skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hardware tends toward being general-purpose over time. It only makes sense to do dedicated hardware for things that aren't feasible to do using general-purpose silicon at the time (notable exceptions are for simpler things like ethernet controller chips, although if a general-purpose CPU is cheap enough to replace the chip, maybe that will change). As you pointed out, hardware speeds do get exponentially faster over time, which makes it less desirable to go to the effort of designing purpose-specific hardware.

The problem with current FPGA and CPLD solutions where you would be able to upload your own algorithms is that currently they operate much more slowly than mask manufactured ASICs. Not to say that couldn't change at some point, but even then the line between software and hardware is pretty blurry. Tools for designing correct implementations of an algorithm in hardware that take full advantage of being in hardware (very fine-grained concurrency, etc) are difficult to master.

Sorry, it is hard to hit these points in depth in a short post, but hardware has a set of concerns that are separate from software, and treating them as exactly equivalent is not really accurate, even if functionally and algorithmically they are the same.
Matt Blaze: How unpredictable screening helps terrorists
Lack of knowledge and opportunity is certainly a tragedy. Buying all the mosquito nets to save lives is pretty useless if we don't help those same people grasp opportunity and become educated. The two causes are exclusive in terms of donation. Just because I donate to prevent Malaria does not mean I can't spend just as much or more to OLPC.
"I agree with you entirely except for one thing,"

Then, more to the point, why don't you oppose voting in general on this site?
I understand and agree with you, but that is by definition accessible only to a very specialized expert group.

The differentiation aspect of hardware is that it involves both logical and physical domains, where as software is limited to logic. We may require new approaches to hardware and architectures as the "intrinsic" aspect of the problem is very much rooted in underlying hardware architecture.

(I also wouldn't be surprised at all if the initial successful applications of quantum computing are memory related.)
Well, that will be okay. Do you want to spend your time building the game or writing ray tracing algorithms? You want to call Array.sort(), not write a sort. It just takes up time.

It's interesting that CISC won out over RISC considering the conversation we are having. It's simpler for the builder. You can repeat yourself less. Imagine doing a quicksort in assembly. No way, right? Not today. Why?
Configuration management ala Chef, Puppet. The old way of Sysadmins hand maintaining configuration files on individual UNIX machines simply won't cut it in the era of easily provisioned ephemeral cloud resources.
Okay, then we just have different views on what the gaming console should do ie- just games or do the other stuff. The closed systems of gaming consoles certainly makes it hard to provide everything.

The mac mini and the concept of the HTPC is one that I think will certainly flourish over the next decade. There were 141 million LCD HDTVs sold in 2009 alone. $599 gives you a very very powerful machine for its purpose. Most importantly, it always comes down to apps. The killer app for living room PCs is entertainment+content. It's all there. Right now I can instantly access anything I want (movies via netflix, itunes, hulu,etc. or games via steam) within seconds and on-demand. That was NOT possible a short while ago on the hardware or software end at a reasonable price point ($599 or less).
Trevor Blackwell FAQ
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Doesn't work in Opera.
Everyone I know is just laughing at it. This is just a way for them to get (or, as they say in Russia, "saw off") more money from the government's coffers.

Apophis has been studied quite closely by astronomers, and the chance of impact has been reduced from tiny to minuscule.

An old story too. Why Perminov decided to choose this time to go open with this idea I do not know.

Now, there may be good reasons to launch a probe towards Apophis, for scientific or technological research. If eventually something like this happens, more power to them.
a) Every kind of concurrency stuff. CUDA, threading, Go/Erlang/... light threads, and so forth.

b) Alternative databases.

c) Real-world scalability.
Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast
IE supports this kind of effect via the filter: CSS property. MSDN has tons of information on this. (I'm not saying this is a nice way to implement it, but it does at least work)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBMUI-Mj_YU#t=5m58s
Thanks. I think that should be in the FAQ.
Do you have some sort of evidence that he is working for Highlander or are you just making an accusation?
I don't think we can rely on mobile services for emergency uses yet.

I'd much rather depend on a copper wire to a central office with a multi-day battery backup system than on both a flakey cell phone and a flakey cell tower that will both quickly lose power.
Perhaps one of these:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/health/22brod.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/25/health/25medicine.html

EDITED to add: HN discussion of the first of those at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=87167 .

EDITED again to add: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/success/michigan.html has the 2/3 figure in it and has been mentioned in at least one comment on HN.
You're absolutely right, that's exactly how I remember it too.

People used to call me all the time, "I can't find a laptop under $1,000, help! What should I buy? Should I just get a desktop for $700? I can use the same monitor."

Now, my next portable is going to cost $100. It might be a tablet. Not too long from now, they're going to be in refrigerator magnets for $5.
Not only is cell coverage incomplete, but DSL reach is very limited compared to POTS http://www.dslreports.com/faq/4676 (I cannot get DSL and I'm only three miles from my CO - apparently they don't support longer distance versions of DSL). There are vast swaths of the US that are not served by cable. The remaining option would be satellite, which is expensive.
The title is relatively misleading: the article doesn't say that atmospheric CO2 levels have been the same every year; rather, the percent of year-by-year emissions which are absorbed has not gone down.
Thanks for reminding me that you can only use Foursquare in big cities... I just updated the post.

There's certainly some cruft in Foursquare, too, but I agree that Gowalla tends to be a bit worse with this.
Thanks for posting these. I'd forgotten about /best

Found a story I had missed "Is college worth it?" and a fascinating insight by lionhearted about how you might get into an airline lounge:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011748
I hate to say this, but if you actually have to ask the developer for some simple docs on something basic like this, that's a big red flag to me.
It is terrible. An old girlfriend worked as a type designer and rampant piracy makes selling fonts to end users a terrible business.

These "Type Foundries" make their main revenues by designing custom fonts for magazines where you can earn 5-6 figure sums. e.g. Martha Stewart may want a custom script font family for her magazines. She'll turn to a company to design a font exclusively for her. They also make money when selling large bundles of licenses to media companies that tend not to pirate fonts. Much the same way Adobe sells lots of software to institutions, but suffers piracy among hobbyists. Except there are thousands of font options, many of which are free.
1. In the headline: MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. MSRA, Minnesota Street Rod Association.

2. The article claims that people develop resistance to antibiotics, which is almost wrong enough to set off the Quack Filter.
The Firefox "Places" frecency algorithm
Reminded me of my old Kaypro (CP/M). I have/had a DOS based emulator, nice22^H^H^H^H^H^H 22nice.

Googling around for it turns up:

http://www.dcast.vbox.co.uk/cpm_over.html

http://www.cpm.z80.de/emulate.html

The latter has a copy for download. (Although both also provide alternatives, some maybe better.)

Now, I think I still have access to an idle 5 1/4 floppy drive and a PC with an old enough bus to use it. Long overdue to do a bit of personal preservation.

I also have a CD ROM that I ordered years ago from some outfit in Oak Creek, CA, IIRC, that has a bunch of CP/M based software. If I can find it and it has not rotted...
If you are trying to say that the OLPC was what drove down laptop prices I would have to disagree. The OLPC was made possible by the same forces that drove down other laptop prices: cheaper electronics parts.

OLPC may have had a slight effect, but the larger cause was the natural development of computing technology. As electronics advance prices drop at a fairly predictable rate. What cost $100 this year is probably going to cost $50 next year, and $25 the year after that.

That is the real reason why laptops have gotten so cheap, not because of anything the OLPC foundation has done.
Admittedly I couldn't stand to read the whole article. His obsession with typewriters seems to have influenced his taste in font size and family.

My question to others based on what I read is how many people here, without looking, can type quickly and accurately but choose to not follow the homerow practice? I type very quickly, and hardly ever need to press backspace. I usually only look when I type in 16 character passwords with alternating caps.
ah, ok, thanks - i had it backwards.

thanks for the details reply. i keep reading it, understanding a little more each time. this sounds like something i should look into more.
The thrust of that article is that YouTube's bandwidth bill at Google is zero, because of Google's dark fiber / peering. If MS had bought them the bill might be astronomical.
CISC won over RISC? I think you meant that in reverse :)
Which may have been a significant factor in lowering overall price points. Generic laptops are now in the US$500 - 600 range (depending upon your definitions of "generic" and "laptop").

My (rather limited) understanding of the PC industry is that it does / did try to maintain certain price points in the face of ongoing technical improvements. For a while, the area around US$1000 was maintained for lower end systems. That has since gone by the wayside.
Bill Gates once boasted that he could run Microsoft for a decade with no income whatsoever. So, yeah, long times until returns is normal with them. Actually, I wouldn't wonder at all if they just did the math, projected that the entire project will be a net loss, and did it anyway. Just how do you account for strengthening DirectX and helping keep windows entrenched on the desktop with Games for Windows?
What does this do to DSL? My local provider told me they could provide a dry line so I could have DSL without dialtone, but I've heard a lot of local telcos can't do this.

In any case, AT&T needs to improve their service before this happens. I live out in the country and I can drop a cell signal (AT&T is my provider!) by simply walking across my living room. Cellular service is spotty at best in many locations on my small property.
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It's not YCombinator affiliated, which is what prevents it from being in the FAQ I do believe.
Clojure vs Ruby & Scala -- Transient Newsgroups
Apophis is currently considered the largest threat to our planet
What if you want the subject on the right, like all non-pipeline commands you read?

foo myfile
bar < myfile
(bar | baz) < myfile
edit: (forgot to elaborate on which question I was referring to) "There just aren't that many designers out there, relative to other disciplines. Anybody who has tried to hire designers knows that it is super hard, harder than hiring engineers which is already hard."

I think the real question is: why aren't more graphic designers transitioning from print into web design instead?

IMO There are plenty of graphic designers for market demand, but there are very few qualified web designers
at least that is what it says here: http://en.rian.ru/science/20091230/157423845.html
While your cell phone battery might be weak, why do you think that your wireless network doesn't have battery backups on all critical infrastructure? Uptime is just as big of a deal for wireless networks as it is for wired networks.
This humbly reverent stance is a deeply Christian sentiment. Within the Christian modality, it is recognizing the basic flaw of the individual as an unworthy and sinful creature only blessed by the grace of God. Here, Mr. President is eschewing Pride for an admission of fallibility and attributing his success to an external locus of control. This sentiment is what made him so very appealing to a wide selection of voters. Contrast it with the tone of Gore's self-talk, which was overshadowed by a shame of his fortunate upbringing -- he was disproportionately self-concious of having lucky pedigree that it backfired, further alienating him from the common voter and making him seem "elitist." As further evidence, post-election Gore further embraced populist iconography by growing a beard and focusing exclusively on common concerns.
Learn some linear algebra. Literally every how'd-they-do-that-technique from OCR to PageRank is based on putting data in to a matrix and extracting some eigenvectors.

I took LA in college, but my professor was no where near as good and on topic in relation to computer algorithms as this guy: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-06Spring-2005/Cours...

Oh, check out R. There are a lot of free papers and example code showing say, how principal component analysis on a dataset of migratory geese can be used to explain so and so, along with generating some pretty pictures.

It's a really nice bit of OSS!
Ask HN: How many HN readers are avid poker players?
This is semi-inspired by several articles that have popped up in popular periodicals over the past few months regarding increasing academic interest in teaching poker theory. (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877087)

However, I am mostly just curious.
You are right about the tools being difficult to master. I've been doing some work with FPGAs lately, and I see one big problem. The hardware is really cool. But the software is horrible.

I'm working with Altera tools. To do any work, I need to download about 5Gb of stuff. The IDE is painfully slow, badly designed, and crashes about once every hour. Everything is closed-source. Basically, the development process is at least a decade behind that for software work.

Xilinx tools are also closed (don't know if they are as unusable though). I think that if one of the FPGA companies opened up their toolkit, they could win big. But they are too worried about their proprietary routing algorithms to do that.
All Quiet on the CodePlex Front as 100 Day Mark Passes
A caveat about the whole urge to make UIs look three-dimensional: it takes more caution to prevent screwing up. More so than with a two-dimensional style, we catch subtle visual miscues and dislike them.

Things must be consistent: every 3D widget needs to appear to have the same light source and be plausibly oriented to each other, just as a start. The need for visual consistency sets up a tight coupling in 3D designs. For instance, take the OS X Leopard dock, which went from a minimally 3D background that icons "laid" on to a much more 3D table on which icons "stood". Icons designed for the old dock looked wrong in the new dock.
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...which is amusing in the context of the recent media buzz about Apple creating a tablet computer that doesn't even have a wheel. :)
Be that as it may, the Semantic Web community and the data it requires in order to exist are still growing, much faster than when I started blogging about it in January 07.

People are starting to care but the "adoption rate" is so low because, as you said, people don't understand it. I still struggle with the subject. Not the underlying concepts, but the picture as a whole.

From an "insider's perspective" I can say with confidence that what we hope the Semantic Web will bring us is going to come about. I just personally no longer believe in "well, here is the old Web, and then here's the day we switch on the Semantic Web. See the difference?"
Marginal increases in political aptitude yield benefits crossing many domains in life, unlike most skills.
I've never been successful with the home row method, I'll admit; it has always caused severe pain in my wrists. That said, I can type at least 90 wpm without looking at the keys, and that suits me just fine.
The cynic in me says AT&T wants to do DSL/fiber to the high density, high value markets and get out from under the requirement to also provide POTS to the low density, low profitability rural markets, currently subsidized by the high value markets.

See: http://www.fcc.gov/wcb/tapd/universal_service/

* Advance the availability of such services to all consumers, including those in low income, rural, insular, and high cost areas at rates that are reasonably comparable to those charged in urban areas

So, if AT&T drops POTS, what are they going to do to cover rural areas that cannot be covered by copper based DSL and are unlikely to be covered by fiber due to cost?
A Thousand Foot View of Machine Learning
Well, the basic parts of the site are self-evident, certainly to anyone interested in the hacker community. And the other, more esoteric aspects of the site are 1) in the source and 2) occasionally mentioned in articles.

Not sure I would say that it is a red flag about the site.
... and if I'm wrong, those skills will still be useful.
Ask / Tell HN: dropped out, learning from books by myself... any advice?
Sorry for the grammar, I'm not a native English speaker.

I left university shortly before getting a bachelor degree in Computer Science. This happened some years ago; I did it because I was very busy with my own startup and I decided focusing on the startup was a better idea. Also, I noticed that I learned much faster by myself than on the university (though that university wasn't a very good one, so maybe it was worth dropping it anyway).

This is how things continue now: as I'm passionate about cs and maths, I keep buying undergraduate and graduate level books which I read cover to cover. Since I cannot spend too much doing this because I have other obligations now -I'm not a full time student-, depending on the book, it can be one to four months per book. I'm not focusing on exercises much so far, but rather on learning the concepts and general tools of the trade, which I try to apply whenever possible. So it's possible that a big part of what I read, even if I understand it, will be forgotten in some time, unless I find a way to apply it or to set it in my memory in a better way. I'm using spaced repetition for memorizing important equations and concepts that I don't want to forget though.

In the last two years I think I have learned a lot, at a pace slightly slower than that of university (though with a wider variety and more advanced texts maybe). I think I can keep learning this way, progressing to more and more advanced concepts.

I'm posting here because I don't know about any other person doing this kind of disciplined self teaching. I'm sure there has to be a lot of people doing this. Any advice from such people? Also, any advice or comments from people not doing this? Actually, all comments are welcome.
> most reputable sites are not changing all their IP's very often

Your suggestion is that only disreputable sites are changing their IPs frequently, but there are a lot which return different addresses for load balancing or geolocation or CDN reasons, or which genuinely might change (MX records particularly) quickly, and some which are generated on the fly so never-typed-before.example.org will resolve, because they've configured a server to reply to any request but there is no inclusive list to cache.

> if (and only if) they do, then we can requery

And how will the client know? If the site is down it might be down for real or the client might have no internet connection, instead of the IP being outdated. If there's another site on the old IP then it will connect and return valid headers. You'd have to rely on the user already knowing the website they wanted to see and saying "that isn't right try again but properly this time" and that assumes it is something user facing rather than a POP3 connection which suddenly "can't connect" or gives a login failure.

Plus you'd then need every popular TCP/IP using program ever to be rewritten to have a "try again but this time with a full DNS requery" option.

> 50+ queries to a varied array of servers to find the IP's for one host is not unusual

So fix that, don't overhaul the whole system because some people can't configure it properly. As you said it shouldn't need more than three or four at most. Where are you seeing that so often that you say it is "not unusual"?

> so ultimately, if we follow the path to the 'top', the whole scheme relies on people trusting people

As does the whole SSL certificate pyramid scheme and the whole 'using an OS that was written by other people' scheme and the whole 'eating food grown and processed far away' scheme. That doesn't mean it's inherently awful.

> we have to trust the telecom companies for the directories they publish.

And we have to trust them to route packets to their destinations once we have the resolved IP as well and not change the content on the way over, too.

> popular browsers and OS's are themselves caching IP's mostly outside of the user's control, then are these load balancing devices irrelevant?

No, they load balance for the site over many users, not between individual requests from the same user. And if OSes and browsers are caching why bring the hosts file into it?

> the HOSTS file. even packed with 1000's of IP's, it's relatively small. What are your compelling reasons?

You can run your own caching name server (on your computer or LAN) right now, you don't need to overhaul DNS for the whole world in order to benefit. Plus, local hosts file management generally would be a pain in the neck.
To be clear, I thought it went without saying that marking agreement or disagreement would not count towards the worth-reading score, and that the two arrow pairs would not be accumulated into a single score. Two scores would have to be displayed, perhaps giving users the option of seeing only the worth-reading score.
Because web design sucks. Dealing with HTML and CSS directly is like dealing with assembly language. With print design you know exactly what you have to work with. With web design, you're designing for a multitude of browsers and clients.
I like Clinton, but let me play devil's advocate & defend jdminhbg's answer anyway:

"Good man" -> adulterer & impeached POTUS
"Good marriage & children" -> adulterer, but we have no real idea of the health of his marriage. It could be healed, or it could be a facade to preserve political and professional careers.
"Good friends" -> Can't argue here, except maybe for the dead or imprisoned ones (Whitewater)
"Successful political life" -> Impeached POTUS
"Write a great book" -> Being on the NYT BS list doesn't qualify it as a "great book" to me. When I hear great, I think Hemingway and such, books that people will care to read decades from now.

It's all a matter of perceptions and viewpoints.