skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Car CNG conversion licenses cost $10k from the EPA
Can you recommend a book on advanced statistical techniques or non-parametric statistics that's written mostly in English with a minimum of jargon?
As long as consumers force prices down companies will focus on making things cheaply to maintain their profit margins and thus their jobs.

It's easy for safety to be over looked when the bottom line is ALL that matters.

Consumers are their own worst enemy. Only regulation forces companies to comply but any politician that regulates and pushes prices up risks being un-elected.
What Is It Made Of?
If drop.io has an API you could try this:

- shorten any url with goo.gl and get only the uri.path

- create the chatroom in your bookmarklet as:

http://drop.io/chat_{shorten}/remote_chat_bar.js

- profit?
What you're optimizing for in that case is hyperlinks to articles entitled "how do i...". This is probably an SEO technique by now.
Web Laureate Insight, "Facebook: Wall2Wall2day"
There are already other services that do this.
I wouldn't say that theories we can actually prove are not science. Provable theories become approximations again when you take them out into the field. Also imagine a theory that is at first verified through experimentation, but later proven when found it relies on a mathematical relationship. In general science is not that well-defined. What matters is what knowledge the theories convey.

What most computer scientists don't yet realize is that algorithms are not that important. Their specific solution tailors to a certain context and its testable properties depend on that context. The interesting thing about Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm is not how he actually solved it, but the computational complexity of an optimal solution. If you look at it closely this is not really that interesting either. It does not tell you how to solve your shortest path problems when you're building a large-scale on-line route planner (notice all the context). It's just a little nugget of knowledge that can help you during design.

More powerful examples of computer science are Amdahl's law and the PFTK model for TCP throughput. These give us deeper understanding of the world of computation and networking that can really help engineers, the same way physical laws help engineers.
That usually means that the room does not exist. I haven't quite worked on the error pages.
This is pretty silly, isn't it? Is it that mind-boggling that data can be illegal to distribute, for example a movie or an unreleased game?

The prime number is a red herring. Given the prime number theorem, the probability that an n-digit number is prime scales as 1/log n, so it's easy to pad any data with random garbage that isn't executed until you get a prime. For a gigabyte of data that might be a few billion attempts. (Proving it's a prime will be harder.)
Right. Once you set up a non-blocking event loop, it's much simpler when you can go async all the way down.
You need to look at Erlang and Ruby then.

Ruby is a very human-readable langauge, Erlang is powerful concurrency.
Map Reduce -- How Cool is That?
I wouldn't guess. why guess? why not just not quote a number at all since you have no idea?
You should approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, instead of analogies
Malcolm Gladwell: Entrepreneurs are anything but risk-takers
I think Nokia's future is really going to be determined by their ability to make great software. There is no question that they can make great hardware, but pretty much in all cases their software is letting them down. Can this hardware engineering dominated company make the shift to an organisation that can make great software? Do the managers and executive team know how to hire, motivate and manage great software people? Beyond that: Can they get their software teams to release quality products that get deployed to end-users? Can they do effective developer support and platform evangelism?

I kind of always root for Nokia because they are a successful European tech company. Unfortunately for the past 10 years they haven't failed to let expectations down. Maybe all this increased competition will get them to make all the changes they need - they certainly sounded serious at a developer outreach event I went to last year. The event still didn't leave me convinced they understood hackers though, or how to inspire application developers to write for their platforms.
I _built_ it on chrome. You might be using an old version, I pushed a new version that should fix many of the bugs.
It rewards people for their contributions to the site.
In practical terms, citizenship does not restrict residency in Europe for Europeans.
A more relevant example, as mentioned in a linked article, is that the binary data of images such as child pornography and state secrets are also numbers and as such may be considered illegal.
Thanks for the link. I already went to school, but I'm really interested in the different ways that programming and CS are taught, so I'll check that out.
maven sucks ESPECIALLY on large, mission critical projects where repeatability and reliability are primary concerns
There are dual-core i7s with hyperthreading as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microproc...
Absolutely you are of that opinion? People should slave away their youth dreaming of the day they can retire and when that day comes they can't do anything because they're living on a fraction of what they had before? That sounds like an absolutely awful life.

As I said, I would like to see SS go away in favor of just mandating that people invest in some fund that is heavily regulated (regulating the risk, to minimize the risk of people losing their retirement money), but savings must be mandated in some form. If you don't then people simply wont do it. Then you're left with the choice of just saying "I told you so" while you watch them starve to death, or financially supporting them. Both of those are very bad options.
They call the Curta the "math grenade" for a reason...
Post-Avatar Depression, a preview of the dangers of immersive VR?
Private equity (incl VC) is about raising money, not investing it
>> "On the other hand, it wouldn't be unusual to find that 10,000 lines of Java could be written in 1,000 lines of Ruby (or Haskell, or Clojure, or...)."

Only if you're comparing "Terrbile java programmer" with "good ruby/haskell/clojure programmer".

Now that may be the same as average java programmer vs average ruby programmer. But that's not a fault of the language, it's a fault of some people using the language.
that's weird, I never had a single comment about my karma, and I have more than you.
I think the argument that "how can a number be owned or its posession be illegal" is mostly bogus. One could translate any string of text into a series of bits and back to a single number and say that a book or a picture is just a number. Then one could say that noone invented that number, and that it's just a number, so you couldn't have copyright nor protection because everything could be randomly generated, etc, etc...

I think the real issue is that in the case of prime numbers made "illegal/protected", the absurd is not that they are protected, but that they are not encoding any meaningful information that a human being produced. They are a particular number (probably randomly generated) and the fact that they are used in a particular context (to encrypt data) makes them protected.
I still don't get how a prime number can reveal hidden information. Can someone please explain me the process?
the real reward would be if the top 100 people got the ability to add live dofollow links in their profiles. that way people would get a little bit of Google juice for their sites
Alternative languages in music and programming (and some conclusions)
>> Is it that mind-boggling that data can be illegal to distribute...?

The DMCA has had an impact on the worldwide cryptography research community, since an argument can be made that any cryptanalytic research violates, or might violate, the DMCA.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac...

That is mind-boggling.
I've seen Ruby, and IMHO it's no more readable than any other language.

And as I've said I believe concurrency to be largely a self made problem you can avoid when you learn to program better.

But thanks anyway :)
Tweet It: Social Media Terms Dominate Top New Words
Everyone has opinions on politics, and the internet is full of people expressing them. There are relatively fewer sites with people expressing their opinions on startups and hacking.

If he's not 'espousing a certain point of view', I have some Paul Krugman columns to sell you;-)
Hey, that's a really good idea! Is anybody listening?
Wikipedia has links that go nowhere.

But it does still sound a bit dodgey, I think because to get accurate feedback, you necessarily need to fool people. For example, if you had a link that stated it was a proposed feature, it would affect the clickrate. Or maybe it wouldn't? Maybe interest would be enough. Perhaps this could be experimentally tested.
That puts a horrible incentive on those who would do it just for the links.

The best incentives are non monetary. Real people are motivated by them.
Tunnel Splitter: Accelerating a single TCP connection over multiple ISPs
How can an image be a number? This is an honest question.

Isn't an image a list of numbers? These numbers could the RGB of each pixel, or the N higher Fourier coefficients, etc. From these numbers, one can compute a single number, sure. Nonetheless, the idea that an image is a number and, hence, can be made illegal, looks utterly ludicrous to me due to the fact that the image -> number mapping is certainly not injective.
Key take-away from learning a prospect has already developed a competitive version of your system:

"I left Silicon Graphics feelings discouraged. But on the drive back to E.piphany a few things hit me.

o A credible customer told me that we had hit on a high-value problem

o They couldn’t find commercial software to solve this problem.

o It was an important enough problem that they invested effort to write their own software.

o It had been deployed inside their company and there were real world users

o I could now point potential investors and visionary customers to the widespread use of the product inside SGI as a proxy for our product

The more I thought about it, the better I felt. This was a validation of our ideas not a negation."
I've often thought of trying Adwords for TV. Several years ago I used to make animated commercials for cable TV and one of the major hassles was getting airtime on cable stations. Has anyone tried it?
Off topic, but I don't know where else to post this (and this is a dead comment anyway).

Who do I talk to in order to get my accounts un-killed? Someone has a vendetta against my IP address or something, and as a result every account I had or have made is instantly and silently turned ghost. Any help would be appreciated.
Next-Gen iPhone to include significant camera improvements
CES 2010: Cool tech picks
Yes, it is very interesting to look back at the ashes <-> roses transformations since 1997 (mostly roses -> ashes).

--------

Ashes -> roses

* Apple

--------

Roses -> Ashes

* SUN

* Java (debatable, but the article waxes poetic about Sun Microsystems "which stole SGI's panache and profits by turning its own interactive-TV efforts into the popular Net software Java" except Java never became very popular on the Net, more on the server side and embedded).

* Netscape

* HotWired and Virtual Vineyards (who?)
11-01-2010 DVB-S/S2 transponders, changes and download links
A Few Resources for Women in Open Source
An image is ultimately represented on disk as a binary string. Hence it is a number.
From the article: Its binary representation corresponds to a compressed version of the C source code of a computer program.
Is your secure USB flash drive really secure?
Smartphones Helping Magazines Become Interactive
To give the phone a little credit, it did take the reporter a few smacks before he got it right. Even though the phone obviously isn't "unbreakable", I doubt anyone could take their iPhone, dunk it in water and then smack it even once like that.
I read Predictably Irrational last year, and as an ER nurse, I think quite a bit about one of the lines from his book.

<from memory>
Dan wrote that he presented some research he had done to his former nurses on how removing bandages slower would cause less pain for the patients. To which, one of the nurses replied, "but removing the dressings quickly hurts the nurses less".</>

One of the hardest things to get over in the medical/nursing profession is willingly causing someone pain. Some people deal with it by being control freaks and complete ass hats. Others manage somewhat better.
A list of numbers is a number, in the same way that a string of digits is a number.
Not really, the lowest # on the leaderboard right now is ~4.2K.

To get that you'd need to spend like 6-7 months on HN submitting quality stuff or making quality posts(need those votes). Noone is going to do all that for a single link, they'd rather spend that time adding their site to a bunch of directories or writing articles to submit to content farms.
For those (like myself) who prefer to read Dijkstra's writings in his own handwriting, there is a pdf at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF
Nope, that's just one interpretation and it's not more valid then any other. Your argument is equivalent to saying something like this "129 isn't a single number, it's actually 110^2+210^1+9*10^0 (aka 100 + 20 + 9)".

Anything that can be represented on a computer can be seen as a number, rather large numbers sometimes but still definitely numbers.
Skiff.
Can you wait for the Skiff? Looks pretty amazing. And bendy.
> PHP sites such as Wikipedia probably need more servers (since every request is a separate process).

Citation needed. But every request isn't a separate PHP process; PHP is linked into Apache. Apache starts up a pool of processes and reuses them for requests. It's all highly efficient.

> By the way, Facebook uses Erlang for its performance-critical parts (such as chat).

Actually, it's not so much the performance critical parts but the parts where PHP's share-nothing architecture isn't appropriate. I doubt they're using a front-end web server for chat either.

> You could still use an agent-like messaging system for shared-nothing multithreaded/multiprocessed environment.

If you had the need, I suppose you could. Although I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.

> When using cURL you must poll the handler until the request is complete. Obviously you'd need multithreading to achieve a better control flow in such a scenario.

You don't really need multithreading. JavaScript has callbacks for everything, for example, but isn't multithreaded. So this isn't so much a problem with PHP as it is a lack of design of cURL. But then cURL is a C library.

> I've written and debugged some wordpress plugins, and I can't say I came to the same conclusion as you...

Wordpress is old and not well designed. (Much like PHP itself)
yea, although a couple of the tweaks have ended up tweaking me out when i can't find something. :-)
it doesn't reveal information except that it is a constant that is used as part of a process of encryption where without the constant cracking that encryption would be effectively impossible and with it cracking the encryption is trivial.

effectively the number is the encryption, as having the number makes the encryption useless. the rest of the algorithm is pointless without the number and vice versa.
California's Mass Transit Ridership Plummets (Because of Recession)
Now you're just being argumentative. You honestly think Ruby is as readable as Brainfuck? Java? C?
"but that they are not encoding any meaningful information that a human being produced"

I was sort of with you up to that point; I don't agree, but I was with you. However, now I would say you need to read the article more carefully, as the entire point is that they do indeed encode something human-produced and usable. If you use Unix, you've almost certainly got the decoder for that number sitting right on your disk right now, it doesn't get much more concrete than that. Without that, you're missing the whole point. They aren't randomly generated at all.

Guess I might as well spell out the other objection I have, which is that you're subtly begging the question. You prove that the idea of owning a number is silly because the idea of owning a number is silly in your last sentence of your first paragraph. Let me give you a much better argument: flip your argument on its head, and say that of course it's perfectly sensible to own numbers.

All but the smallest works translate in any reasonable encoding scheme into enormous numbers, numbers that would simply never be chosen randomly. There 0 chance that sitting here and stringing together "random numbers" will ever produce anything like a movie or picture or even coherent sentence, that doesn't already exist in the encoding scheme. (Not literally 0, depending on the circumstances, but close enough.) Therefore, the actual problem is that it does indeed make sense to own numbers; in an infinite space when we are all choosing umpteen millions or billions or trillions or well beyond that of digits, one can very plausibly stake an ownership claim on the grounds that it is clear that if somebody else ends up with the exact same number, they got it from you.

Therefore, since it is sensible to own numbers, the objection that it is not collapses and then the rest of the argument against ownership does too.

As I said, I don't actually agree with that line of thought. There are a lot of intricacies in the issues of encoding, and some other objections I'm leaving out, but it's still a stronger line of argument. My feeling are more related to the classic bit color essay: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php If that doesn't seem related, think more; it is, it very much is.
The argument is bogus, because it's not the number itself that is illegal: it is the number plus the necessary meta data required to turn the number into something that has been outlawed.

It is like saying that it is silly that we prosecute people for possessing television sets, when the case under consideration is someone possessing a television set previously in the possession of someone else. If you do that, you are hiding contextual information that changes the meaning of what is being said.

As in the case of the television set, someone would only be convicted of 'possessing' or 'distributing' the number, if it was beyond reasonable doubt that he intended to break the law using the number. The number itself doesn't break the law: the actions/intent of the user is what breaks the law.
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You could view it as a list of numbers, yes.

Alternatively, we all know that the file representing the image is nothing more than a collection of bytes. Bytes are nothing more than 8-element bit vectors. What if instead of treating the file as a collection of $n$ 8-element bit vectors we instead treated it as a single $n*8$-element bit vector. What we now have is a single (potentially VERY large) binary number.

To make any sense out of this number we'd have to pull out individual collections of bits, but this is no more complicated than doing a bitwise AND and bit shift.

Put another way: you can think of an IP-address as 4 sets of numbers between 0 and 255. For example, 192.168.1.1. You can view that same IP-address as the hexidecimal number 0xC0A80101. The hex representation is convenient, as it makes elements in the dotted quad apparent. 0xc0 = 192, 0xa8 = 168, 0x01 = 1, 0x01 = 1.

Hope that helps.
You get live dofollow links to stuff you submit, if it gets voted up. And it has actual anchor text, instead of being a raw URL.
Same here, using Firefox 3.5.5 on Windows XP
Maybe another way to achieve the same would be to allow optional anonymous posting. (With 2 caveats)

1. There's a way to recognize the same user in a thread - maybe color, or some way to say "This is the same user that you just replied to".

2. admins etc can see who you really are.

I think then you'd be able to truly let your comments win/die on their own.
> With so many matters of personal taste/preference/experience involved I'm not sure if anyone's proclamation of 'the best interface' has more value than the 'best food' or 'best movie'.

http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
Why a .NET guy picks AppEngine
Well make jacquesm an admin then!
Why do you think that removing your name from the leaderboard will matter? Will the name-callers even notice?

Rude people are rude people. If they can't complain about your karma they will complain about your socks.

My advice is to ignore them and carry on. Don't take criticism seriously unless it's serious criticism.
Every language, including the most vile but still Turing complete abomination (I'm looking at you, mumps) has something that we can all learn from and something that is worth singling out for admiration.

The article might be more convincing if it didn't go out of its way to bash a language. :)
Also for python is pyevent, which works pretty well. I have used it to much success -- some people don't like the minimalist style. Also, the maintainer only updates sporadically, but I've never had real problems with it. http://code.google.com/p/pyevent/
One year in 90 seconds - with tutorial
Yes, in the same ballpark as Java+C. Brainfuck is obviously harder to brainparse.
yeah but you keep the high PR juice only for as long as your site is on the front page:

front page: PR7
page 2: PR0

the top100 leaderboard user profile on the other hand: PR4
I had trouble parsing that headline - a rousing game of "find the verb."
He was a Prussian. To students of military history, that says it all.
You are totally missing the point. The 3-tuple (1,2,9) may represent number 129 if you use the decimal expansion. What if you use a base-16 expansion, or a base-8 expansion? You can even choose the base so that the tuple -> number mapping is not injective (and, thus, not invertible).

So, you give me a number, and I can give you infinitely many n-tuples that can be transformed into that number. Unless you know the mapping, and unless the mapping is injective, a single number is useless. It could represent infinitely many images.

So, I ask again, how can an image be a number?
Technically, a string of digits is only a representation of a number. And such representation may not even be unique.
This has nothing to do with law lagging behind technology.

Even before computers, the ability to express language in a number was well known. If someone turned a defamatory sentence into a number and spread that number together with the key to turn it into the sentence, then they would be just as guilty of defamation as when they had spread the original sentence.

I surely hope you do not advocate getting rid of all laws that deal with information that could be expressed in a number, because you feel it should not count as the same incriminating information, just because it was masked with some mathematics?
There's already a way to decouple your posts from the leaderboard: change your nick slightly.
Ren & Stimpy animator John K. sends fan illustrated how-to letter
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