skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
See my comment on the WSJ's enumeration of over 5 billion annually spend on this area; I know it was 1 billion not too many years ago. 100,000 per scientist if there's 50,000 of them; play around with the numbers, but "10s of thousands" feeding at this trough is not unreasonable.

There's a reason why my university's president and department's head are big boosters of AGW/CC, even though the former is a biologist and the latter a chemist.
Assume that Daniel is rational. If you want to reach him how about focusing on actions that he might agree to? How about:

o increasing funding for monitoring temperatures on a worldwide basis so that we can get a better handle on where we are.

o increasing funding for monitoring CO2 levels (along with other greenhouse gases) to see if can get more data about the here and now.

Certainly we will need better monitoring of both temperature and CO2 gases to understand where we are and to monitor the effectiveness of any interventions that are agreed to.

It's often more effective to work from areas where you may agree and to tell if you are having a values conflict or a disagreement over facts and competing hypotheses for explaining them.

Another way to look at this would be to ask "what would prove to you the reality of both global warming and C02 as it's cause?" Or to answer "what would prove to me that global warming is not taking place is ________" and "what would prove to me that reducing C02 would not have an impact is _______ "
Server appears to be overloaded, just forever loading for me :(
Reminded me of this: http://www.manishchawley.com/calvin-hobbes/ch890804.gif
I'd only recommend it for test projects, but RapidXen is $6 per month. The quality is about what you'd expect.
I always thought it was a great opportunity to create a world wide sign language, so you could speak to anyone in the world with it. It would actually make it worth while for a lot more people, not just the dead, to learn signing, because you could use it to speak to others.
Nothing against the nice old lady, but from what I saw of her work in the slide show, to somehow pass this off as high art is a tribute to fakery.
All of what _why has accomplished fills me with awe. He was so prolific, and everything he made was amazing, and along with it he was one of the coolest people I've seen online. He was humble, didn't take anything too seriously (up until his disappearance, I suppose), and encouraged me to rethink a lot of my attitudes.

His disappearance definitely wasn't a very considerate thing to do, but at least we still have most of his amazing work.

This page is full of links to awesomeness.
> Nowadays, there's some factual statements that are almost literally impossible to say in Japanese because the words/phrases/grammar to say them don't match up.

Care to elaborate? As a English/Mandarin/Japanese speaker, I am certainly acutely aware of the limitations of translating from one language in to another, but find such an assertion hard to accept without concrete examples.
Seems like it would be really easy. Think about it we don't see the actual computer or camera any where in the video. For all we know it's guy with a handy cam.
Justin Rosenstein is a funny guy
I used it a lot for video encoding
Love it! As far as I know, they are the only one that officially support slackware which is why I went with them in the first place.
There is definitely an opportunity for browser-based Civilization game, though it's going to be tough to compete with Sid himself:

http://www.facebook.com/civnetwork
It's also good for hosting websites (well, duh) and especially excels when you need a lot of storage; EBS volumes are almost unbeatable on price and comfort.
And one can invent those libraries for another language and can match Arc in the challenge using those invented libraries -- at least you don't seem to be denying this.

Depends on the language, obviously. It seems unlikely you could in C, for example. Presumably the problems you'd encounter would gradually decrease as the language grew more powerful. That's why I phrased the problem as a challenge. I was curious to see what happened when you tried to solve this very simple problem using existing language/library options.
webbynode
Presumably you mean "false negative," because true negative would seem to indicate that the software correctly recognizes that he does not have a face.
Youtube Comment:

"The xbox360's new system had the same issue, "Project Natal" that was the reason it's release got set back was I believe it was ying yang twins or one of them were testing it and it couldn't detect their﻿ movements."
One problem here is illustrated by this (in)famous Stalin quote:

"I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how."

(Note that inside the party there were real votes.)

E.g. we started whole earth satellite monitoring in 1979 as I recall ... but guess what NASA calibrated the raw data against. If you say "real time weather balloons" (if not the first, a later satellite took readings at various altitudes), guess again....
What you're talking about sounds totally awesome, except these rumors say that one of the existing carriers is going to blow up their whole business model about two weeks from now. And that just doesn't make any sense.
> Care to elaborate? As a English/Mandarin/Japanese speaker, I am certainly acutely aware of the limitations of translating from one language in to another, but find such an assertion hard to accept without concrete examples.

I'm nowhere near fluent in Japanese, so I'm not the best person to get into it. I do have a couple good friends who are native speakers or expats with a very high level of understanding. A good mate runs a bilingual IT firm in Tokyo, and can handle even technical/legal Japanese to a pretty high level.

Sometimes I've asked, "How do I say XYZ?" and there's no real way to say it without describing it. To go back the other way, what would the English equivalent of "domo" or "daijobu" be? Daijobu is something like "don't sweat it", but that's not quite right. I'm not sure there's anything quite like domo.

But, that's common enough in other languages. German doesn't "cheers", which is a pretty useful and versatile British English word, but that's not what I mean here. From my general understanding, it's very hard to put together appropriate forms of disagreement in Japanese. Like, it might not possible to say something like, "You're wrong, but I respect the sentiment", or "Agree to disagree."

I'm not sure on those specific examples. I know one of the first things people learn about doing business in Japan is you'll rarely hear "no" from a subordinate, so you have to be very aware of something like, "That might be difficult..." - that might mean it's impossible.

Not entirely sure - I've spent a bit of time living and working in a lot of places, and picked up touches of a fair few languages. I've had people translate for me to some extent or other in German, Dutch, Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese. By far, the most stumbling and "that's hard to say" I got was in Japanese. I'd actually be curious to have someone more skilled with the language elaborate more to see if I'm on the mark here.

That said, the character of the Japanese language is really beautiful - I love reading Japanese literature translated into English. You'll commonly see a very factual, plain description, followed by a very profound beautiful statement mixed in with minimal transition. Eiji Yoshikawa's "Musashi" is pretty much a must-read for anyone talented who feels some friction with more mainstream and normal society.
Seconded, they've had a few network glitches recently but are generally rock solid.

We're hosting a few production sites with them since 2004 and overall the expirience has been great - and it's hard to beat their traffic prices.
That incarnation of Kid Pix looks like a bit of a monstrosity, lacking the spirit of the original.
Perhaps if you removed the webcam's IR filter the algorithm would have a better chance of working for faces of all shades.
It reduces the keyspace that needs to be searched when bruteforcing... leading to accounts being compromised more easily. That's about it.
I agree. The distinction between having a standard library and extending it with a new one is a weak distinction. The only thing it says is that arc handled a specific common function out of the box. What about all the other batteries that are not included in arc vs. language x? If you need to do any one of a hundred normal things that languages do, arc would fall flat on its' face. Try connecting to a database being capable of fetching large result sets, try having robust integration points with a host of common facilities. True pipes, cross platform, concurrency models etc. etc. My point is that any number of languages could offer a dozen challenges that arc would fail, but pg could always add it to his library and declare it standard simply because he's is in control as the authoritative source.
It's nice to see the axioms spelled out. I had only read about that Origami is more powerful than Euclid, but never had the details.
Really? I thought that the Natal was using Infrared sensors to get a depth map. I guess dark skin does absorb more infrared energy, but I'd think that they'd have already been able to calibrate it against dark clothing too.
If AGW is a vast scientific left-wing conspiracy, I think it's diabolically brilliant. Surely everyone thinks reducing pollution and fossil fuel dependency is important, right?
MT uses plesk for their VPS, but currently I am using gs (grid server) which has its own custom panel. Even if they had plesk or something similar for migration, it wouldn't help because I want to move to slicehost/linode and they are non-managed server, so they don't use plesk/cpanel (to the best of my knowledge).

Almost all migration needs to be manual, its not difficult, its just pain in the butt repetitive manual work and has potential for lot of things going south.
Idiot?

Wait a minute, you're that dude I roasted a while back for your pathetic little rant about programmers. IIRC you ran your mouth in the HN comments until you actually advocated that a woman who'd been raped deserved it. Then when I called you on it you tried to say you never said that, even though it was easy to read that you did.

If anyone is an idiot here it's you Rory. You don't know me. You definitely don't know _why. And you sure as hell haven't earned enough street cred to have any kind of opinion on the matter.

I suggest next time you just shut your stupid mouth about me and other real hackers. You're a wannabe. When you got some real code under your belt, then you can come back and play with the big boys.

Until then, keep playing the flute or uh writing screen plays or founding companies or whatever other insignificant little events your life needs to define your personality to other people but not to yourself.
It's the same title as the YouTube video.
US Air Force says decision-making attack drones will be here by 2047
I'm curious, which web sites are currently running on Haskell?
Ask HN: Site to find developers / programmers?
There was a site I remember seeing a few weeks ago that was very spiffy - allowing designers to find developers and vice versa. It was a slick site, but I seem to have forgotten the name. It wasn't one of those standards ones - not eLance or anything. Any ideas? Help!
You act like the web was weaved on 30"s. :)

ps. regarding the $100 DVI/display port adapter... you should check out MonoPrice. I get all my A/V gear from there and it's certainly comparable to overpriced AAPL and monster cables.

http://www.monoprice.com/products/search.asp?keyword=DVI-Dis...
I really doubt this was the case. This is what is supposed to happen when we have AI, but then again, as you surely know true AI will come ten years from now.
How important? Look at the arguments of Bjørn Lomborg, "The Skeptical Environmentalist". He says e.g. there are far better ways to spend the world's money to improve lives than e.g. what's being proposed WRT to AGW/CC.
Some stupid rule thought up by someone that is trying to force users to make passwords that they can remember. Like some sort of Web/IT version Clippy saying, "I see you're trying to enter a password with a '+' in it. Are you sure that isn't a typo?"

Either that or their backend software is incompetent (as well as the people that made it) and can't handle pattern-matching outside of [:alnum:] or can't store character values outside of [:alnum:]. It's the same reason that there are many sites that you can't use the 'md5 a single password against the site's domain name' trick because they limit password length to 8 or 16 characters (as if they are some sort of 'accepted industry standard').
I used to ssh into university computers and browsed from there, so that I have the right IP address and get access to journals.
DHgate Review: China Wholesale Site for Small Merchants
What about interested layman?
I did a ten-week course in BSL (passed with full marks!) and your assessment matches up with my experience, which was that it was like exaggerated enthusiastic telling of a story. It's like miming, too. Hearing people talk with their hands, bodies, faces, reactions, energy, rhythm, speed, etc. all the time already. They get along fine in clubs with loud music thumping away. Just watch someone chatting on the phone, they still make a tonne of physical gestures. And we've seen that textual interpersonal communication (i.e. pure English syntax and grammar) is hard, it's great for technical details or (with some effort) describing stories but sucks at that.
Reminds me of the story about Nikon camera's blink detection asking "Did someone blink?" when taking photos of Asian people (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jozjozjoz/3529106844/).
I stopped reading this article about two paragraphs in because it makes the mistake of thinking that a space battle would necessarily happen in human timescales.

A real space battle barring some silly fictional constraint (You can't hyperspace jump too close! The shields are just holding out! Can't fire from cloak! Etc etc) is going to be the perfect embodiment of warfare as we know it now: months of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Except replace months with years and moments with milliseconds.
You're mincing words to tell us about Japanese. Your examples seem to indicate that Japanese more naturally conveys social situations and basic descriptions at the same time, making it more effective, not less. Russian has no future first person singular conjugation for 'to win'- this doesn't make Russian 'less effective' at communication, nor does English's use of "I will be able to" in place of "I will can".

If you want to make an argument on the effectiveness of communication, please use a quantitative or otherwise qualified argument, rather than exotic anecdotes.
Black people's faces obviously reflect less light. This is a much bigger problem for the cheap computer cameras that are not very good at collecting light. The software probably could not distinguish his facial features because there was less contrast due to the lower light.
Build it with me? http://builditwith.me/
I was in the mood for playing when I checked it out. But not enough to bother with email addresses.
This e-commerce API lets artists embrace their inner developer
It hangs. (2 minutes pass) No! But still slooow
Hacker Fair at HackerDojo, 01/16/10 from 10am-1pm
Well, reasonable. And not very daring. Maybe even a bit too much on the safe side: the current iPod touch already runs at about 800 MHZ. I don’t think the next iPhone will be any slower than that.

(But the idea about the screen resolution is great: I think they could actually do that.)
What is the Best Diet to Lose Weight
That's right; the title is linkbait
I am a very happy VPS customer of WiredTree.com. Their prices are great, servers are fast, and the support is top-notch.

Edit: root, WHM/Cpanel, etc as well
Now, I can't for the life of me find any of your wonderfully totally original flute music. I mean, I was thinking "DAYUM! Rory's gotta have some bad ass atonal Japanese hate porn flute power ballads out there." Yet I can't find any of it on google or bing. I mean, usually bing can find the really weird shit.

So lay it on my oh master of the totally original. Where's your music?
But isn't Arc a library written specifically to win this contest?

A well-balanced "contest" would probably include a bunch of specifics (web, 3d, computation, ...) or stick to generic "programming" ("implement a self-balancing binary tree").

I see the Arc contest as more of something like, "take a look at what happens when you think about a problem space in depth and write a domain-specific language to make solving problems in that space really easy".

The only downside of Arc is that other domains are not as easy to work in. If you design a DSL on top of an existing language, then you don't have that limitation, which is what's good about the Haskell implementation. If I need to write a parser for part of my web app, I can use another nice DSL for that. If I used Arc, I would not have that option.
I wonder how hard it would be for Facebook to allow dissidents to set up a second password that logs into a version which hides certain types of incriminating information. The trick would be making it indistinguishable from the real thing.

(This idea is very similar to TrueCrypt's hidden volumes.)
that was a pointless article. In summary, everything will be bigger,better, faster.
I know HAppS advocated an approach of using static HTML with Javascript for content/dom stuff. From http://happs.org/:

HAppS does not come with a server-side templating system. We prefer the pattern of developing static web pages and using AJAX to populate them with dynamic content.

Does Happstack take the same approach? Can anyone comment on how this architecture affects googlebot and other spiders?
Why on earth are you making me register? Can't you just hash my IP address?
How is that evil from anyone's perspective? You released code under a license that said people could do certain things with it. So they did those certain things with it, and you think that's evil? Huh?

(Of course, if people are using the software in ways at odds with your license, you have legal recourse, in which case... why aren't you taking legal action?)
Ask HN:  Please review my DropZap web demo.  It's written using GWT.
I think banks to alpha-numeric so you can type them in on the phone.
In an age of nat routers and dynamic addresses IP addresses are not suitable as identifiers. That doesn't mean you should have to sign up, though. It would be much better to use your existing login from another service via openid or something.
Along similar lines as the article, I've always thought about how we can be more efficient when speaking. If you notice, there is a tendency to be more and more efficient on the web, with abbreviations/acronyms. Imagine a world where we say "lol" just as though we type it (not hard to imagine). Now take it a few steps further, by considering the vast amount of different sounds/tones our vocal chords can create, imagine if we keep simplifying the spoken language to a point where it becomes like one of those star-trek civilizations with their clicking sounds when they speak.

I believe the trend is inevitible.
Ask HN: Lesser known blogging apps?
I've gotten a bit sick of having to constantly reinstall Wordpress, with all of its seemingly endless vulnerabilities and security upgrades. It's also a pain to constantly have to look for new plugins and themes that work with the newer versions.

So I'm looking for a replacement that's secure, elegant, and less of a hassle to maintain.

Any recommendations?
Can you have a 4G phone that doesn't get 4G broadband??? No. They will have to call it something else.
http://medaform.com
I wouldn't want to work with a company unconcerned about anything but creating things. Building cool stuff is awesome, but a company ignoring licensing issues isn't going to get very far. Regardless of that, I'm also an open source developer, and I don't take kindly to companies -- small or large -- who think OSS licensing restrictions don't matter.
The claim is obviously made in a tongue-in-cheek fashion rather than in anger - but it's effective at pointing out the net result of not testing for a wide enough sample of your potential customers, resulting in some of them not getting the functionality that they paid for.
I'm not part of the Ruby community and I don't know Zed, nor did I know _why, all that being said, insulting Zed or saying inflammatory stuff about Zed doesn't change any of the facts. Just cause Zed has a opinion that differs from a lot of people about _why's retreat from the online world, it doesn't make him a dick or an Idiot.
Probably, but I think the overall zeal would have been much less intense.
Excellent point, though you might need to take other steps to deal with the increase in thermal noise (which lowers the color quality somewhat, not that anyone seriously uses a webcam for its photographic fidelity).

There's a market opportunity here if your theory is correct.
From a European/UK standpoint by far the best value for money with their recent launch of a data center in London.

I found the VPS market in the UK was dead, with very little that excited me, the London data center was Christmas coming early.
Really scalable?

http://tutorial.happstack.com/tutorial/macid-limits

"A realistic way to use Happstack with macid is to write an alpha version of an application using macid (no database), and then add some other type of persistent hard drive storage (probably database) outside of macid only if it becomes necessary.

This raises the question: if you are eventually going to have to put in a database back end, why use macid at all?

The -- perhaps slightly depressing answer -- is that you probably won't have to put in a database back end, because your app won't be so successful that this is required."

Now this is ridiculous. That's the way you guys are going to convince people to use Haskell for reald world apps?

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see Haskell winning in territories occupied by other languages, but this looks just like another piece of Haskell code written for the sake of being written in Haskell.
Just read the full article. It's no good. Analyzing ASL in terms of hand shapes only, on the grounds that they're the only feature that all linguists looking at ASL seem to agree on is really problematic. Computation of entropy is heavily dependent on the alphabet. If you say english has an alphabet at the syllable level, you'll get a very different amount of entropy than if you say the alphabet is phoneme level. If you go a level below phonemes and look at distinctive features (voiced/unvoiced, aspriated/unaspriated, front/back, high/low, ...) you'll get yet another entropy number altogether. These numbers will be wildly different from each other. Entropy calculations between languages must use comparably derived alphabets which cover the whole communication channel, or they will be meaningless. Argh. Junky article.
Does the author have an iPhone? There already is an App Store Genius. It doesn't work with your ratings AFAIK, nor the number of times you use an app, but it is definitely there.

Not trying to bash the guy for writing his thoughts but even he says it is conservative. Extrapolating what the next iPhone will be based on the last 3 is easy to get 90% right, as the author does here. It's that last 10%, the interesting bits, that is difficult to predict.
Or at the very least, add an openid option so I can just log without having to create a new account.
Do you think the page is confusing? How could it be improved?

The demo is limited to the first three levels of standard mode. Do you think I should take off the three level limit? Although you can play this in Safari on the iPhone/iPod touch, the animation is sluggish and buggy. Moreover, the native version has more features.