skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm personally affected by terrorism every time I cannot bring a bottle onto a plane or have to go through any sort of needlessly onerous procedure in the name of protecting us from the terrorists. Being killed by a bomb is just a minor part of terrorism.
Which is technically 8 hours or more before they wake up.
Because there are two converging trends at the moment:

CPU makers getting in to the GPU arena:

AMD bought ATI, intel has announced a CPU/GPU combo

NVidia is going in the direction of more and more general computation capability with their offerings (see the gt 300).

Sooner or later those trends will meet somewhere in the middle.

I predict this will happen as soon as NVIDIA offers a product that has enough general compute capability to run a linux port.
Domain name extension 'could boost cyber-crime'
IPv4 address space will be exhausted(I know, I know, a cheap shot).
Good point.

To most consumers, including me, "renting" a AAA game from steam for as long as I could conceivably want to play it is a simply fantastic. I simply don't care if I "own" it or not.

Same with the Kindle. I buy books for $9.99 that are 50 to 100% more in printed format and even more at a retail location.

So from a consumer standpoint, I get a product in a better format, I like reading books on the Kindle, I love downloading games. I get those products at less than 50%.

So if I want to share a book with someone, I can still buy it in print format. Or I simply buy it for them. Considering the goods are half priced or less, It's still a win.
No biomedical predictions yet...

1. Everyone will have their full genome sequenced if they need some sort of medical treatment.

2. Healthcare will start to become cheaper due to personalized medicine and more data based decision-making.

3. Traditional drug discovery will be begin to be replaced by something: complex drug combinations, nanotech, ??

4. Some gene-therapy will be more commonplace.

5. End of cancer? infections? probably not
This is the coolest looking new language I've heard about in a long time. So many new things that I don't even know how I would start programming in it. I love seeing that. The focus on readability is also awesome. This will definitely be a source of inspiration for the language I'm working on.
I will be in my 50s, but retiring ever is not in my expected future. That is, I expect some lifespan extending tech (singularity or SENS) to run ahead of me.
Dealing with barriers to enter
My books/games are available for re-download anytime/anyplace.
I can't lose my books/game disks.
Half price products. (I can buy it again if I need to).

I don't understand the problem.
DRM == strawman?
This is pretty cool too: http://keyboardr.com
- web will cease to be the delivery platform of choice for applications

- internet will be heavily controlled by governments/corporations worldwide
Over the holidays there were AAA games selling for $3. What possible re-sale can you expect from that?
Ubuntu 9.04 affected too, thanks for posting.

Summary:
FH_DATE_PAST_20XX matches on yars 2010-2099.

As a workaround until the spamassasin rules are updated, the score can be lowered in local.cf:
score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0
The problem is e-ink. Right now it's grody grey, monochrome, and has a 1/2 second refresh time. Apple can't work with that.
The early worm gets eaten by the bird! First is great if you're first in the mind of the consumer but if you're not the first to gain traction (in the web world = users) in enough people's minds - there's no advantage to being first. It's quite possible your being first might pave the way for later arrivals to dominate the market you created.
Another strawman, lending books.

I've found over and over again that a book that I loan to someone, or one that someone loans to me, remains unread.

Same with games.

The game is changing under your nose. Major titles and books for cheap prices. Consumers win big.

The practical result is that all producers of creative content are in a race to zero.

I considered building an indy flash/silverlight game recently. But if you can get great AAA games for $5, how on earth can you compete with that.
I predict that the various phone (land/cell) and television services will become commoditized into internet providers. There will be no need for service providers to setup a phone number or voicemail. You'll simply have devices that connect to wired or wireless internet service and use whatever application is preferred for text, voice, and video communication. I think something like a skype username will become the defacto way of identifying people, instead of remembering or storing phone numbers.

I'm sure the existing companies (verizon, AT&T, sprint) will fight this change (who wants their business to become a commodity?), but they'll only delay the inevitable.
The Kindle supports small independent publishers:

https://dtp.amazon.com/mn/signin
Ten reasons why an Android phone is not a phone for me.
With the concern over carbon, isn't digital delivery of goods a win/win?
biotech will become very important indeed (it was supposed to already past decade)

i don't t.hink full genome scan will become economically feasible though
it's hard to see how you can not understand what was meant

And yet, you're the second poster on this topic to mention what is meant without being explicit about it. As if everyone is already supposed to know the one right answer to this very complicated question.

I think that this kind of carefully circumscribed rhetoric makes people think that opinion on such questions is less diverse than it really is. The result is dull posturing and the inevitable partition into camps with binary opposite positions, incapable of compromise or a shift of perspective.

So. I gave my opinion on the causes of Islamic Fundamentalist terrorism above. What's yours?
It will become a general co-processor, integrated on the low end, separate on the high end, never unified. The two types of chip fundamentally don't do the same job. They can't run each other's programs.
Ask HN: Making "Let's Plays"
I am wondering if any of the folks here make these. If so, can you share some tips on what software you use or methodologies...etc?

Thanks.
The funny thing is that not that many people that would be able to afford this would actually do it.

The USA is a nice country but there are many parameters that go in to the decision of choosing a place to live and it scores low on plenty of those.

The US is the destination country of choice for people without money. Those with money are just as likely to go elsewhere.
Mine required manually switching from one mode to another (which ended up being about a 3-5 minute reboot, as it had to then detect all of the music on the device) when I wanted to add new music. I'd plug it into my mac and it would sometimes show up and sometimes not. There were times when I'd be attaching and detaching it over and over again for about 15 minutes. I change my music daily (I have a long commute), so this became quite onerous and hated.
Cases Against Applying Schedule Pressure
I didn't find the population density comparison very convincing either. But the main point they are making is that not as many people as expected by the financial community are going to move to more urbanized centers in the years to come. Their argument would be more convincing if it was based on economic opportunity instead of population density though.
Who knows? It probably exists already but it is pretty much under the radar right now. People dismiss it as 'complete rubbish' at the moment if they have heard about it at all.
Though, imo, not before we figured out some energy efficient technologies. Otherwise, we'd be spacefaring nomads, migrating when we've grazed and razed.
what do you not understand? what can i be more explicit about? if "terrorism" is a problem, then it seems like it would be a pretty smart idea to look at the causes. is that better? i don't know how to make it clearer.

or are you asking me to answer the questions i raised? how on earth would i know? but either someone has done the work and found out, or the work could be done.

or are you just looking for a fight?
After you've asked this kind of question informally, you may be interested in resources like this:

Color Harmony Compendium, A Complete Color Reference for Designers of All Types

http://www.amazon.com/Color-Harmony-Compendium-Reference-Ann...
I started running ssh on port 443 when public ssh is required, because it works more reliably when traveling. A nice side effect is that it also avoids the Rumplestiltskin attacks.

That said, my preferred solution is openvpn.
People will be able to search their genomic sequence, and build a social network with similar people to them. Or a dating service based on your genetic sequence, designing a 'match' for most fit children.
Myths about code comments
I seriously think that while the kindle is pretty good, it's like the mp3 players before the iPod or smartphones before the iPhone. It's an electronic version of an existing business model but doesn't really exploit the possibilities of such a device. I expect to see someone coming up with a reader that provides a reading experience like dead tree books do while combining it with a convenient Spotify-like flat fee / unlimited use service, like a digital library.

I'm very passionate about reading books and I'd fork out 10-20 dollars a month (maybe even $30) without hesitation for a service that allowed me to conveniently read pretty much any book whenever and wherever I want without having to go to the bookstore / library or having to wait days for Amazon to deliver it while not feeling being ripped off because of having to pay as much for an e-book as for a dead tree one. Here's your startup idea.
I've heard that before about floating point co-processors, they're definitely unified now.

Remember the Weitek and the 387 ?

In the end it's a cost-savings issue, as cpus get more cores they become more and more like GPUS, as GPUS acquire more general purpose instructions they become more like CPUs. Those lines will meet, once they're on one die the 'budget' can be used more efficiently by looking for ways to integrate them more tightly.

There is nothing inherently different about general purpose computations vs the kind of vector processing that a GPU is good at, at the end of the day it is all calculations, and more and more in parallel.

I fully expect that at some point even DRAM will be part of the CPU.
sorry, mostly already implemented by 23andMe in 2009 and prior
ah, ok. so change the word unification to integration - i am not being that specific.
I agree with this. Nine times out of ten, schedules tend to be arbitrary guesses anyway. I don't know if I agree that scheduling pressure should be totally removed, but I feel that a lot of organizations place it too highly compared to other pressures.
Agreed. Although the successful one developer and one analyst almost certainly are wise enough to stand on the shoulders of giants - using an image-processing library here, an html parser there. Functional programming at the organization level: if you have to coordinate a lot of global variables nothing ever works right.
That's called "Argument from Authority" (latin: argumentum ad verecundiam). It's not exactly isomorphic to the Ad Hominem fallacy, but it's close.
HN has civility standards in part to limit the attention advantage that can come from inflammatory rhetoric. Scientific Journals operate the same way, and for the same reason. If you even out the language, the arguments have to speak for themselves.
I don't think it simply meant that you had to get up early; more that it was good to be the first to do something. That seems to apply in most types of work, including startups.
Yes. Hugely. It needs to be easily legible, and you need a clear call to action color.

I'd suggest looking at successful sites that serve your target market, and looking at what colors they use. I'm guessing you'll find lots of black/blue/grey/white sites, with orange and green calls to action.
How Much Information Was Consumed by Americans in 2008
Disregarding the whole "computers vs computer science" thing, I really believe this is a good idea. It's one of the reasons I'm working on Hackety Hack.

Computers touch every aspect of our lives. Understanding the basics of how they work is almost like a modern literacy. I don't think that everyone should become master programmers, however, they should at least understand the most basic things about how they work. We give cursory overviews of quite a lot of things in schools, but I can't imagine one more relevant than computers.
A visual history of Cray (8794×682)
i just saw this on HN, a SSH blacklist

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7855
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-64 came out in 2001, although it was something of a huge failure.
There was no year zero. Thus, since a presumed January 1st, 1 AD, there have been 200.9 decades.

(And for the record, I posted that out of humor, not pedantry.)
> "In the past, information consumption was overwhelmingly passive, with telephone being the only interactive medium. Thanks to computers, a full third of words and more than half of bytes are now received interactively."

hmm...how much of "interactive written communication" on computers are chat conversations? talking and chatting online are somewhat different, but i can't help but feel that chatting online is only the tip of the writing iceberg.

when i think about written communication i think about reason, eloquence and creative expression. how much online chatting, facebok walls and tweetings really explore that, versus putting casual conversation into text?
Just noticed this on our installation. Y2K+10...
PMC's will become much more prevalent and popular.
Why was the state capable of taking care of these people from the ages of 0-20, but cant take care of the same group in their old age?
Windows 7 has essentially added a much more basic version of this called "libraries".
I will say that technically, that option is there, but in my experience, it very rarely works as well as it should. We've just reverted to using Dropbox.
Point, but I'm not sure they're comparable. Both CPU and GPU are something you can never have enough of, because their task list expands to meet supply. Contrast: once you have enough FPU, you're done.
The igraph library for complex network research [GPL]
I don't understand the argument for your own CMS. I currently use Drupal and don't see any problems creating modules (many of them already exist) to add all sorts of functionality I come up with for many different types of sites. Creating your own CMS sounds like a nice idea, but to me it seems like reinventing a lot of different wheels which already exist. If they don't exist, they are pretty easy to attach. Am I missing something?
I wonder how long until we can run meiosis and fertilization in software and print a zygote?
The navigation in the results of search, using keyboard, more specifically, the arrows, is a great idea! it is a simple and easy.
I have to disagree, at least anecdotally. I know several people, whom I'm pretty sure don't have to work if they don't want to. Yet they moved to the US specifically in order to start companies. And even they, rich, educated folk from "good" countries have had ridiculous amounts of trouble getting visas and work permission.
i'm not sure they're as different as you are making out. why couldn't you have a chip that's somewhere between a cpu, a gpu and an asic - it rewires itself to make a trade-off between cache+prediction v many alus+parallelism? maybe the asic part is a bit extreme, but fermi (the next gen nvidia) will have on-chip memory that is switchable between explicit local shared memory (gpu) and implicit local cache (cpu). why couldn't the same kind of flexible approach be made to instructions - longer+fewer v more+shorter pipelines?
If you are a Drupal expert, if Drupal is the fastest way you can build a tiny new webapp, then use Drupal. I'm a Ruby person, and the fastest way for us to get interesting features onto our existing product site was to serve them with Ruby.
Macbook Tablet on sale! Not exactly what I expected either.
I understand this is photoshopped but it almost had me there for a little while. Photoshop awesomeness
As always, the Macalope says it best.

"January tablet unveiling 'confirmed' by ex-Google employee". Oh, well, then, that's all we need to WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT THE F-?

http://twitter.com/TheMacalope/status/7238525063
The problem is not that it wasn't in place and didn't work, it probably works 99.9% of the time. So all you need to do is throw enough people at that crack to become successful.

Airport security is after the fact, you need to work to create a world in which would-be-suicide bombers have too much to lose, and are too smart to be brain washed.

In the end that's probably cheaper too.
Votonic - the Erlang Content Management System
Votonic - the Erlang CMS Pt. II
Marc Worrell, lead developer, discusses why Votonic, why Erlang, and vision for the future.
I had a great experience at work, where networkx was too slow to work on the graph that I was working on, and igraph handled it perfectly, quickly, in python, and with just as simple an API.

Worth the pain to get it installed (IIRC, was a while ago, may have changed, etc.)
Practical First Rails Threading Example
Office/ Groupware (Microsoft Exchange, Outlook) AND their development tool chain. Visual Studio with its fantastic compiler and debugger kicks GCC + GDB in the arse.
Lawmakers in cash-strapped states poised to make Amazon.com collect sales tax
Anecdotally, I know at least several Americans that have moved to Europe, at least one pretty affluent.

But anecdotes are nice, numbers are better. For every wealthy person that would like to get 'in' to the US there must be 50,000 poor ones.

The difference is that for them nobody is going out of their way to create special visa to allow them entrance.
Twitter and Me Why It’s The Only Social Media Tool (Vivek Wadhwa) Uses
Bob, I know that. and Facebook uses Thrift which is now part of Apache incubator project. I may need to deal with some large data set with Cassandra database, which communicates with external programs in Thrift format messages.

As a side note, I hope Google will finish real time search api soon and open the firehose :-)
Three Ways to Keep Your Ego in Check
In my province there was a similar program, Provincial Nominee Program or PNP, an immigrant would invest $200,000 in a local business plus give a $25,000 deposit to the provincial government and the immigrant investor's citizenship request would be fast-tracked.

After living here for a year they were supposed to get the deposit back, but they didn't.

Even worse is the majority of the people who benefited were the same politicians who set up the program.

Now it's a huge scandal and the police are involved, large amounts of money plus politicians and there's a scandal, imagine that!
But hey, the speculation is bolstered by a quote from Rob Enderle! And he knows what he's talking about: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/12/09/enderle-joojoo
How to Capture an Idea
150+ Highly Recommended CSS 3 Tutorials
With sincerity, I'm not looking for a fight. Just a frank exchange of views.

I agree it would be nice to prevent Islamic Fundamentalist terrorism by understanding its causes, but that approach doesn't seem likely to work. My opinion, as above, is that the thoughts of suicide murderers will be messy, hard to understand, specific to individuals, and not terribly useful for preventing terrorism. This is because people are complicated, and because, legally and practically, suicide bombers are crazy. They're a threat to themselves and others.

I don't think there's any coherent argument against trying to understand the psychology of terrorism, but I find the enthusiasm for that course of action slightly ominous. This is an armchair discussion for me, and I suspect most people here, so the line between "Trying to Understand" and just wishing the problem would go away without our doing anything about it looks pretty thin.

That mindset has to be fought, in spite of the stupid posturing and overreaction after 9/11, because it's possible to overcompensate. If a bunch of murderous lunatics jump onto the world stage by killing a few thousand people and then claim they're the Next Great Existential Threat to the USA, it's not right to ignore them because they don't live up their own hype.
Timeline seems highly appropriate for me since I graduate from college in 2 years (since I am on a student visa). Maybe I will be able to stay in the US and work on my startup as I want to (during the best years of my life) than sell my soul for a corporate job.
Currently there is no computer, in any form, that is successful because it can be used together with other people in a physical sense. I think this new product must be great to use alone or will not meet the masses.

So even if this vision can be reductive I continue to think at this new product as a larger more powerful version of the iPhone that is mainly a portable device.

Portalbe does not mean the only usage is to carry it around outside your home. It feels natural that such a device is something you can lean on the table while cooking to read the news from internet, or to watch a film while on the bed after a destructive 2010 party like I'm doing right now.

Also of course in the "outside" world it's a great experience if the device is light enough. For instance I never take my laptop outside in the plane when I flight, as I feel uncomfortable to do it, my macbook is too weight and requires too space. So what I use is my iPhone indeed, but it's totally inadequate to perform tasks like writing a blog post.

So actually I can see why this device can be a success.

I also can clearly see (it's years I think that I could start a startup about this issue) how people are not able to share an image with one click, but this is, IMHO, an entirely different problem that should be addressed in some other way.

When I heard about Google Wave the first time my first reaction was: now people will be free to share things with one click in real-time, but my feelings with Wave are not good, it's not as "simple" as I dreamed, so I guess we have to wait for a new solution.
It's a game of bottle-necks. Solve one, you get another one for free.

Once you have 'enough' FPU you have not enough memory bandwidth, so you go wider / faster on the memory bus (this is already happening, we are now well over 1GHz on the memory bus), or you place the memory closer to the CPU (also happening, increased cache size).

Then as soon as that is done you now no longer have 'enough FPU', so you go parallel.

GPUs now have almost 250 cores and yet there are plenty of people that use more than one in a single machine (I've seen up to 4 of those, with two dies each for almost 2000 cores). Clearly some people don't have 'enough FPU' yet, and plenty of games would want more effects to add to their engines (which seems to be the biggest driver of this kind of development outside of hard core number crunching).

Increased resolution displays are another driver for more FPU power because once you start shading every pixel becomes the end point of a long pipeline of mathematical operations.

I don't foresee anybody complaining of 'too much FPU' in the next decade or longer, in fact I suspect that once this kind of FPU capacity becomes mainstream that we'll see whole new breed of applications to take advantage of it.
I looked up your profile but didn't find any contact info. I am dying to know more about MongoDB limitations and this page isn't helping:

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Concurrency
I see what you mean by "conditions".

What do you thing of offering a resident visa to everyone who completes a bachelors + graduate degree in the US? Minimum, that will take 6 years in the country to complete which is approximately what is needed to get citizen (as far as residence requirement goes).

It must be noted also that time spent in the country on a student visa does not go towards your residency requirement to become a citizen