skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah. I can totally see that being a retro trend. Printpunk kids with twirly mustaches and top hats, hand-cranking broadsheets, and newsie girls with pink hair yelling "EXTRA! EXTRA!" on street corners.

Probably we could be there by 2014 though. People always underestimate this sort of thing.
According to the article, it appears to be war.
I know it's hard; those boxes in which you write comments can be tiny

I hate this. I tend to submit the comment with little proofreading, then I read the comment on the page and edit it a bunch of times.
Yes, you can enter very negative weights in the input boxes for digits (numbers) and dashes (hyphens). Then these domains will be sorted down to the end of the list (below the end of the page).
Just played around with it. Nice work.
Very nice. I would like to be able to see more results at once.
How about doing a DNS lookup but for a SOA record type, instead of an A record? I'm fairly sure that will either give you a record or an NXDOMAIN.

$ dig magic.com SOA
[snip]
magic.com. 21600 IN SOA auth03.ns.uu.net. hostmaster.uu.net. 990605 21600 3600 1728000 21600
I have a friend who was an intern with Siemens in computer vision while preparing for Ph.D. programs in machine learning. I would guess that other companies that build medical imaging tools have similar divisions.
He probably used a Visual Basic GUI interface.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU
Operating systems for Arduino
What about the emergence of ubiquitous free internet? I'm thinking it will take of the form of everyones' mobile phones forming a global, giagantic mesh network? (Is that the right term?)

How likely is that? It seems like the next step in the evolution of the internet, turning into something that no one can possibly control.
The Many Benefits of Walking (weight loss)
"since that just about characterizes every conversation I've ever had."

As the words of wisdom go, "Smile...and back away."
Yeah, but this isn't TV. A guy actually got arrested on this "evidence". Granted, they had his billing address, but I would imagine the defense will have an opportunity to lampoon the police on the stand.
I don't have a problem with the Bourbakists doing very abstract and rigorous Math. After all, Math was an edifice built on quicksand until they came along. I think they contributed a lot.

However, I also think the Bourbakists created a monster, which was this notion that the "Greek method" was the only valid one, and that the "Babylonian method" was to be avoided. Even Combinatorics was considered "unworthy" of great minds. All geometrical intuition was frowned upon. Applications were laughed at. All of a sudden, Math became sterile. Interestingly, Turing's work, in a sense, derived from Hilbert's program to make the foundations of Math solid. The fact that Theoretical CS exists outside of traditional Math is nothing more than an historical accident. Computability is pure Math. Computational Complexity is still a bit "dirty" but it's also rather fundamental.
It was before this proclamation.

This is a very important warning for all new to the game.
And a waking bell for the rest.
That sounds good, I'll look into it.
A while back I wrote a Fuse filesystem for Mac (http://code.google.com/p/xtagfs/) that does exactly what the blog proposes. The fs just provides the directory structure on top of an existing filesystem and the files are symlinks to the actual files on the filesystem.
Seems to be missing some short names --- for instance, while diiq.com and diiq.org are owned, diiq.net is unclaimed --- but 'diiq' does not appear at all, despite being four characters long. What qualifies a domain name to appear in your list?
Maybe an option to encourage startups is to offer a tax break for the first 12-24 months, if they create x (5 or 10) jobs.
Irrespective of if the founders are US Citizen or Permanent residents.
Realtime 3D Scanning
The key to astronomy has often been serendipity
Depends on what you mean by "redaction".

In context, we're talking about removing information from documents, so that partial documents can be released without the removed information being released. The problem is that the PDF format was simply not designed to support that, and the great majority of PDF editing tools (or perhaps all of them??) do not allow for it.

The solution is to create an entirely new PDF, in a way that ensures that the targeted information is not the file. For example, one could take an existing PDF, cover the targeted information with black rectangles, print the resulting document, and then scan the hard copy to create a new PDF.
Why was the state capable of taking care of these people from the ages of 0-20

It wasn't and didn't?
To put it bluntly, in a face-to-face conversation, I would have dismissed you as a whiny attention-seeker and not spoken to you at all. And if someone had asked my opinion of you, it would have been, "whiny attention-seeker who knows how to have a thoughtful conversation, but chooses not to".

Here, we simplify that with a downvote. Have a nice life.
Very cool. What is the backend written in?
This is very cool. TheMargarine.com is available--startup millions, here I come!

Edit: Seriously, great work. Have bookmarked and will be back for my next domain search.
Ask HN: Great books you read in 2009?
I got a Kindle halfway through 2009 and I've been reading a lot more but I'm always on the lookout for great books. I'd love to hear about what books others in the HN community enjoyed during the last year and would recommend. I'm primarily looking for non-programming books, but if anything really blew you away, I'd love to hear about it.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Note: I'm not trying to start a flamewar, as I didn't agree with all the books below, just that I found them interesting and they inspired further research and exploration on my part.

The Family, by Jeff Sharlet - Fascinating overview of the intersection between American fundamentalist Christianity and conservative ideology and how they gave birth to the "Religious Right".

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand - Philosophical novel that uses architecture as a metaphor to introduce the tenants of Objectivism.

His Majesty's Dragon, by Naomi Novik - Alternate-history fantasy set in the Napoleanic Wars. The entire series was very enjoyable, and I don't usually enjoy fantasy.

The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollen - Overview of our food, how it is grown, and the things we should know about it. I found it very persuasive without being preachy and it completely revolutionized the way I eat and view food in general.
What futures are already here?
"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed yet." -- William Gibson

I find this quote to be a more reliable guide to the future than most predictions.

In 2000, Google was already two years old. Wireless was still pretty new, but every geek gathering just had to have it. Little digital cameras that you could attach to a phone were interesting curiosities. Phones that did email and web browsing existed but were super expensive and clunky.

In the other thread with predictions for the decade, almost all of them boil down to whatever's hot in 2009, only more so.

I'd like to ask the HN community to instead think of the really niche, expensive, geeky, "the mainstream will never get this" aspects of their lives right now. Stuff they find really useful, or just cool. And then consider if there's any upper bound to much they could scale up, or how easy these technologies could be made for others.

Now those would be predictions....
I'd like to get a book out on insomnia but then I'd prefer to read an MD myself. Otherwise I want to write something about modelling biological neural networks or balancing robotics pitched to the beginning hobbyist (me).
An alternate workaround (which doesn't disable the check altogether, but watch out in 2020!):

locate 72_active.cf && sudo vi 'locate 72_active.cf'
search 'FH_DATE_PAST_20XX'
change '/20[1-9][0-9]/' to '/20[2-9][0-9]/'

Source: http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/Rules/FH_DATE_PAST_20XX
This is a great article. I posted on the same topic but different perspective today as well: http://fitnr.com/filtering-the-web-of-noise/
Early morning is the most productive part of the day for me. There are no interruptions, no noise, and my brain is still well rested.
They have a player that you need to download. I did, ready to be blown away by recent advances in Turing test bots, but seems like we're still decades away from a program that could possibly pass the test.
I don't see why. The heuristic here was fine (is the date too far in the future?), and not part of the problem. The bug was in the implementation of the heuristic ("any date after 2010 is too far in the future").

Maybe you're making a software maintainability argument instead? But clearly this doesn't make a good argument for classifiers vs. heuristics.
It's not just that people aren't reading your last section. We are. Well, I did anyway, and I didn't get the impression from other comments on this article that people are skipping it. It's that your blog post is written against a problem that doesn't exist. Very few codebases in this world even have enough comments, and fewer still have too many.

When I consider this and read an article warning about over-commenting, it suggests a certain perspective that I believe is incorrect. That is what I and probably many of the other readers reacted against in this post. If you only meant this article as an academic exercise ("hypothetically, in a world where people write too many comments, I would give this advice to over-commenters"), you need to say so at the top. Otherwise it gives the impression that you believe there is an over-commenting problem, and that someone might actually need to read this blog post or benefit from the advice contained within. Such people are rare.
well, reportedly it's $4000+ only for materials.

but the point is - why would anyone want full genome for a specific procedure?
I'll kick it off:

1. Self-hosted social networking. Lots of my geekier friends are getting frustrated with Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook or Flickr, for a variety of reasons. They are retreating to personal sites to host their photos and blogs, and they just interact with the rest of the world with RSS.

There are some missing pieces here, but people have been talking about distributed social networking for quite a while. We may be reaching critical mass.

2. Ubiquitous streaming video: right now, top bloggers like Scoble carry video cameras around at all times, and for special geek events, the grainy live video feed is standard. By 2019, that could easily be in everybody's phone (assuming the bandwidth is there, if not, then only in countries with decent telephony).
They just used the information to find his location and have him deported to the US. There was already a warrant for this guy's arrest.
What's the big deal about the eyetap patents?
User pkrumins has been doing a lot of self study, albeit more in computer science and technology than maths, I believe. Perhaps some of his posts might nonetheless prove interesting with regard to the meta-topic of self-study.

Kudos to you, from one who is slightly envious.
Wrong Correctness
The death of the PC as a gaming platform.

what are you smoking?
> US Patent Application US 2007/0286933 A1

Refrigerator Stable Baking Batter

In various embodiments of the present invention, a bakable batter mixed using cold process conditions and provided in a pressurized can, can be used to bake a variety of food products. In various embodiments of the present invention, a bakable batter mixed under inert atmosphere conditions and...

http://www.google.com/patents/download/11_760_647_REFRIGERAT...
it's hosted in appspot, so it should be python (unless Google supported other languages)
The problem with this is the potential for massive gaming. The argument of non-startups would be why should they be penalized for having hired people before this period or are considering laying them off and would not otherwise be viable without the tax advantage?

Ideally they would make the tax incentives permanent - ie reduce payroll taxes if the goal is to increase employment, but I think the startup visa is a much more interesting alternative as it seeks to attract talent that traditionally is difficult to define but is so important to how vibrant an economy is. In theory, just the fact these people bring viable ideas that people want to fund should be sufficient irrespective of jobs they create.
I think he added that after my comment, although I'm not positive.
It's written in about 2500 lines of Python, using Django 1.1 (app-engine-patch) on Google App Engine. Full source code is here: http://github.com/jcrocholl/scoretool
This one really got me:

15. Mark Bao Starts 1,000th Start-Up (startupnews.com)
4 points by MarySmith 3 hours ago | discuss

:)
.. and the maven logo also looks horrible.
Maven sucks and everyone hates it, but uses it anyway because tragically there is no better alternative for large projects.

For me, the M2 plugin for Eclipse seals the deal as it makes the build files double as the IDE project files. One place for dependencies, one build cycle, this is how things should be.

I hate Maven with a passion, and use Ant any chance I get, but for very large multi-module projects, the strong points outweigh the negatives (although by an uncomfortably slim margin).
Ask HN: Review my app: Collaborative twist on create your own adventure books
Google now supports both Python and Java on App Engine, but you're right it's Python.
do others notice the "symptoms" described in that article? as far as i can tell, i seem to be just as useless at names as i always was, and seem to be able to think just as much and as clearly as ever.

i do notice the physical side - i can't run as fast as i used to (and i am not timing myself, so it's not that one is measurable and the other not). also, my sight is really bugging me - having to hold things further and further away to read them. but thinking-wise i haven't picked up anything.

i'm 42 and write software.
Why everyone is wrong about the Nexus One Resolution
a Nook
Apple sold 3.05 million Macintosh® computers during the quarter, representing a 17 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 10.2 million iPods during the quarter, representing an eight percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones in the quarter, representing seven percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. -- http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/10/19results.html
Out of curiosity, why did you settle on app-engine-patch rather than use_library()?
Interesting reading! I wasn't aware you'd include things like details of pathogen-contamination testing in a patent application. (Or compare the results with CO2 vs N2. That's a detail of genuine interest to anyone trying to make a related product outside the scope of the patent, or a similar product after the patent expires.)

I think they've shown their work.
yeah, it's a different document.
If it helps, chinese often address other chinese using their given name rather than the family name, otherwise it would be pretty annoying to address each other within the family. If it's a formal greeting, use the family name, otherwise use the given name.
Thanks! Likewise - the filtering problem needs to be solved.

Funny that we are discussing in on HN where the paradigm is exactly the link curation approach you are talking about in your post.
is fiction ok? i live in chile and stumbled across bolano's books (particularly the savage detectives and 2666) in spanish just as they became popular in english in the usa (2666 was released in translation).

savage detectives is a funny account of adolescent "poets" in mexico; 2666 is a much darker, somewhat rambling tome that addresses "evil". they're very different, but both great books.

for non-fiction the book i've used most this year is an old classic - harbison & steele's "c a reference manual". it's invaluable (if you're writing c). i don't know how people can prefer kernighan & ritchie...
All it means is that we consider intentional killings worse than accidental ones and that biases our priorities accordingly.
Seems like MS has had go at this problem many times since 1990 and never cracked it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS#Development
Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin - a great blow by blow account of the financial crisis shortly after the fall of Bear Stearns. A really amazing look at how decisions are made under extraordinary pressure. It is fast paced and reads almost like a movie.
link does not work for me
It's not expected to be an extinction-level impact even if it were to hit.
Never underestimate how much people desire to be spoon-fed
I don't think it maintains all the memory of closed programs - the data/stack areas of memory will differ hugely between when a program is closed and when a program is launched. If you did save all these areas of memory, the program's state would be exactly the same between opening/closing.

However, the disk blocks containing the executable program file are likely to be cached in memory after you open a program. Memory is orders of magnitudes faster than the hard disk, so this would explain the speedup
Harmony Silk Factory - Tash Aw

Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdi

Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway
Which is screwed up. A premature death is a premature death. Preventability is independent of intention. I think it'd be easier to prevent a few thousand car accident deaths a decade than it would be to eliminate terrorism. A rational society would focus its effort on saving the lives that minimize effort per remaining productive lifespan.
Those came in Leopard, actually.
I thought of BeOS immediately. Then iTunes, actually. I can always quickly find what I am looking for in itunes on account of the column browser.
I just finished reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It's really long and a little digressive (1079 pages, took me 3 months to finish), but was one of the most entertaining and brilliant books I've ever read. I highly recommend it.
There is going to always be some company to game the system somehow. Look at Microsoft & their H1-B visa dependency.

That said, I think tax-breaks for increasing number of employees is a good idea.

Also, an investor can qualify for an EB-5 visa & green card by investing a $500k to $1m in "saving" 10 jobs.
Some books that stood out this year (many not for their intended reasons)

The 4 Hour Work Week (Tim Ferriss)
- In parts entertaining, interesting, self-promoting, educational, inspirational, attractive and undesirable. Definitely worth the read and a great call to action. Will make you consider what you want and how you can achieve it.

The Game (Neil Strauss)
- Truly interesting story and an interesting view on human dynamics and hacking one of the more important systems (dating). A great view on what is most important - ends or means. Will make you consider how people work, what motivates them and whether success cures emptiness.

Losing my Virginity (Richard Branson)
- The awesome and entertaining story of Virgin with lots of great advice and startup David vs Goliath inspiration. Will make you consider what determination and the little guy can achieve.

Business Stripped Bare (Richard Branson)
- Branson's more focused take on business advice and patches on bits of the Virgin story since the first book. Will make you consider the power of being genuine and growing a company with people treated as smart humans.

On Writing (Stephen King)
- Most inspirational and compelling book on writing I've read. Half writing advice half King biography all awesome. Will make you consider becoming a novelist.

Coders at Work (Peter Siebel)
- Haven't finished yet but great interviews of leading coders. I didn't enjoy Founders at Work (personally found it a bit indirect/not deep enough) but in Coders at Work you really feel the connection between interviewer and interviewee while at the same time getting a lot of incidental startup advice as these coders have all had decent roles to play in Silicon Valley etc. history. Will make you consider if you're actually a better coder than you thought.

Think and Grow Rich (Napoleon Hill)
- Reads a bit like a bad Internet ad at times but that's because they stole that technique from here. This book summarizes the techniques that lead to success based on numerous interviews of most of the greatest leaders of the early 20th century. Pretty good bits in here and again inspiration fuel. Will make you consider how you can take charge of your self and your life.

Letters From a Stoic (Seneca)
- Decent musings on living life and mastering oneself. As relevant today as 2 thousand years ago. Will make you consider how you can master your self and what you will let affect you.

Here Comes Everybody (Clay Shirky)
- The best book on online community I've read. Shirky makes you want to make a difference and communicates his enthusiasm for the power of the masses with ease. Will make you consider how to enable communities to achieve unthought of goals.
Because app-engine-patch includes more than just a zipped package of Django 1.1. It comes with jQuery, the Blueprint CSS framework, a media generator to join and minify your CSS and JavaScript, automatic URLs for each app (using urlsauto.py), and helper functions like ragendja.template.render_to_response and ragendja.dbutils.get_object_or_404.
excellent. thank you.
This. You need to be able to check in your build tools, and use them as they were to precisely repeat any build you've ever done, or you're risking bit rot.

It's not non-deterministic if your dependencies include an explicit version. You should not be using unversioned -SNAPSHOT dependencies for release builds.

And if I want my dependencies to be preinstalled rather than checked in and bundled, I'd rather use yum so the rest of the world can reuse them too. Does Maven even support dependencies upon native (non-JVM) apps and libraries which are available for a given platform?

No. Maven is intended to support easy-to-use bundled code dependencies, not to operate as a complete replacement UNIX packaging system.
Microsoft Patent Filing: Control a Computer by Flexing a Muscle
My favorite read in early 2009 was What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Keith Stanovich

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

which is full of helpful information on developing the kind of cognition missed by IQ tests that constitutes rationality, very important information for parents, educators, and business leaders.

2009, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book On the Origin of Species, has been a banner year for new books on evolutionary biology. Some of my favorites include

Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Evolution-True-Jerry-Coyne/dp/0670...

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-Evolution...

and

Evolution: The First Four Billion Years edited by Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis.

http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-First-Four-Billion-Years/dp/...

All are full of up to date information about biology, which, as Thedosius Dobzhansky said, only makes sense in the light of evolution.

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

http://www.amazon.com/SuperFreakonomics-Cooling-Patriotic-Pr...

is enjoyable and thought-provoking, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, for all the usual reasons applying to collaborations by those two authors.
Apple sold in excess of 10 million iPods last quarter, most of which were priced above $100. That's in addition to 7 million iPhones.

My own pet theory is that a new device will carry the iPod brand (e.g. "iPod Slate") and take the top price point ($399) from the Touch. They might not sell 2.5 million in the first quarter at that, but I can easily see sales ramping up to meet 10 million if the device is even remotely interesting.
I suppose one way would be to use an older "portable document" format (aka plain-text) and replace the sensitive text with strings of "x" characters.