skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of when Richard Stallman cracked down on CLISP (before it went open-source) for being distributed with, and linking to, a GPL-protected library of some sort. The legal argument of the distributor was that he was providing the library, and it was the user that was linking it. Stallman checked with a lawyer, and apparently the law treats that as a "subterfuge" and that you're "really" distributing only one program, which has only been "disguised" as two (quotes from [1]). IANAL, but I would assume that judges would follow similar lines of reasoning in this implementation, that for practical effects you are "really" distributing a copyrighted file, even if the distribution process at one point happens to involve only a pair of statistically random data[2]. In the limiting case, they can just say that the two files comibined constitute a distribution method, and you'd be hard-pressed to argue that.

[1] http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/...

[2] Note that while either file on its own is technically random in a statistical sense, they are not independently random. Even if you XOR in Firefox, the data is only pairwise-independently random, not completely-independently random. So the random argument actually falls on its face.

[N] It also made me think of this, even if it's not directly related: http://xkcd.com/538/
Even Android 1.6 has built-in text-to-speech.
Thanks for the follow-up question.

"(Finger size does not explain all individual variability, however; there are differences between people with the same size fingers, perhaps as a result of differences in the mechanical properties of skin or in how each person's brain processes the information.)"

"However, other types of tactile tasks may not work the same way, he adds. For example, passively pressing the skin against a textured object--as the study participants did--involves different neuronal pathways than actively moving the fingers around an object and may be controlled differently."

You are correct that the cited study found for its sample "when the scientists looked at the results by finger size, they found that the sex difference disappeared." Then one would want to check other forms of touch perception, as mentioned in the submitted article, try another sample for replication,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

and so on.
Huh, apparently my saying so is enough to cite this as fact in kez's blog.

One good source about relational databases (including their history) is _An Introduction to Database Systems_ by C.J. Date. The author has an axe to grind, but he's thorough, and there are plenty of other references cited should you want to dig deeper.
Ignore silly lists:-)
Full color 3D printing
I want to look into this more, but I have to wonder- if you look hard enough for a number/ratio to appear, won't you find it almost everywhere? Seems kinda like a fortune teller asking you to look for the number '3'.

I am not a mathematician, so I also have no idea what I'm talking about- just gut instinct.
Like yours a lot.

Variations:

iteratively create awesomeness

create happiness iteratively
The geek MBAs should count in both categories, of course. You have a 3:5 MBA-to-geek ratio in your example.
Thank you for your links, and writing the article that you've written. I've tried to understand it; though in honesty skimming it more than reading it, and I haven't given it the fresh thought that it likely requires.

But.

How can one declare causation if one isn't even sure of one's senses? One's observations? One's data? How can we avoid the possibility of an 'evil daemon' of Cartesian philosophy: who is "as clever and deceitful as he is powerful, who has directed his entire effort to misleading me."

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

Sure, certain patterns patterns of our observations will nudge us one way or the other towards a higher probability of assigning some, possibly specific, causal link. But can we ever be sure of it? This is the sense in which I mean that nothing 'implies' causation. Perhaps it is better to say that some things merely suggest it.
With regards to why we don't arbitrage, I answered this in another HN comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=823327. There are a number of reasons, but one of the biggest is transaction costs.

With regards to the TAM, I totally agree that we dropped the ball when we were on stage. I guess the pressure of being under the bright lights got to us. But we do indeed know our TAM; if you happen to be interested I can send you an Excel model that calculates it.
In your modded-down post, I think you were intending to mean numeric evidence like bench-marks but you actually wrote that you weren't convinced by evidence, period.

The author makes some logical arguments, which could be considered evidence. But as the GP points out, a lot of his assertions at least seemed to lack both numeric and logical evidence - so your assertion comes-off a bit muddle headed.

I found some of the article's points interesting too but I don't think this is problem people are having with this earlier post.
I'd love to see one of these on the East Coast.
Introducing Project Verity – Making Drupal Administration Client Friendly
Thanks, appreciate it! Would love any other feedback you have.
Article would be better titled as "What a handful of MBA students I met with for drinks had to say about Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple".
It might even be a little limiting that the people getting the $1000 have a project that they intend to work on with the grant. What was the best return the Stanford class got with the $5? $800 in 2 hours?
Wow I was thinking if this famous chef likes them I've got to try a Tombstone pizza ;<)
You mean, to offer movies for rent earlier than Netflix? Isn't that what RedBox is doing?
I've yet to see a single case where a closed source software vendor accepted liability for data loss and / or security related issues.

Do you have a documented case where you can show that a closed source software vendor was forced to cough up at least a sizable part of the damages sued for ?

They all pretty much rule out stuff like that, and it would surprise me if such a case existed.

The situation is actually the reverse, because closed source gets leaked to the 'bad guys' only (by buying it off some employee with access) the chances of trouble there are a lot larger than with open source where there is a level playing field and the bad guys have just as much access as the good guys.

So, no, you can't sue anybody in the open source scene, but you can stay current. And you probably can sue some party in the closed source scene but the bigger question is what you'll do with the outcome of that suit.

Most likely the damages are limited to the price of the product by contract.
But, as I understand it, most energy markets in the US and internationally are not commodity markets: they're regulated monopolies, often with a certain regulated maximum rate of return. I would think that these monopolies can use the data that they themselves collect: they have to in order to plan and to supply the power to the grid on a cycle by cycle basis. Isn't this true?

But even if it's not, I personally, along with other members of the public, can access historic clearing prices in several day and hour ahead markets (e.g. Midwest, Texas, etc.) Surely I'm allowed to use that data. And it seems to me that this is the important data -- unless one wanted to use metering data to do price discrimination, which the law already protects against.

But even ignoring that... I don't know of any other such regulations on commodity markets. Can you think of any?
test

http://www.example.com/

fizzle more

EDIT: I put a space in between the url and the closing asterisk. I'm not aware of whether or not an asterisk is a valid character for url values.
There should be a startup `oblique strategies' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies) app somewhere to give you a little something to reflect on when you are stuck. Brian Eno's original ones would probably work, but maybe there are better ones for startups?
ScaleWell seams to me like a more direct action form of a Y-Combinator or TechStars incubator. It's something that's easy for a group to set up and start helping startups move forward. (Full disclosure: I'm a trustee)
Seems to me like they probably did some kind of cost-benefit calculation that factored this in. They probably looked at it and said, "Rentals of DVDs that might otherwise have been bought are hurting us more than piracy that could be avoided by the earlier rentals." And, given how few pirates are likely to ever be paying customers (as piracy advocates frequently trumpet when studios issue bloated piracy cost numbers), I can see how this analysis might turn out to favor their current course of action.
Personally, kendo practitioners taught me how ridiculously hard fighting unarmed against a weapon is - no matter how super talented you are. The teachers that tell you to run away in a real fight have got it correct.

On that note, a JHU student killed a burglar with (I believe) a katana a couple months ago:

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2009-09-16/news/0909150076_...
With 'goat' in the gps username I'm really not sure I want to know.
On a related note: somebody else suggested the ability to merge duplicates.
Encryption and obfuscation barely slows down enforcement at all.

1. Install the P2P software du jour.

2. Download some infringing content.

3. Notice what IP addresses the software talks to. (e.g. using Wireshark)

4. Send "pre-settlement" extortion letters to the people behind those IP addresses.

5. Profit. (Seriously.)
We've been doing something slightly similar with the Awesome Foundation (http://awesomefoundation.org) since August 2008 or so.

We started the Awesome Foundation as an organization that gives away $1000 each month to someone with a goal that we deem 'awesome'. We ask nothing for it in return and think of it like a grant. We throw a party each month for the newest grant winner. No business plan is expected and we've kept the application exceedingly short at 500 word max (I prefer 140 character ones but that's just me).

We have expanded into several cities, each giving their own $1000 grants monthly. Providence, RI and NYC are off the ground now, and it looks like there's a London and SF chapter just around the corner. Hopefully we'll have one in nearly every major city before too long.

Our goal is purely to spread the awesomeness. We take zero stake in what they've done and have zero expectation that it is a business (a major difference between us and Scale Well). We don't care if it scales, or fails- as long as it was awesome.

Some of the things we've funded:

~A giant hammock
~ Visualization content
~ Tools for improved social interacting
~ Cotton Candy Gun
~ An Eco Pod Armada to clean up rivers

I'm glad to see more groups pooling together for such awesome things and encouraging micro-financing. Best of luck with it. If you've got any questions, feel free to look us up.

(I am a founding trustee of the Awesome Foundation in the Boston Chapter)
One word: persist.
It does have text-to-speech, which figures prominently in the "car mode" app.
I applaud the Governor's intentions, it is far more sensible to allocate resources to higher education than to prisons.

Having mentioned that, I think it should be stated that he is solving the wrong problem here. The reason tuition is increasing so rapidly in California is because the State no longer has the wherewithal to properly fund its educational institutions. This is a direct consequence of the fact that Californians are able to vote on ballot initiatives obligating that state's government to take on, sometimes quite expensive, commitments. Pair this with the fact that Californians have made increasing their tax burden exceedingly difficult, and you can see the Governor's problem.

That situation is really a mess. Even for prisons, he can't cut spending below a certain amount, or the law enforcement brotherhoods and lobbyists will come after him. He can't decrease the number of people in prison because of the Three Strikes ballot initiative, which obliges him to incarcerate large numbers of nonviolent offenders indefinitely. And the worse part about it is that he needs to do both, decrease spending and the number of incarcerated people.

And that is one of what must be a large number of issues he needs to work through to get the budget on track. Its prisons vs. education, that decision should be the easiest.

I don't envy that State's leaders. People anywhere make democratic leadership challenging but the people of California must be especially difficult to manage.
You're basically saying that computational complexity theory cannot make any valid claims about the actual complexity of algorithms. That's a pretty far reaching assumption you're making there.

In my view, the author did two things, and maybe this debate results from his rather rambling style that made it a little difficult to separate the two.

One thing he did was to explain theoretical properties of possible (bad) hash table implementations and hash functions. And the other thing he did was to claim that these bad implementations are actually out there.

I did not find a flaw in his theoretical analysis. Maybe there is one that you can find, but if you do you should be able to prove him wrong without any empirical evidence. His second claim that these issues frequently occur in the wild is where we do indeed need empirical evidence.

I don't believe that bad hash table implementations are widely used. They are very central components of programming languages and libraries and I suspect that any glaring mistakes would have been found.

But one thing I can say for sure is that bad hash functions exist in the wild. I know because I have written some of them. It's not trival to write a hash function that distributes hash values evenly across all buckets. I really do think that hardly anyone bothers to actually analyse the distribution of their ad-hoc hash functions.

In OO languages people write lots of little hash functions all the time. They're not well designed or well tested pieces of code.
Sooo... can non Chicago companies apply?
There are some challenging statements here, which are worth reflecting on.
That's the funny thing, Johns 'Ikea' post, in spite of not being of much practical use to me, as opposed to Max' post, will actually get me to visit his site more often rather than less, simply because it was genuine.

I read for all kinds of reasons, sometimes to further my business goals, sometimes to learn. The simple fact that you'd go out of your way to get the answer to a question that bugs you really impresses me. That's exactly why I am a programmer to begin with, the kid in my just simply never stops wondering about questions like that and every now and then I have time enough to find the answer to a few of those.

So, likely your next post will be inspirational in some other sense.

Keep them coming, and I'll definitely be reading.
Cafes juggle needs of Wi-Fi regulars, walk-ins
Apple plans new prototype store in downtown Palo Alto
I saw an old talk you did where you were advocating simply using ajax (jquery i think) to query couchdb directly from the front end. Is this something you still recommend? I don't think mongos security model would allow this.
The whole thing is a giant straw man. Not worth reading.

His would-be juicy bit about amortized analysis and hash table growth -- this is all freshman undergrad algorithms stuff. Though, it is sad to say, that lots of IT shop pros out there don't know this stuff. (I have been the "guru" or "genius" far too many times, because I know that a naive array add implementation is O(n^2))
Yes, but the real question is not how well they're doing now, but how much better they could be doing if they spent less time being bloggers and more time being programmers.

That's an unanswerable question, but you can't rule out the possibility they'd be doing better still.
I was hoping that an onion was the name for a group of obfuscations as per http://www.futilitycloset.com/2010/01/03/a-field-guide/
With time
With Bittorrent and Usenet, I rarely bother with Netflix Instant anymore.
These sites are created for people speaking a foreign language. So, if you ask to an English speaker they will probably say that it is fishing. For a speaker of the foreign language it will be perfectly natural.
HN usually frowns on 'kudos' comments like this, but I think it's worth saying:

Very nicely done.
Netflix's on-demand selection does need drastic improvement.. One can find some gems here and there but overall it doesn't touch their DVD selection and we all know that's b/c of the studios.

Yes it is too much work to walk down to my mailbox and wait 2 days for my damn DVD when the technology is there to deliver it straight to my TV in seconds.

Of course this all would have to come at a price but I would gladly pay 20 or 30 and possibly even 40 bucks a month to have unlimited access to their full DVD collection on-demand.

Shelling out 20 bucks for something you'll end up watching once or twice 95% of the time is throwing away your money. So until they (the studios) stop attempting to rip us off like the greedy bastards we know they are then I'll get the new releases elsewhere for free.

There is an ideal price to be set on the curve where everyone wins it's just that the aging execs in charge can't change fast enough to keep pace with their consumers changing preferences. Time to get someone new in charge..
The multi-touch keyboard in 2.1 is a big improvement over the previous generation, I type much more quickly with it.

I'm a little surprised this hasn't gotten more attention.
Don't Outsource Programming
I guess what I have learned from this is that the problem is Silicon Valley, not IT.
Techmeme: AppMakr To Make Anyone An iPhone App-Builer (Mark Walsh/MediaPost)
Yeah, I thought that was the case but wasn't 100% sure, so I didn't mention it. This further dilutes the value of a botnet CDN, probably straight into negative territory.
I was trying to think of the properly inflammatory headline when I submitted http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2010/01/netflix-and-warner... (a far better writeup). I should leave it to pros like TechCrunch.
An Essential Step for Corporate Strategy
I, Cthulhu - by Neil Gaiman
Anything that cites Outliers instantly loses credibility for me. Maybe his presentations became more visual throughout the decades because of the technology available.
Green Is a Strategy
Does Pinboard have a Firefox extension (or plans for one)? I'd love to have an alternative to Delicious, but the smoothness of their Firefox integration is so good it not only keeps me using Delicious, it also keeps me using Firefox.

Some reasons I like it so much:

* Ctrl-D to bookmark, just like vanilla Firefox

* Ctrl-D on an already-bookmarked page to edit tags / description for that page

* Ctrl-B for an always-up-to-date bookmark pane, with FAYT by title or tag

* "Open in tabs" for any tag (I use this daily for the webcomic update-checking ritual, and occasionally for actually useful things)

* Awesome Bar integration by title or tag (bit flaky but great when it works)

* Dropdowns for user-defined "favourite tags" in a menu bar (this plus a "todo" tag is almost as good, for me, as a natively supported "toread" feature)
You have to download and install openCV =>

svn co https://code.ros.org/svn/opencv/trunk/opencv

http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/PythonInterface
"Of course this all would have to come at a price but I would gladly pay 20 or 30 and possibly even 40 bucks a month to have unlimited access to their full DVD collection on-demand."

Ditto. If I were WB or Fox, I'd work out a deal with NetFlix to provide this 'premium' content SOONER than the DVD release, or I'd be hard at work developing my own CDN.
What’s So Special about Special Ops?
Maybe there's something to newLisp, but any time I see a group with that flavor of persecution complex ("All the criticism is wrong because they just don't understand!") I take pause.

To be honest, that could describe almost the entire (vocal) Lisp community these days, and I say this as a quite embarrassingly commited Lisp fan and user.

Anyway, I wouldn't say that dynamic scope is evil, but to most Lisp users is does just feel a little backwards. Un-natural, if you will. That's just one of the reasons why everyone secretly (or not-so-secretly) longs for the never-coming day when emacs lisp can just 'go away'.
Awesome! I have been looking for something like this for a long time!
Charles Anderson Discovers Dragonflies that Cross Oceans
But the final pairing between companies and seekers is still going to be extremely asymmetrically one-to-many... aside from stroking developers' egos, how is this model superior?
The Awesome Foundation was definitely an inspiration for ScaleWell. We applied the same mantra of supporting "Awesomeness" to the current entrepreneurial climate in Chicago - lack of recognition, lack of capital, lack of support institutions.
Satisfy users. Iterate.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Ask HN: What made you decide to pursue a startup?
I've been feeling pretty lost these past few days and could use some career advice.

I come from a finance and management consulting background and I've been thinking about ditching it all to pursue a start-up. I'm only 2 years out of college, however, I worry that if I leave the industry and begin working on a start-up full time that the opportunity cost might not be worth it.

It is incredibly scary ditching a well established resume to possibly work on something without any guarantee of success. I've been working on the start-up at night, but the truth is, there simply isn't enough hours in the day to do this effectively, especially when you're working 12 hours or more a day and constantly traveling for work.

I'm really not sure what to do. The thought of creating my own company sounds incredibly attractive, however, I might be missing out on a pretty decent lifestyle with a sizable paycheck. Obviously money isn't the only factor, but it definitely influences my mentality.

For those who've made the jump, what did it take? How do you know if you've made the right decision? Especially if you haven't scored the big exit deal?

My parents absolutely despise the idea of me doing a start-up and I question it myself, I'm just not sure. And I hate how for me, it really has to be one or the other, both my work and my start-up require extensive time commitments.

Any help or advice would be appreciated, thanks.
This was my first thought before I looked at the code. The constant name is perfect and intuitive. Great work.
sshhh..remember the first rule of usenet
Sounds like what we really need to do is outsource the prisons. To, say, Mexico, or China. I'll bet the Chinese don't pay $50,000 per prisoner per year to keep their prisoners locked up -- heck, they probably harness their labour to turn a profit.
I want one of these, but open, so I can use my own VoIP SIP information and integrate with my pbx.
Why do we choose U-Haul and not housing costs? It seems obvious to me that everything is more expensive in California, including U-Haul. It's cherry picking.
Google's Free Airport WiFi is a Nexus One promo in disguise
You can assign up to 6 tasks per each test, to minimize the 'constraint omission' risk. Does it solve the issue you raised?