice.
i doubt anyone's that interested in my personal plans, but this is perhaps a useful exercise anyway :o)

- improve lepl: simplify configuration; better logging showing how values are bound; possibly automate tokenisation; possibly improve speed.

- return to an idea i worked on years ago to generate synthetic rhythms. at the time i didn't have enough cpu power; now i think i can use a gpu.

- long shot: develop a small language that targets the llvm and opencl (gpus) in a simple way.

- improve my web site (already 90% done). motivated by people laughing at it on reddit a couple of days ago :o(

looks like i will be spending 4 months in the usa, on a tourist visa (partner has a sabbatical), so i should have time for some of this. i also plan to visit icfp for the first time.
Productivity tools and games that are run as applets written using protocols like Ajax and Ruby on Rails. No downloads required.

The "no downloads required" part is true. The rest... not so much.
Get married. (the most ignored part while hacking away with work & startup alone)
I only regret it took me so long to make an account. Cheers everyone!
I think this idea has been worked on by a lot of people too.

Way back in Hackday India 2007 a group of guys worked on an app called Socialrouting which was hosted at socialrouting.com (it's currently down). It allowed users to mark and view routes with respect to landmarks and also allow people to update traffic in a particular area via an SMS to the SocialRouting twitter account, which was then transferred to the map on the site. I was impressed by the way Pradeep (one of the dev) gave a talk at a Barcamp about their mashup.

And now, I guess that was the idea that morphed into Mapunity http://www.mapunity.in which they are currently working on. It provides live traffic data for a few cities in India. These guys provide services to govt organisations.

P.S: I used their Traffic API in Hackday India 2009 :D thats how I know about them :)
> Is uber-productivity significantly enhanced by choosing the right development methodology (e.g. test-driven development)?

Yeees...-ish. All methodologies have their pros and cons. Therefore you should be experienced in as many of them as possible, so you know when and where they are best used.

People who only know one methodology really well tend to overdo it - they don't know when to stop shoving tests and patterns into their codebase.
That line wasn't about their response to Wired :) That was what his assistant told the Oracle's NC team when they wanted to discuss a problem about the machine with him.

P.S: You didn't read the article did you? ;)
Unix How To: Using Basename Wisely
Oops; I checked and Novamente is actually written in C++: http://www.agiri.org/wiki/Novamente_Cognition_Engine#Current...

Turns out it was Novamente's predecessor, the Webmind AI Engine, that was written in Java.
ATX3 :)
Supersized iPod Touch coming January 26th?
Twas Two Weeks Past Cloud Deployment (Here Comes Santa Cloud)
A crystallographic paper is more or less just a structure determination in a common file format (CIF - the article talks about it). There's very little in the way of interpretation.

As such, they're way easier to falsify than papers in even really closely related fields. I've spent plenty of time pulling structures from ICSD and other databases populated off Acta Cryst; my PhD was in computational mineralogy - but a raw simulation isn't a publishable result in the way data hot off the diffractometer can be.

By the way, if anyone here gets the chance to visit a neutron source (eg Isis, isis.rl.ac.uk), take it! Amaaaazing machines.
Intercepting Predator Video
The Bakugan Birthday Cake to Surprise Your Children
WordPress is awesome! It's very simple for inexperienced users learn and simple for geeks like me to dig into the code and make it do all sorts of things that if I had to create from scratch would have taken me weeks. I've used Drupal and it's ok but not nearly as user friendly as the WordPress dashboard. I know PHP is the red head step child in the minds of the Rails develpers - but when you take into account PHP's simplicity and then add in the WordPress code ex, it becomes a very powerful combination...
It looks like it's designed for a different use case than rsync, rather than being better.

I'm not sure that the space it sees between rsync, plain http, and bittorrent is a niche it can fill, or a gap through which to fall into obscurity.
1. If the poster can consider 'activation costs', he most certainly can consider the benefits for his kids. Billions of people have radically altered their lives for the benefit of their kids, it's not some remarkably difficult task.

2. Same as barren.

3. Impossible to know, and under any plausible reckoning of improvement, insufficient to make activation costs predominate.

4. Same as doesn't care.

5. Unlikely; goes against millennia of empirical evidence that people love where they live (nowadays we call that 'patriotism')

6. A fully general counterargument (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Fully_general_counterargument). You can use that to argue against anything: 'You should move away from North Korea', 'Why, my descendants might move away into it for other reasons!'; 'You shouldn't move away from North Korea, then', 'Why, my descendants might then move away elsewhere for other reasons!'
8. I plan on being happy as much as I can and maintain a positive demeanor.
I try not to read Wired too much, it just winds me up ;-)
I used to think that I was pretty good at puzzles like this.

That is, until I met a girl that just simply aced them, one after the other, and in record time at that.

It's the first time that I ran into very solid proof that brains definitely are not created equal, I've never met anybody in my life that even came close to that level of problem solving ability. It's akin to the difference between a chess grand-master and someone that just plays a half decent game of chess, some people operate on a different plane altogether, they are so good at attacking a problem in parallel from all sides at once that what seems confounding to one person is a walk in the park for them.

If you solve the second puzzle in 5 seconds or so because you simply 'see' the solution then you fall in to that group, consider yourself a very lucky person, I wonder how rare such talent really is.
Fotoxx 9.1 su LinuX
Clarification question (possible but unlikely spoiler): Can two padlocks fit on the safe at the same time?
Heh... you guys would fit in with people here if you talk about "out-of-band" relationships.
Since 1993 it's been Lucida Sans Typewriter or Lucida Console; I've not found anything better to my eyes, although I'll check out this discussion.

The only issues I've found with this font family are that the differences between l and 1 and . and , can be subtle.
Interesting. Your date of membership is also my birthday. Coincidence? I think..... so. :-/
But then you downplayed that innovation because it is only iterative. My point is that most innovation - even meaningful innovations that change the technology landscape - are iterative.
Did you know there's a puzzle called "The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hardest_Logic_Puzzle_Ever

I extended it to the general case!

http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~te233/maths/puzzles/evenharder.htm...
Stop "waiting" and start "living." Help people have meaningful online conversations with Ask My BrainTrust (http://AskMyBrainTrust.com)
Well, if you can learn from your mistakes, it will not have been a waste of time. You can use the experience of failure... or so I have heard. I have been failing as well.
Spoiler: The solution is very easy for problem # two if you're allowed to flip the coins.

I haven't worked it out since I've been up all night and had to squint just to read the problem, so I may have read it wrong. I didn't read the first question.

Have fun.

----

Edit: Just great, seeing this right when I'm about go to sleep after a long night. And it appears what I had in mind doesn't work.
Badly-presented content can be useless or misleading. Good design may not draw attention to itself when you're paying attention to the content, but it's still there. e.g. http://graysuite.blogspot.com/2009/06/consider-my-mind-blown...
I agree that they are difficult, but for me, they fall into the category of:

"I can probably solve these by long and convoluted
means, but I suspect the solution is neither clean
nor elegant and, to be frank, I can no longer care."

The beauty of the 100 coins problem is that the solution, once seen, is clean, simple and elegant, and it is possible to reason to it - it doesn't require complete inspiration from nowhere.

That's why I liked it so much. YMMV.
Making Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff
I would agree that releasing it and maintaining it as a real (even if open source) product would be a huge task, especially for a novice, but I got the impression that his goal was just to build something for the purpose of learning more about Lisp programming.
Bad idea.

Central bank independence is negatively correlated to inflation as well as variance of inflation. As such, a situation such as the United States has (with a fairly independent central bank) tends to be quite good both at reducing inflation, and at keeping the rate of inflation predictable

Further, central bank independence is also negatively correlated to average deficit as a proportion of GDP. Thus indicating that historically, the more power politicians have to overspend, the more likely they are to do it.

While I don't think the Federal Reserve system is perfect, I do think it's a vastly better system than one that essentially cedes control of the currency to whatever group happens to be governing at the moment.
Possible Apple Tablet multi touch tactile keyboard revealed
previous coverage of this subject here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000464

and here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1002227
Any time you sell a security, you are selling a security which you believe to be a bad investment. If you buy at the bottom and sell at the top, the guy you sell to will lose money.

Take their deal with Hudson Mezzanine. Goldman offered Hudson a bet: if the housing market goes down, Goldman wins, if it goes up, Hudson wins. Hudson lost. What's the problem?
Maybe not for them. Since they are so connected via the network, there maybe a higher level of consensus.

Possible. You might be able say that for them living with technology might be unambiguously better. But when it is said as a simple statement by itself it appears a highly subjective opinion, or at least very dependent on the circumstances.

Not really. Why would it have been obvious to them that the things on top are what the operator uses to see anything?

A good point and a possibility, but the humans had been there for years. If they had had advanced technology of a different kind, that exposure to the humans technology would likely have let them start figuring out how the human's technology worked, even if they avoided it.

Overall, I think the idea that they don't feel the kind separation from the planet that we do is the most plausible reason.

That is certainly a possibility. I find it more likely that they simply were at the bow and error phase of technology and had not yet grown beyond it in any direction more likely.
I disagree with the premise: there are a lot of elegant logic puzzles (consider: to mock a mockingbird), it's just that a lot of puzzles dod not fall in this category :)
Wasn't your dad like this sometimes? Mine was. I'm the same way sometimes too. Not that I'm arguing with you. Spend more time with your kids. But don't beat yourself up. Are your kids happy? Good on you.

2010 is my year of teaching my kids to play Go.
My new year begins with one month of semester holidays.

Plan:

Release one app every 15 days and spend 1hr a day iterating the app I created in the previous 15-day session.

That'll make 2 apps in one month of holidays. while the rest of the year I release one app every month to manage college and freelance work (to support the side projects).

At the end of the year I should have close to 10 apps (or maybe only 5 if i take regular breaks). And atleast one of them I hope succeeds. I took this lesson from the 2D BOY studio guys who developed World of Goo. They prototyped a new idea every week until they found a nice prototyped idea.
WordPress team releases 2.9.1 beta 1 to address PHP Curl bug
And the general reaction (on Hacker News and elsewhere) was ridicule and disbelief. Schneier explains why he thinks this is naive.
The lifecycle analysis is necessary. I guess the answer to your questions can be Yes.
Let's see. 356 days ago here, I said "The math behind signal processing; curing and drying ham and salami.".

This year, let's call it "The math behind signal processing; write a book."
Hey, I suck at it too. And it's hard to make yourself spend a lot of time and effort on something that you're not really good at, when there are other things you really excel at.

So my theory is that I suck because I suck.
Interesting.

I make silly mistakes when I am tired. I doubt more schooling would help me.
It could to without those people popping up all over the place. Other than that, awesome reconstruction of an awesome song.
Can you get the content you want to be readable on the Sony? I can't. "Freedom" is nice, but I'll often choose practical over free.
No, no. You were on the right track. Think about it with a smaller number of coins, say 4 coins and you know only 1 is Queen side up.

On the first one: I get the feeling this isn't what the puzzle was looking for, but I'd just lock the amulet up in the safe, send it to the other spy, and let them spirit it out of the country. What, does my country not have bolt cutters?

Edit: Spoiler hint for the first one: Start by sending over an empty safe with the padlock locked on only one handle of the safe.
I think Bruce is focusing too much on the technical side of this, I think it simply never crossed the mind of those that built this thing that the 'enemy' would be technologically savvy enough to pull this off.
You can now embed the WPμ engine within a Joomla 1.5 install via a plugin. No iframes. In our case, users are all authenticated through the university LDAP server. Joomla + WPmu within one consistent skin is very, very nice. Yeah, it's php, but it works.
And here you have described the difference between print design and web design. They each have constraints.
Having chatted to both of you "out of band" (heh, awesome) consider all that seconded.

It's been a mixed year (but ultimately net-good); forward the troops I say :)
Web 2.0 startups. Hosting solutions
Right choice of hosting solution is a key to efficient and cost effective operation and it depends on software and system architecture, time-line of the project, running cost, availability requirements.
15:00 Zulu time: URL is down for me: Error: 500.

Will check later.
thanks for the comments - i agree, the cover page is much improved.
I got #2, and I have a solution for #1, but I don't think it's right. Here's my non-right solution to #1:

G places the amulet in his own safe, locks it with the padlock, and keeps the key. G sends the safe to K by way of a servant. K takes the safe with him and uses whatever tools to open it at his convenience once he is safe away.

I think this is wrong, because it's not very satisfying at all. I think it could be right, because (1) it could work in real life and (2) it meets the solution criteria of the puzzle, namely, transferring the amulet from G to K.

I would be happy to know of a more elegant solution.
bullets are good - just added them.
Schneiers argument is that encryption is not a viable option because key management would be a nightmare. The insurgents get the raw videostream by intercepting it using some sort of antenna to pick up the signal directly from the predators. Since, presumably, the military actors that need the videostream don't actually pull it out of the air themselves but get it through some kind of military channel (Internet, VPN or whatever they use) wouldn't the obvious thing to do be to encrypt the raw stream from the predators to the command post where the signal is picked up by the mlitary and distributed and send it on to whoever needs it in unencrypted form? That way the insurgents wouldn't be able to pick the signal out of the air, and everyone associated with the military who needs it would have access to it. No key management nightmare needed.
What's to stop the servant from making off with the safe if they can carry it in the first place ?