skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do it in the logical way until you hit the output pins.

Ding, ding, ding!!! We have a winner. This is exactly correct: write your code the way everything should be in a perfect world, BUT have a hardware abstraction layer to separate that from reality. The upper layer code should just know that when the end sensor is reached, the hydraulic ram should be reversed. The HAL knows what state the end sensor must be in when it's triggered, and what polarity to send to the valve controlling the hydraulic ram.

Even in small embedded systems, a properly tiered architecture can save a lot of trouble.
ebay or some random places on the web. they are all imported from hong kong.

http://www.popularelect.com/product_info.php?products_id=136...
It sounds like he's using Apache for HTTPS and PHP or CGI scripts.

It's about halfway down.
A book called "Reinventing Discovery", about how collective intelligence is transforming science. The manuscript is due to the publisher (Princeton University Press) in a couple of months.
I prefer http://www.joesgoals.com/ - it allows you to set up multiple chains and manage them from a single page.
I picked up an amateur understanding of Erlang earlier last year and have been teaching myself Scheme for the last five months with The Littler Schemer and How to Design Programs.

I highly recommend both, Clojure seems like a good choice but I've never been crazy about languages built on top of the JVM...
I guess my explanation sounded more awesome than it actually is - general game playing has been around for a while now (see for example games.stanford.edu and the wikipedia article on general game playing), mine's a stab at it with some homegrown techniques, largely out of personal interest. As I said, I have no idea if my techniques are feasible or actually work yet, but if they do (and I have the time), the general game playing competition at the 2010 AAAI conference isn't out of the question.
No, they don't. And what is not said here is that they don't acknowledge failures, even when they are obvious, thus depriving the organization a chance to learn from the failure.
Really surprised to see Netflix listed as neutral. If anybody agrees with the original parent, I would love to hear your thoughts.

I see Netflix grabbing huge market share from the overpriced cable-TV companies and become the standard way to watch paid video content.
No, that was not the small errors that are shown here, but rather errors of very significant magnitude.
The parts are the variable cost, software and know how are largely fixed. In a normal market, prices would trend towards the variable cost. The US cell phone market, however, is an oligopoly of large carriers that push the "retails" prices on phones high so they can lock people into contracts by selling the "subsidized" phones. Thus, prices won't trend towards the marginal cost. They'll stay high.

That's a long winded way of saying: if carriers (and handset makers) didn't have a massive chubby for long term contracts, prices on handsets would be much, much lower. The iPod Touch is a good example of that. It's obviously worth Apple selling it for a ~30% margin, assuming the $155 parts cost is correct. What do you suppose the margins on the actual iPhone are?
Twelve Virtues of Rationality
I'd like to contact you, but your email address isn't public. It needs to go in the 'about' section of your profile, not just 'email'.
You can also use Unicode in comments, which may or ʎɐɯ ʇou be a bug but did surprise me.
Another reason why I Google with the Bing

http://img.skitch.com/20100105-f2xhs1pm1bmi1wt24cng2hddyw.jp...

Cause everyone knows "Islam is the light baby doll"
He links to that article from atheists.org right before the blockquote. I'm not sure what he should be ashamed of.
My pet theory was that it was based on the length of the query, since "Islam" was the shortest word on the list of terms. That got shot down by "Allah is ". I guess it really is censoring.
Maybe I'm an outlier. I have a 16GB iPhone and have never even come close to using hardly any of it.
For fun? --> http://www.wotsummary.com a full summary of the Wheel of Time Series. (I'm working on a couple of design updates (and the summary for TGS) this week)
Parrot's Remote Controlled Helicopter
I'm in Seattle also, and I only lose 3G on my T-m G1 when I'm underground in the bus/light rail tunnels. YMMV?
The mere fact that it is legal for any pension to be underfunded is absolutely beyond me. But I can't say that I blame any government for doing such, most of the time they're essentially being extorted by public workers unions for pay and benefits that far exceed the market rate. What the heck is wrong with a traditional 401k contributions like the rest of America gets.

I know a guy who worked as a janitor, mopping floors at a state building for 10 years and because of this I'm going to end up paying him 25 to 30 grand a year, every year after he turns 65? Its outrageous that the state tax payers are being fleeced.

Eventually municipalities and states are going to go bankrupt and the pensioners are going to get pennies on the dollar.
anyone know of a tool that will generate charts like that when i run my program? perhaps by instrumenting my code?

i'd be very curious about this, but i wouldn't want to invest a lot of time into it. right now i use python for my web site serving (django).
Here is the tech crunch review, which is the polar opposite of the engadget review:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/05/google-nexus-one-the-te...
I considered building a similar app - good luck!
To be fair you're missing a lot of parts and the ones that they share are a lot more high end on the N1. Twice the CPU, 4x the RAM, over 2x as large a screen, GSM/EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA radios, GPS, compass, still/video camera with flash and autofocus, etc etc.

And on top of all that iSuppli's figure is just an estimate. Considering every phone in the same league as the N1 is in a similar price, there aren't obscene profits being made. If they really cost $150 to make someone somewhere would start selling them for cheaper--we're talking CE here which is defined by brutal price wars. Don't think that HTC would settle for being an OEM when they could own the market by selling devices at 1/3 the price directly.
Nice work on the protocol. Very light weight.
Trying out a slightly different method here: my calendar here: http://www.keithdonegan.com/2010-calendar/

Basically the cal has to have ALOT more green boxes than red.

Green = no junk day with food.
Red = Yes, you guessed it, I gave in to temptation.
Writing a genetic programming system in OCaml to evolve minimal boolean logic circuits.
Cintiq displays require a stylus. There are buttons on the side you can tap with your finger though.
I'd say that, although this is the best Android phone yet, the phone itself is not revolutionary.

The most important aspect of this story will be if the sales model catches on: buying your phone one place, and activating it another. The more people shop for the best phone, then for the best network, the more competitive pressure is on both to improve.
yeah my friend and I recently cancelled a $80/mo cable bill to switch to a $9/mo Netflix account / We get 1 dvd out at a time and use our PS3 to stream a ton of history channel and other stuff ~ so far its not too bad :)
As one of the organisers, I can say the abbreviated name was chosen as a bit of an inside joke ('in' being the REST community). We certainly did not mean to offend anyone nor do I think there is any reason for anyone to be offended, but I guess others may see this differently.
Seven Years of Good Luck: Splitting ZFS Mirrors
Posted a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980043

Some comments there.
Optimizing Optimizing HTML
For the same CPU architecture, compiler and FPU control word, you should expect the same results.

For example, on x86, many C / C++ compilers interpret long double as a 64-bit float while others interpret it as 80-bit extended precision.

And extended precision TBYTE (in Intel syntax) does actually take up 10 bytes. There's a speed loss for not aligning, but no correctness loss. In a possibly related note, however, Apple has bizarre and unnecessarily strict alignment policies for Mac OS on x86:

http://blogs.embarcadero.com/eboling/2009/05/20/5607
I thought the tmo data plan was $25 per month... do you have a link to the $30 pricing?
Lessons Learned in 2009 by the Founder of WiredReach
I've used t-mobile since they were called Voicestream. This was in New England, SW Florida, and now DC. Their network doesn't have the penetration of Verizon but I have never had any substantial issues with service. They even recently expanded to provide service in the DC Metro, which was a pleasant surprise.
I can't actually find a "year on one page" calendar on Amazon. Do they still make such things in these days of digital organization?
I think they are forgetting about people like me that don't want to buy a $300 player every time they invent some new format. My computer plays 1080p video files just fine. My TV displays 1080p video just fine. I have virtually unlimited download bandwidth. And yet, I can't watch HD movies.

To do that, I would have to spend several hundred dollars on a special player for special disks, and I have to replace my HDTV with one that has HDCP, and I have to get a special HDMI cable to connect the player to the TV. No thanks. I don't want your movie that badly.

If there was no copy protection and they were interested in making money, they could sell me access to that movie file. I would download it, and then my computer could play the movie on my TV, and everything would be fine. They get money, I get movie. No piracy happens.

But instead, since I can't pay for a movie even if I wanted to, piracy is the only option.

(The movie thinks there is some moral dilemma that would prevent me from pirating something. But in my generation, there's not. I saw a book I wrote available on a torrent site a while ago. I didn't even get upset, I thought, "wow, that's awesome, people are pirating my book". I still made plenty of money. Just like I think the movie industry would make plenty of money if they got rid of DRM.)
http://www.vocabdojo.com : A website used to study vocabulary for the SATs, GREs, etc. I made a Django app to do this after I discovered that making 900+ flashcards is a huge pain in the neck, and then decided to turn it into something that everyone can use (after switching to Tornado, of course :D)
This reminds me of a page on fast and accurate geometric primitives; the code requires that you to flip the Intel FPU into a reduced precision mode to make the error easier to estimate.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake/robust.pc.html
I meant, by staying out of the market, the author is losing out on e-reading only. But this doesn't mean not reading, just because the mobile phone is a crappy reading platform.

It just means carrying around a paperback.

I see why you might read much more by carrying around a Kindle rather than a phone. I'll give you that. But I'm not the target market for the Kindle, because I am willing to check out a book from the library and carry it around instead.
http://davidseah.com/blog/compact-calendar/
try out "Obama is"
I understand the rationale behind ChromeOS.

What I don't understand is how one can justify spending all this time to build one application that is an inferior, resource-hogging clone of a GNU tool that is probably older than him. And the only possible explanation that you could give me is "you could run this on ChromeOS"?

I don't mean to be rude, but it looks like you are saying the right things, but not stopping to wonder if it makes sense or not. Is it really that much of an advantage to have this "feature"? If all you have is a ChromeOS device, you are probably not the person who would need to have an Erlang REPL. And if you are that kind of person, you'll probably get a computer that runs an actual operating system, one that actually gives you a terminal and a SSH client.
Im thinking of building a few simple games using clojure. Im also building some simple tools to help me learn calculus and linear algebra. Man, university sucks, not enough time to hack, and they make you use C++ :D Still better than high school though.
You have to watch the film. They explain it all in some detail.
Yup. The legitimate users are punished with inconvenience and expensive mandatory hardware purchases. (And, of course, the lack of a Free Software movie player.)

Those that pirate it have no inconveniences, no mandatory hardware purchases, and can use a completely Free Software stack. Is the movie industry really surprised that piracy is rampant!?
http://www.80legs.com - web-scale web-crawling for everyone. Launched in September and growing revenue now. We've solved a lot of big data store issues in our back-end. Challenges have shifted from technical to business :)

Extractiv - web-listening and content-extraction that combines semantic analysis and web-scale reach for a complete picture of what information is on the web and what the web is discussing. The core technology is working, currently turning it into a real product.
Oh man, that's a blast from the past. Haven't use a Beowulf since my PhD days 5 years ago. Thanks for that.
Still tinkering with http://www.startupwiki.co.uk

And on a server admin tool http://hg.errant.me.uk/eventscripts-xa

Cant find another "big" project to engage me :( Perhaps gonna have a go at reinvigorating my blogging platform project.
Working on an ultra-light mashup to help track books that I've read. It's my first Rails project, hosted on heroku, mashes up Amazon+Facebook Connect.

http://readit.me/
For the same CPU architecture, compiler and FPU control word, you should expect the same results.

That's a stretch. Just because it's called "GCC" doesn't mean it behaves exactly the same on every platform, even if the CPU architecture is the same.

Apple makes extensive modifications, has their own ABI (see below), etc.

In a possibly related note, however, Apple has bizarre and unnecessarily strict alignment policies for Mac OS on x86:

It's not "bizarre and unnecessarily strict" if you want to be able to rely on SSE2+. Apple had the advantage of being able to define their ABI without regard to most legacy concerns, and so they did.

The reason that it's strictly enforced everywhere is that since Apple's compilers use SSE2+ they must be able to assume that, at function entry, the stack is properly (16 byte) aligned.

I understand your pain -- I've had to update a JIT implementation to deal with this, along with quite a bit of assembly that assumed 4 byte alignment, but Apple's reasoning makes sense.

See also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/612443/why-does-the-mac-a...
Google Destroyed the Web
I think the last point is the most interesting. Do we need a search engine that punishes sites with ads to get rid of spam?
http://timetric.com/

We're building real-time data services. If you've got interesting data, we want to talk to you ASAP. andrew at timetric dot com.

We're based in Clerkenwell, London.
No problem - it works now.
I don't think ISVs are hurt by piracy, they are hurt by people not buying their products. Sure, with piracy, it's easier to not buy your product. But I doubt anyone has ever gotten to the serial number screen and said, "oh, this needs a serial number? I guess I will pay $1000 for a real copy instead of looking for a crack." No. The people that pay for software already made the decision to pay you.

As a practical matter, we use a lot of "ISV" software at work. None of it requires registration or activation or phoning home. If it did, we wouldn't be allowed to purchase it. (This is at a company of 300,000 people, and I think most companies of this size have similar restrictions.)
I think the author is missing the point. Large, overly complex, ineffective systems a symptom of corporate culture. It isn't something that you can just fix without fixing the underlying cause.
http://frogmetrics.com/ - YC summer 2008.

In my spare time, researching how to catalyze mass behavior change to improve society.
This isn't new. They've been filtering it for years, ever since some screenshots of what happens when they don't made the rounds.

From November 2005:

http://google.blognewschannel.com/archives/2005/11/30/does-g...

"Blacks are lazy"

"Blacks are stupid"

"Jews are evil"

"Jews are cheap"
They could at least be somewhat equal about it

In theory, I'm not sure that I find the addition of a whole bunch of exceptions to be better than the current situation.

In practice, these recommendations are all a bit useless.
Let's hope someone at Google is reading this and gets this fixed PRONTO. It is grounds for boycotting the service IMHO.
I remember years ago reading about Mechanical Turk, and the demographic profile then was about the same; the reason given was that homemakers and underemployed women could hop on Turk for a few minutes whenever convenient, such as in between cleanups, and get a few jobs done.
I use PowerShell every day at work. I much prefer it to CMD and at one point I much liked the idea of piping live objects, but the more I use it, the more I don't think it makes sense. If I want to work with live objects, then I want to work with a proper programming language. In my shell, the file system is my object model. I want to work with the bytes in those files.
Apple doesn't use the x87 floating point unit. They've never needed to because they can rely on the SSE2 unit since any Intel Mac ever created has one. This isn't necessarily the case on the PC even though every modern one will have it as well. I'm pretty sure gcc is set to compile floating point numbers using a SSE2 code-path by default on OS X.
Chopped the top off a what?
10 skills I look for before writing a check, Perspiration & Appetite for Risk
Interesting. One also can't get "whites are", "Hindus are", etc. But one can get "Christianity is", "Buddhism is", etc.
> For the same CPU architecture, compiler and FPU control word, you should expect the same results.

Wait a minute, does that mean that floating point types don't have a stable ABI? If I have a library with function foo(float bar) compiled with compiler A, then it's not safe to compile an app - that uses that library - with compiler B?
Seinfeld's Calendar + Github = http://calendaraboutnothing.com/

"The Calendar About Nothing generates a "Seinfeld Calendar" from your public "Github" feed."
A nice middle finger to Zeldman's horde of cargo-cult followers. Clicking on a B button in a WYSIWYG editor and getting a <STRONG> element always pisses me off. XHTML does not mean what you think it means

The http://id.annevankesteren.nl/ page he references is quite interesting beyond the obvious OpenID and SVG trickery -- he's linking the CSS using this Header in the Response:

Link:<fancy.css>; rel=stylesheet, <fancy.css>;rel=stylesheet

Not sure why it's doubled up that way, but with just one reference he's saving two bytes over a <link> element -- doesn't need the href, but does need the trailing \r\n.
> 3: If the "cleanup" was done right, and if it was truly optional, $40 is a really fair price for it. Even if we assume that they've got some in-house tools that automate this, the process would likely still take at least 20 minutes and require oversight by a skilled technician. Part of my business is about kicking Geek Squad in the pants every chance I get, but I doubt I could beat that price.

20 minutes? Skilled technician?

Maybe I'm missing something here, but this task seems to be just re-imaging the hard drive.
The stack is not actually aligned on function entry, because the return address is on top, so more alignment will be needed to avoid SSE2 locals being misaligned. It's not so hard for the callee side of the ABI to make sure the stack is aligned if it's going to use SSE2 and friends; it's rather more onerous to require every call site to make the alignments for the benefit of the callee.
Once you fail, isn't it easy to continue to fail? "Oh well, I broke that chain of 100 days. I'll probably never get that many again, so I'll just give up now."

Playing mind games with yourself is rarely effective. If you want to write every day, just write every day.
2010 kicks off era of hidden Linux
I have a dry erase calendar on the wall next to my desk that I do this with. It's great to see a bunch of Xs up there at the end of the week.
Woo-hoo. Go perl!
The stack is not actually aligned on function entry, because the return address is on top, so more alignment will be needed to avoid SSE2 locals being misaligned.

The stack has --known alignment-- on entry, which removes the need to compute alignment at runtime. Any other approach requires more instructions overall.

It's not so hard for the callee side of the ABI to make sure the stack is aligned if it's going to use SSE2 and friends; it's rather more onerous to require every call site to make the alignments for the benefit of the callee.

I disagree that it's onerous. It seems silly to increase the runtime costs in exchange for a minutely simplified compiler port. It's not as if non-4-byte aligned ABIs are unusual.
I'm relieved: I prefer being trolled to having the enterprisers seize the reins.
Ask HN: What is a good windows hosting service?
I have a website written using C# and ASP.NET with the MVC Framework. I would like a virtual private server. AWS seems kind of expensive, any suggestions on alternatives?
A BLX15 is a high frequency power transistor (well, what's high frequency, these days 150 MHz doesn't count for much I guess, but in the 80's it was hot shit), it is encased in a compound that has really good thermal conductivity.

One of the major components of that casing is Beryllium-Oxide.

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

Apparently it is entirely safe to handle, as long as you do not grind it to dust, which is exactly what I did, not wearing a respirator or any other safety measures, I never realized how dangerous that stuff was.

I was simply interested in seeing what the guts of a transistor like that looked like and the best way to do that without causing damage was to slowly grind the cap off.

Not a smart thing to do.

I only found out many years later. Fortunately I never had any Berylliosis symptoms so I think I got away clean.

Luck favours dumb people.
The design of a system will reflect the organization that creates it.
Interesting... It's fairly difficult to find male celebrity names that do not come up with "___ is an idiot".
I have the same plan I've had since the Sidekick II (with modifications for data on newer devices), which I got with a subsidized phone, and then renewed for two years with a subsidized G1. It is about the same as the new "unsubsidized" price for phone+data. If I buy this phone, I will pay about $20 more per month for service and will be locked into paying it for two years. This is still less than the price of the unsubsidized phone, of course, but I am still kinda annoyed that phone service keeps getting more expensive and only gradually getting faster and more widespread, despite all other kinds of tech getting cheaper and faster.
Still working on http://www.MyBankTracker.com/ and loving it. Released our iPhone app a couple weeks ago, which runs on MongoDB.
I seem to have invented a new datastructure, so I'm analysing it to check its performance before writing it up and announcing it. I've also invented a variant of an existing data structure that has some nice features. That will accompany it.

In the meantime I'm starting a re-write of my alpha 0.1 web service to help connect people with friends and friends of friends. The existing one still exists, and I'm still collecting comments, so if you'd like to know more, drop me an email.

And I've got a full time day job, and 8 talks/presentations in the next four weeks.
Cool. Nice to see you thought about that ahead of time.
Google Phone (Nexus One) Details & Features
There's an inverse correlation between the gold/dollar exchange rate and the dollar/everything exchange rate?
I'd love to read that book once it's published.