skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cool, I just upgraded. A long while ago, I used to use Rich Hickey's very nice LispWorks to Java bridge. I have tried getting into Clojure a few times in the past, but I kept going back to Common Lisp, Ruby, and Java.

That said, I have in the last week given Clojure some real experimentation time: set up an IntelliJ (good for Clojure and Scala) project with little examples for using PostgreSQL, embedded Sesame RDF data store, accessing CouchDB and MongoDB, and a lot of other small bits of code that are requirements for common work tasks.

One possibly great thing about Clojure is that it could be effective for just about everything that I do except web apps (I like Rails :-) The downside of Clojure is that there is a solid amount of work in Ruby, Common Lisp, and Java. I am not at all sure if customers would want me to use it.
Suppose that you were being approached to invest your money, how would you react to a "great idea" vs a "it's not done, and it's ugly, but let me show you what it does"?
Those still aren't very good odds.
You can't talk about odds without talking about returns. 1-in-5 is f'ing fantastic if a $1 bet pays $1000.
tl;dr forthcoming ACTA copyright treaty is a Bad Thing, times 10 - though I'm not sure why he keeps talking about 'gutting existing copyright laws' rather than drastically reinforcing them - I assume he refers to the fair use provision which may be a victim of the secret negotiations. I largely agree. But...

It will no longer be a medium of the people but instead it will be the new money machine of the entertainment industry and any voices against them will suddenly find themselves silenced and bereft of any legal recourse.

Wait, what? Those who speak up against the abuse copyright (qua privilege) will be censored? I doubt that. You'll still be able to publish your work under a creative commons license if you see fit to do so, and you could, you know, produce more original content. I'm not convinced that creativity will grind to a halt if we don't have easy access to existing content.

I'm not supportive of ACTA or the secrecy which surrounds its development, indeed I am quite disappointed with the current administration's lack of transparency in this area. On the other hand I don't see that just projecting random and inchoate fears onto the legal fog surrounding it leaves us any better informed or empowered.
Defenders must prevent every possible attack.

Attackers must evade the defenses just once.
Whoa. You must blew my mind. I really want this to be true :D
Apple-imposed Boot Camp deadline for Windows 7 is set be missed
It's not so much reliability as spotty coverage. I can make calls only from my living room and not at all from many areas of town. There have been proposals for a new tower to give better coverage, but they have been shot down by all the NIMBYs. The firefighters dont want cancer. The greens dont want a fake tree in the large nature preserve (next to the giant water tanks). I will probably switch to VOIP of some sort.
>>you'd want to be sure they are very well trained

I doubt they would just issue a firearm along with the uniforms. Many airline pilots are ex-military and quite capable of using a sidearm. Training/restrictions would certainly be available for those that aren't.
why is it a red flag?
True, but if someone is going to go to the trouble of planning and financing an attack, I imagine they'd want a better than 20% chance of success. Especially since one attacker being caught could ruin the chances of all the others.
From personal experience, your position, in many U.S. locales, would most likely be poorly received by a police officer. For example, if you are in your car, they can simply arrest you (no charges, but can hold you for 72 hours) and then fully search your person and vehicle and use whatever they find, probable cause be damned.

There are many not well understood and not well court tested Federal rules that can be used against you in much the same way.

I highly recommend when dealing with law enforcement to not use a phrase like "my papers and effects are mine and not to be trifled with lightly". You may get away with this with a senior government official but less likely with a run of the mill police officer.
Stack Exchange

http://stackexchange.com/
WHY? Really, how much do you think a PETN bomb costs? Re-read the article: nothing that happens in response to these attacks fails to help the terrorists. They send 5 people and one blows up a plane: huge positive ROI. They send 5 people and nobody blows up a plane, but commercial air travel is disrupted to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars: huge positive ROI.
Any info as to if donating to wikileaks could put you at risk?
It turns out he is a vimmer. I fully support his argument.

BTW there is even a snippet/plugin that turns VIM into a typewriter by disabling any movement keys.
Comparing a low-level API like Win32 with a high-level toolkit like Qt FTW.

HelloWorld using C# and Windows Forms is about 10 lines if you do it by hand.
The Apple Tablet
But is it not also possible that the TSA is purposefully putting on the guise of an incompetent governmental entity?

It's extremely unlikely. For one thing, appearing incompetent in order to encourage the incautious, freelancers, amateurs and copycats is essentially using the public as bait - if you happen to miss one, people die. As a strategy it's morally and probably legally questionable.
The article doesn't suggest that the 10x API is going to be paid-only. It suggests that the firehouse is. Which sounds right, the relevant snippet -

"We want everyone to have the opportunity -- terms will vary based on a number of variables but we want a two-person startup in a garage to have the same opportunity to build great things with the full feed that someone with a billion dollar market cap does."

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/brow...
Patrick, I was surprised to find out that you're from Chicago. Look me up next time you're back in town.
It's posts you've upvoted.
Gowalla hasn't given me enough of a reason to keep coming back other than to tell my friends where I am. And I'm not convinced thats valuable until all my friends are on it, to which we'll require a Loopt infrastructure + Facebook user dealio.

Foursquare currently only works in specific cities, but I think its shallow in terms of why I'd keep coming back aside for the very shallow game of it. Is there value here? In the future if I get rewarded for being a mayor, and services get rewarded for active users visiting (eg: coupons) maybe.

I think in the short time Gowalla and Foursquare will duke it out, I'm skeptical that they'll get enough users without teaming up with a big player. Facebook has 300M web users. Loopt has 3M mobile users. Gowalla has 50k?

The other problem with these applications is the lack of background apps. Why do I have to manually check in to every place I go, why can't it work like Google Lattitude on my Blackberry: it just runs and does everything for me.

A Last.FM scrobbler for location, please. (Fire-eagle?)

Flook is interesting, but entirely disconnected from Gowalla and Foursquare. A better comparison for Flook is MobileSafari, or TwitPic, or Flickr. Flook is about content thats around me thats cool - who created it comes second to this. I guess there is also the element of where are my friends going that is interesting, but I believe that is secondary to the value of being somewhere and having interesting local hidden gems. And we all know the challenges with this kind of "information overload vs filter failure" plays, the devil is in the details.
Neurosky MindSet Brain Computer Interface ActionScript 3.0 API
peter norvig has a great chapter in the O'Reilly book "Beautiful Data" about using naive bayes + a ton of data mined from the web to do fairly good natural language processing. one of his recent themes has been "naive algorithms + lots of training data can often beat sophisticated algorithms + little data"

i dunno if his article is online somewhere, though.
If the fraction of anthropogenic CO2 has not increased in the past 160 years, BUT the amount of atmospheric CO2 has been slowly increasing over said period, what does this have to say about AGW?

My understanding has always been that the theory of AGW has always been contingent upon increasing levels of airborne ACO2. And if that is NOT true, then what exactly is the "A" in "AGW"?

Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted, but I am asking an honest question. The theory of AGW has always included this scaling effect, whereby we reach a tipping point beyond which the airborne fraction continues to increase - meaning that more ACO2 increases the airborne fraction, which increases the percentage of ACO2 that remains in the atmosphere. What effect does this study, if true, have on said predicted feedback loop?
You are right about context and thermo-dynamics and all.

With active one-way mirror I meant one where you have to input energy.
You have a good point, if you measure it in terms of financial damage, the terrorists win either way.

A side point: I suspect bombs are at bottom of the price chart in terms of financing an attack. More likely, the most expensive part is finding someone stupid enough to blow themselves up, and getting them to the right place at the right time. The cost of doing this undetected would probably increase non-linearly with the number of people involved in your attack.
I loved the primal howl. I think if your product can induce that you're going to have some very happy customers.
My guess is Apple will handle the hard part (the interactive book/magazine interface) and allow publishers to just work on publishing their content in a series of well-defined feeds to iTunes.

In my mind, the real killer app for the iTablet is rich, collaborative, social catalog shopping. Why can't they make J. Crew catalogs come to life? Where is the interactive Amazon.com catalog? Thinking further in this direction, I believe advertisements on the iTablet may go beyond traditional ads.

The most intriguing part of the iTablet is the what-if's

What if Apple were able to convince the top 25 textbook publishers that it would be a good thing to have iTablet textbooks, I think that would be a major selling point for college students.

What if they finally cracked the problem of voice recognition or handwriting recognition by doing the hard computations in the cloud?

What if the on-demand tactile keyboard patent has actually been implemented?

Popular Science's mockup done by publisher Bonnier’s R&D group with design firm BERG (hot articles)

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-12/our-vision-...

Wonderfactory's mockup of an interactive Sports Illustrated magazine on a tablet (linked statistics):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntyXvLnxyXk
Perhaps you're right. I just felt it didn't make any sense. How is owning gadgets and quoting specs some kind of "anti luddite" badge? Seems like he's in some serious denial.
I thought db.eval was kind of like a BDL (Big Database Lock) - i.e. nothing will happen while the eval() is doing its thing?
Is this a reputable journal? If so, then so much for the "settled science" of AGW. From the abstract:

"Despite the predictions of coupled climate-carbon cycle models, no trend in the airborne fraction can be found."
Seems fairly uncontroversial to me, but I'm not in the target demographic yet.

Can anyone enlighten me as to why reading Kipling to a child might be considered "recklessness" these days?
My vote goes to SICP as well, however if you don't have much time http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/t-y-scheme/t-y-scheme.html is helpful.
Gowalla has raised $8.4M and has around 50K users as of December 2009.

Foursquare has raised $1.35M and has around 150K users as of December 2009.

Loopt has raised $13.3M and has around 2M users.
Interesting. In my most recent projects, I've been using MongoDB together with Redis. MongoDB for long term data (like records and reports) and Redis for near-realtime stuff (queuing, request limiters, analytics, and the like). I haven't come across the need for atomic record modification but that isn't to say there aren't useful usecases. I need to think on it a bit more.
The two best killer apps I've heard of for the iTablet are gaming and magazines. It seems likely to me that this will be the first Apple device with Apple silicon for the CPU, and from what I hear that means it's going to have some serious 3D muscle. The magazine bid is riskier, but has significant payoff. The Kindle isn't going to deliver gorgeous full-color content any time soon, but the iTablet surely will. I predict games and magazines will be the killer apps for the iTablet.
Ask HN: Best site to buy business cards?
I'm getting very close to launching my start-up and my designer has designed some very nice business cards. Does anyone know of a site that will take the assets and print very high quality cards? Thanks!
Visionary: Stack Overflow for Computer Vision
"... thanks to tens of thousands of part time guides who work from their homes for an average wage of $2.50/hour. It’s not much, but they do it voluntarily, so they must think it’s a reasonable deal."

This is ridiculous, how long until crowdsourced pay becomes regulated?

Taking advantage of people b/c they allow it under their own volition doesn't make it right. This is why we have minimum wage.

People who let themselves be taken advantage of like this aren't using the same judgement and resources to make their decisions as those who know better.
You could do that with a lot of smaller impacts. Also, it would be advisable to hit all major plates equally, to reduce the risk of major quakes on fault lines. If we were going to try to do it in one impact, we'd better evacuate the planet before too.

And have no plans to return in less than a couple hundred years.
After all, the latest bomber was carrying 80 grams, less than three ounces.
Unless am also confused about this whole thread and misreading your comments, your reply seems to have fallen in the precise trap that this thread is talking about.

The percentage of human-emitted CO2 released into the atmosphere has remained steady year-over-year for a long time.

This means that since humans are pumping in more and more CO2 every year, more and more of it ends up in the atmosphere (since percentage is constant and absolutes is increasing).

So this article is a direct refutation of your point.

Please correct me if I'm mistaken on something here.
I'm quite sure it's not a tragedy that children don't have access to computers

This is an example of a radical opinion that one might expect to be downvoted for disagreement here on HN, but I see (from current net upvotes) that others agree, or at least think the comment contributes to the discussion here. I'll expand on this a bit, from my perspective as a parent of wealthy-country children who have long had access to computers. Of course I grew up without ready computer access. Children having personal computers with online access is, like most of human life, a TRADE-OFF. I think computers are wonderful tools and helpful for self-directed learning, but they are also enormous time sinks and distractions from books and many hands-on activities. Current research doesn't unambiguously show that computer use contrasted with nonuse is even an advantage for learning K-12 academic subjects. (Some studies appear to show academic achievement going down as computer use goes up in developed countries.) The role of easy telecommunications in fostering economic development seems beyond dispute, but voice telephony and an efficient postal system for adults may go most of the way to providing that benefit, without all children needing an Internet-connected laptop.

I have lived in poor countries, which is why I am conscious that where money is scarce, one must think about what way of spending money produces the best results. The OLPC project certainly had noble goals, and strove to be inexpensive, but perhaps the countries the project intended to serve need something else more urgently.
Doesn't look like the chapter is free, but the code and data is hiding out at http://norvig.com/ngrams/
I think you're jumping the gun. The wikipedia description -
"Science Daily is a free online news source. It features news and articles on a variety of topics including: computer science, nanotechnology, medicine, psychology, biology, climate, space, physics, mathematics, chemistry, archeology, paleontology, and others.

It has been active since 1995. The articles are selected from news releases submitted by universities and other research institutions."

There's no evidence the site is politically inclined, one way or the other. Confusing titles are hardly uncommon in science reporting.

Edit: The title of the original paper - "Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing? "

Glancing at the abstract, you can tell the paper argues 'no'. The title in Science Daily simply reflects the title and findings of the paper.
After we learn to steer asteroids, it would be interesting to make one dip into Earth's atmosphere to de-accelerate and to enter LEO. A mountain of raw materials in low orbit would be a very interesting resource.

You would, of course, have to pick one that is solid enough to withstand this torture or melt its surface to make it a solid blob of something before it fragments and hits something you would rather not hit.

I really like this idea.
this touches on some related aspects: http://blog.mongodb.org/post/307919034/partial-object-update...
That's just it. I'm not making a point. Knee jerk reaction going on here by someone. See the above edit.
> I actually agree with the sentiment though, it'd just be nice to have a saying that's a little bit more scientifically valid.

If your plan is to drive ten miles and stop, even if it goes perfectly the best you'll get is ten miles away. If you plan to travel to somewhere a thousand miles away by any means possible, even if it doesn't go perfectly smoothly the chances are good that you'll travel a lot more than ten miles which, if you are measuring success as distance from your starting point which many people with a Western set-goal-achieve-goal-feel-success mindset are doing, is an improvement on the outcome of your less ambitious plan.
Inside the Secret Service
Omap3 and Omap4
The O'Reilly book "Collective Intelligence" is another nice resource for Naive Bayes. I picked it up because of a sidebar describing an improvement I didn't find online (something about a Chi distribution...I'm in a different town than my bookshelf today).
Cheaper electronics helped, but my rose colored memories are that...

* Manufacturers were using the lower cost electronics to add more features at the same price point rather than lowering their price point. The OLPC definitely shook that up.

* The OLPC led the way using linux for the underlying OS, which led to the first netbooks using linux. This really shook up Microsoft, resulting in them offering deeply discounted copies of WinXP to netbook manufacturers to recapture that market ($15? vs. $50++? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook#Windows, http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/04/19/ms.asks.15.for...).

With respect to the last bullet, the OLPC drove down software prices as much as Moore's Law drove down hardware prices.
If those people had been afforded opportunities similar to those available in the US their total salaries would be somewhere between $20 and $40 trillion.

Perhaps, but affording those people opportunities similar to those available in the United States might cost a great deal of money, and might also involve controversial steps such as overthrowing corrupt governments and promoting English rather than local languages as a language of school instruction. Poor countries (I have lived in them) are interacting systems of climate, natural resource base, cultural tradition, existing economic level, existing level of education, international trade patterns, political system, and other influences, and thus poor countries don't change overnight.
New Year Honours for game makers
The publishing industry needs to change, and it should take Steam as its example.

The way I see it, the economics of publishing are entirely backwards right now. A creative producer, who wishes to distribute their goods to the masses, should look for a distributer in a competitive market. The current system is that the distributer looks for creative producers, and filters out lots of artists that it doesn't think will be successful. This is as absurd as a trucking company looking to nurture manufacturing businesses so it has more things to ship.

Let's consider the issue of pirating. It's not a false dichotomy to state there are two kinds of pirates. The kind that can afford the item they are pirating, and the kind that can't.

If someone pirates an item because they can't afford it, the producer isn't losing any potential income, because the pirate has none to give regardless. Stamping down on this kind of piracy is pointless.

If someone pirates an item they can afford, however, then you've got problems. What this indicates is that someone found pirating to be more convenient than the legal way of buying the item. Would people really buy more items instead of pirating them if it was more convenient and pleasant to buy the item legally? Steam certainly indicates so. Take a look at the thousands of Reddit comments on steam. One of the remarkable themes that emerges from those comments is this kind, "Downloaded this from Steam, even though I already own the CDs, because I didn't feel like looking for them" or "Bought it on Steam after I torrented it". (If you don't believe me, seriously, look for youself. Also note that Reddit users are basically the demographic of people who pirate out of convenience.)

What this indicates is that traditional publishing as done in the film, book, or game industries haven't been keeping pace with the consumer's desire for convenience. You can blame an uncompetitive market for that. If creative producers were able to select from a gamut of publishing companies and evaluate cost versus effectiveness of sales, etc., then publishers would be forced to innovate. And also to offer better deals to artists.

Of course, the established industry is resistent to change, which is why we are getting all of this DRM. They are approaching the problem of downloading for convenience in exactly the wrong way. Instead of trying to make purchasing games, music, movies, and books more convenient (like Steam has done with games) they are trying to make pirating less convenient. Guess which approach would be more efficient, but would actually take some thought and overhaul of the current system? Amazon is moving in the right direction with the Kindle.
At the point where the display is as e-ink readable as paper, the touch part is as sensitive as an iphone, the screen is also as sensitive to pen input as a wacom tablet, and the software is good enough for touch-doodling, pen-drawing, typing, sketching, all interchangably and neatening up diagrams for you, then you will have it on your desk instead of a notepad, instead of a phone message pad, you will look down and work on it like a jotter instead of cradling it like a child or mouting it vertically at head height and arms length.

But we're not there yet.
The idea presented is not truly the creation of a new business every month. Instead, it is the creation of a business that releases a new product that may be totally unrelated to the previous one at the rate of one new product per month. The business is the creator, and there is only one. So, by doing this, the business is handling many products at one time which may be overwhelming without additional employees unless those products are sub-par. If the products are insufficient, it may create a bad impression of the brand, and by extension, the brand is the creator.
I'd say moo.com