skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently sat through a talk on how second life is being used as a teaching method in a CS course, its no where near dead, people are finding more ways to utilise it

SL is the first iteration, there are many new ones coming along soon
US Air Force Completes Killer Micro-Drone Project
Anyone who still thinks PCs are in any way elegant machines, please raise your hand.
I don't understand it because their content is very Buzzword Compliant, but this is what I can gather: they sell you dedicated servers billed hourly and provisioned quickly, much like a cloud provider.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great linux gets something like this. But, eh... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail c'mon! It's been done! Well!
Http://www.uppetop.com/mens-6-inch-waterproof-boots-19-p-691.html
I suspect that these reviews are a little premature and that Google has a few tricks up their sleeve for today's Nexus One event. Google distributed this phone to thousands of people weeks before its launch, including some non-employees, knowing full well that it would leak.

That's a great way to build up buzz, but at the same time it makes for a pretty lame event. My guess is we'll see a few new apps or features that weren't baked into the employee phones (yet).
I'm on the programming side of this issue (as a matter of skills and experience) but find myself in agreement with the author. I frankly never took the time to gain the deep understanding of relational technologies -- a singular exception to my usual approach to software which is to read primary sources and gain fundamental understanding. (This is something that I have recently started to remedy.)

Perhaps its the inevitable corporate association of an RDBM that lends the subject an unattractive image in the mind (as opposed to a sexy new language, framework, or paradigm)? I am frankly at a loss to explain this to myself, given that the theory, technology, and applications of the subject are certainly quite interesting and challenging!
My Mum taught me to cook quite well by being a good example but most of the technical skill I learnt in Home Economics at high school.

Peeling potatoes with my 4 year old is a test of nerve though - suprised I still have all my fingers left (I hold the spuds, he attacks with the peeler!). I'm aiming for him making cooked breakfast by 7 and meals by the time he starts high school. By then he'll be messing around with sharp knives and fire by himself so no reason why he can't do that and be productive ...
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that if being is the result of chance, then so are our wills.

So if evolution is the universe blindly programming creatures, then human-directed evolution is the universe blindly meta-programming, via our wills.

In other words, destiny and purpose are illusions in a materialistic worldview. (How we manage to perceive them is another paradox.)
Corn production is an insignificant contributor to potential ethanol supply.

Ethanol is a white elephant.

To fuel even 1/10 of our needs by ethanol, we would need 53 million acres of farmland dedicated to growing fuel-corn (the process of which is 170% efficient, requiring 70% more energy to grow than can be extracted via ethanol).

In 2006, we only harvest 309 million acres of farmland.

The only reason ethanol is gaining steam is politics. It has no potential whatsoever to become even a major fuel additive. We are much better off investing those corn subsidies that keep corn ethanol cheap into batteries for plugin-hybrids, alternative nuclear sources (LFTR comes to mind), and better mass transport. Especially for freight.
It looks gorgeous. I love the huge display and the apparent indestructibility. Now all we need is color e-ink.

Any notions on price?
nanijoe is still pretty much technically correct (the best kind of correct). It's just that when chess players talk about plotting "n moves ahead", they mean something different than a programmer talking about a program computing "n moves ahead". Top chess players evaluate a handful of possible lines of play very very deeply. But it's impossible for the human mind to evaluate every response and counter-response to any reasonable depth, which is why computer players dominate so much in tricky tactical positions.
Becoming better mind-readers
And still for good reason.
I'm counting on it as well. It would be silly to engineer all this pre-hype and then just announce another phone with the only big feature being the Eclair (or Flan?) update.

Really, I'd love to see the big surprise be a data-only plan option.
Is this significantly different than the rather old Quantum::Superpositions and Quantum::Entanglement perl modules by Conway?
Here is a lively discussion tied to a post I had made about why Delaware is not necessarily the best state in which to incorporate your startup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=674469. If you follow the thread, you will see various contributions from HN members discussing the pros and cons of incorporating in various states. I'm sure much more can be added here, but this should be a good start for your assessment.
I tried to explain how it works in the comments in the code. Probably worth reading them in detail as they do explain the algorithm used.

My thought process was something like this (over a number of days grabbing time when I could):

Emulate a human selecting pieces and clicking them together. Model pieces as straight lines of the right length. There are two important things: how long the line is and how much it modifies the angle at which the next piece will join. Thus all I need is to keep track of the position of the end of the last piece added and the angle.

Spend a while figuring out the trigonometry and getting that code working correctly. To generate the permutations I realized that the process could be split into three parts:

1. Always place the bridge. Since there's one just add it at the end.

2. Separate the straights and curves. Generate all the permutations of clockwise and anticlockwise curved pieces. To do that I used the trick of all 12-bit binary numbers between 0 and 2^12-1.

3. Then insert the straight pieces between the curved pieces in all places possible.

Feed each possible track layout into code that builds the track and check that the end pieces match up. Add code to eliminate end pieces that join impossibly (come from the wrong angle), add code to remove duplicates caused by rotation and reflection.

Once I got that working I then wrote code in Processing to draw a pretty picture.
Antibody active against many different strains of influenza discovered
Yes. C.S. Lewis makes an interesting argument in "The Abolition of Man." IIRC, he says this: imagine a generation which has absolute power to shape the following generation to its will. Every generation that follows will then be puppets of that generation.

So humanity's power cannot continue growing indefinitely. If it reaches a high enough point, it will immediately drop to 0.

From Wikipedia: "The final chapter describes the ultimate consequences of this debunking: a distant future in which the values and morals of the majority are controlled by a small group who rule by a perfect understanding of psychology, and who in turn, being able to "see through" any system of morality that might induce them to act in a certain way, are ruled only by their own unreflected whims. The controllers will no longer be recognizably human, the controlled will be robot-like, and the Abolition of Man will have been completed."
I dont see the niche myself..

If you want instant provisioning and scalability then use the cloud. If you want dedicated servers, well, buy a dedicated.
Using blood of young mouse to repair tissue of old mouse
The $30bn pair of underpants
I've never really paid any attention to Google press releases; have they traditionally been any good at having surprises at them?

Apple is the standard bearer for message control, I don't know that Google is any good at stopping internal leaks - it seems like we know a ton more about the Nexus One than almost any Apple product announcement already.
The pithy response might be: because evolution itself has evolved.
Technology publicity from the 50's
There are a relatively small number of equally optimal moves (compared to the total number of possible moves) for a given opening, after white has opened in a certain way. The vast majority of moves other than the ones covered in the opening and/or its known variations are indeed sub-optimal, and quite often if someone deviates from one of the great many standard openings, this can be exploited by the opponent.
Wichita kansas real estate
The perfect home is awaiting you in a Schellenberg community, conveniently located in West Wichita.
How many shapes could you form with 2 of these train sets? I think each one costs just $10 or so.
The added benefit is that the multiprocessing approach scales more easily to multiple machines. Same rule applies to Ruby.
I'm not sure this isn't still a leftover from the original dot-com era bust and the existing real estate bubble issues.

This doesn't seem like a reflection on the state of tech in Silicon Valley (which the title infers) but the state of over-speculation in area commercial real-estate.

This is a good thing for tech companies.
Android limits the available CPU time of background tasks, and will kill them if it needs memory for the foreground task.

It also has stats on which applications have used the battery (and how much) since you last recharged.
You could say the same to the article writer. Would it be that hard to write "Sortfolio, our website design portfolio search site, ..." so one knows if following the link is worthwhile?
I'm hoping this title is literal, as in "smoking crack and being the mayor of DC are not mutually exclusive activities"

edit: No, the title is false advertising.
An interesting look at a real-world use and development of a virtual machine, but it was more entertaining when I was reading it and thinking "Wait, was Zork the first implementation of a VM?"

Sadly, it would appear not.
This is a good observation about the macro economy in Silicon Valley but the activity level for early-stage startups is now strong and getting stronger (VC-funded startups still lag) - for the right startups, this is a very good time to launch and develop in anticipation of an eventual recovery.

Agree with your point that the broad recovery is still quite a ways off (lesson for startups: don't get overextended in the short term as you build).
What will mobile phones destroy next?
E-reader has more size, flexibility
is there a reasonable way to build ones own laptop these days?
The energy argument is stale: consider this article. To quote their conclusion:
"Corn ethanol is energy efficient, as indicated by an energy ratio of 1.24, that is, for every Btu dedicated to producing ethanol, there is a 24-percent energy gain."

http://www.klenergycorp.com/pdf/USDA_Shapouri.pdf
That's a pretty cool setup, really. I almost made an ass of myself by saying "they should be using blade servers" when they are, in fact, using blade servers.

I would really, really like to know how the power density of blades like this compares to the potential power density of hefty machines running virtual instances. If you can get close with dedicated blades, something like this would make a really desirable (and sustainable) premium "cloud" offering.
I do the same thing on FF. But in my case , its more of a habit that got carried over from being a seasoned Opera User from ye olde days of Dial-up internet
Mobile Ad impressions see an upward trend in Android
I like to say that the two biggest mistakes I've made when building websites are using an ORM and not using an ORM.

At my current position, we're using entirely hand-coded SQL. It's been a real pain, particularly when trying to fetch large graphs, or when changing the schema.

I read articles like this and wonder if I'm missing something about SQL. I repeatedly find myself writing a whole lot of joins, and writing a tedious converter to map it to something the front end deals with. When I get sick of that and don't care about performance, I do a query for each table. Neither of those seems like the right solution.
That type of workflow will not work on today's multitasking devices for very long; the battery will die pretty quickly. I can testify to this having done it on the G1.

For the meantime (next year or two), until batteries get better and hardware more efficient, push notifications are a pretty good way to solve this. Why does the handset need to keep these connections open when a remote server can do this more efficiently, not draining the battery, and then push a notification when an event happens?

There is a fundamental limit to the amount of information that can be conveyed on a 4" screen. Everything else "running" in the background, in a single tasking environment, can be taken care of by well written apps and services. More of a pain for the developer, yes, but a godsend for one's battery and CPU time.
That is absolutely fantastic. I'd like to see the algorithm run on different (higher quality) musicians though to see the results. Is this really an artifact of Nickelback's suck, or is the algorithm just so efficient that it maintains the musicality regardless?
I actually wonder why Apple can't provide an opt-in mechanism for background apps. They do this already for location services.

Some little popup that says "Would you like to allow this application to run in the background? This can severely affect battery life and performance"
So in America, its worse than in a true socialist state. How about compared to existing corrupt socialist states? Probably better. I can forgive people comparing such policies to socialism, since we rarely see true socialism, and cynically we regard our elected representatives are hardly better than socialist councils.
You can do it, its just not economical. Last time I looked the cases were pretty bulky as well, but it's been a while.
I am a long time (satisfied) user of your ArrayDB [;)] but have been waiting a long time for you to release a network interface ...
The article seems to indicate it created ONLY strip clubs (gambling being quashed).
As a hilarious aside, I listened to the remix before the original, and some of the awkward bits I assumed were artifacts of the algorithm turn out to be in the song itself.
Mr Bean invades EU Site
Initially I had my bets on Twitter following a Second Life trend: small initial adoption, media sensation, explosive growth, People losing interest, relative obscurity.

I still think it will happen that way, but only when the next big thing comes along to cover up Twitter, like Twitter covered up Second Life.
So, I remember reading random SF stories as a child, in the 80s, in which pocket computers did everything. Heck, Larry Niven had this concept going in at least the mid 70s with Mote in God's eye. The difference between those pocket computers and what we're doing with phones now: A name- we call them phones. Why is it so surprising when it actually starts to come true? This is no different than the previous "computerizations" in which digital devices replaced some previously untouchable thing.
Is it just me or does that attractive, female customer service technician work for a lot of companies..?

https://support.newservers.com/themes/client_default/staffon...
The more clearly you specify the semantics, the less applicable the tag is, by necessity.

Personally, I've come around to the idea that semantic HTML is a joke, because "semantics" can only exist in the context of an agreed-upon semantic context and there's absolutely no way to declare One True Semantic Context, handed down from a committee. There's nothing more or less "semantic" about <cite> vs. <div class="cite">; both may be meaningless, or one may be meaningful but not the other, or both may mean subtly different things, all depending on the context they are in. Nor does wrapping something in a non-existant tag <book> magically make it "non-semantic" or "semantic", until a context is (or is not) added. There's no magic in the tag name; it's just a meaningless string by itself.

Bear in mind that much of the reason I say that the centralized committee can't hand down the One True Context is that even if they do, it is simply a fact that vast swathes of the web will ignore their dictate, and a world in which only 10% of the uses of the "cite" tag are actually "semantically correct" is a world in which the putative semantics are useless. (And if you say "Well, we'll cut it down to a certain subset, like my personal store of documents.", my response is, yes, yes you will, and that's exactly what I mean by a "semantic context".) (And 10% is probably a gross, orders-of-magnitude overestimate.)

Context-free semantics is a contradiction in terms.
Under the described setup, you don't have to recompile anything. Using the REPL, you can redefine functions one at a time, without ever taking down the server. For a simple site, I think this trumps ease of deployment.
Royalty-free stock photos. Got to love 'em.
Be a Good Turk Boss - Mechanical Turk Tips from Feedback Army
In the variant called suicide chess it's routinely possible for humans to recognize wins 30 moves in the future. I've seen strong players do this in fractions of a second during lightning games. One factor contributing to this is a comparatively low branching factor in terms of raw move legality. But I think it's similar (maybe slightly lower) to the effective branching factor a grandmaster considers in regular chess.

Another factor is that it's not necessary to see the actual moves. Humans can immediately evaluate patterns that have a known outcome that many moves in the future without needing to enumerate the exact moves of the principle variation in their mind. You might argue that this isn't really what is meant by "x moves ahead". But I think this more "fuzzy" definition may very well be more accurate.
Home Remedies for Acne
Ow MY BALLS!
A very useful site for Home Remedies. I recommend to all ++
Well, if the responsiveness of their website is representative for their servers & service then I'll happily pass "NewServers".
That PCW magazine Hitchhiker's Guide review (on the reviews page) was submitted by me (in about 1999).
Analytics X Prize
And the concomitant disadvantages are that multi-process solutions eat memory like there's no tomorrow, and can share cached data only via IPC. So you get your scalability at the cost of a very large constant factor drop in overall performance.

Some problems don't care. Some do. But for those where threading is a more appropriate solution, the Python GIL is a significant limitation. And this is a great exposition as to why.

Announcing that threading should never be used just tells the world that you only work in one problem domain (probably web content generation) and haven't thought through the details elsewhere.
At least it was there, in late september, when this story was written.
I was wondering the exact same thing. I mean, someone who offers dedicated servers surely should have a responsive website. I wasn't going to say anything because I thought it might just be me - but I guess not.
Doesn't softlayer (http://softlayer.com/) provide this same service?
I can get through a book in on average - for a 250 page hardback - a week, so this isn't obscene.
I don't think you have to be an evolutionary biologist to understand it or find patterns in evolution across timescales. Hawking is a brilliant man and I'm sure he knows a lot of stuff outside physics.
Why wouldn't you just make the it an abstract base model without any fields? If that's not what you want though you should be able to get that behavior using multiple inheritance:

class AlwaysUpdate(object):
def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
if self.pk:
kwargs['force_update'] = True
kwargs['force_insert'] = False
else:
kwargs['force_insert'] = True
kwargs['force_update'] = False
return super(AlwaysUpdate, self).save(*args, **kwargs)

class MyModel(AlwaysUpdate, models.Model):
pass # model def here
... why do they do all their client development in a VM?
Topalov hasn't become world champion. He'll have his shot this spring, I believe.
This theory essentially what Ray Kurzweil has been preaching for years.
Perhaps researchers are finding the placebo effect more successfully due to a sort of meta-placebo effect. They're expecting to observe it, so they do... ;)
Maybe he gives them to friends or a local library after he's done?
The Nexus One leaks are deliberate. No, Google may not have actually sent the photos to blogs themselves, but giving the device to that many people just before the holidays? It was basically guaranteed. They knew it would happen.

As far as Google's leak control, I think that they can be secretive when they want to be. Part of that comes from the fact that they have so much going on — you hear a rumor and it could well be related to some random research project or internal test, etc. But I've been to a few Google events where there were product launches that hadn't been previously rumored.

A good example is probably the Chrome launch. As far as I can remember, there wasn't any significant buildup in rumors of a "Google Browser" in the weeks before that announcement. Granted, the cat came out of the bag when a mailing company accidentally shipped the Chrome comics a day early, but that didn't come from an employee leak.
It's fairly easy to find barebones bodies with mobo, cpu, etc. However finding graphics chips, sound chips, etc. is quite a pain.
What if, like physics, each "improvement" to mankind has an equal and opposite negative impact on the world?

If we think about benefit and harm, these are usually with respect to energy. It takes time to heal wounds, it takes more energy to overcome injury. Benefits, like the car for example, enable humans to expend less energy, but they take more from the environment.

If we extrapolate that to the world around us, then for example, taking a prescription drug will have a corresponding negative impact on the environment.

If what I suggest here is true, then any improvement we could make to human evolution is merely an illusion. Perhaps the improvements we do make are merely improvements, or perceived to be improvements, because we can't see the harm created somewhere else, like the destruction of landscape, deaths in mines, pollution, etc...
My brothers and I have split our massive compiled collection of Brio for our kids. It makes me sad that the company is no more. I've heard bad knockoffs are now available in discount stores, but they don't fit the original track.
Photographer captures electricity
I think "Swing doors waste ..." is more accurate. And perhaps easier to grasp. Doors don't _use_ energy, unless they're motorized.
Because the alternative - survival of the fittest - is incompatible with contemporary/democratic human values. In deed, and sometimes in thought, we pretend evolution does not apply to humans. The issue cannot just be avoided, in the long term there are 3 options:
a) Design the next generation.
b) Do nothing. Go backwards genetically.
c) Create a reproductively unfair society based on fitness (hopefully not one which involves people dying off - but the alternative is preventing people who are not medically and financially independent from having children).

I agree with your sentiment (and am a B or C)
There's some truth to this "optimization" stuff: most of the low end computers these days come with all kinds of trial software installed (presumably for marketing purposes). Usually I'll spend 20 minutes removing it all after the initial setup. Its probably worth $20 to have it removed if you don't know how to remove it yourself.
> Buzzword Loaded
FTFY
Astrology, Free Astrology
I'd love to hear your rationale.

I recently landed at a small startup in San Diego. We're downtown in class A office space, 16th floor with a Pacific view, and we pay less than $2.50/sqft.

I'm having a hard time seeing how being in the bay area is worth 13× the price during a glut, but I've only worked here in San Diego so I could definitely use some perspective.