skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't need to toss out maven, you need to spend the effort learning a system with which you're unfamiliar to actually understand why your build is misconfigured and failing.
A 3.5 USB adapter may suffice. You would have to match the cable for a 5.25 drive (usually it is within the computer box that has the drive :-P )

I hadn't thought of that. Thanks!
Why do you have such a bee in your bonnet about Smalltalk? Are we not allowed to discuss the pros and cons of various commenting styles in other programming languages without you stopping by to evangelize? People who brag about their "encyclopedic" knowledge are usually about as welcome as encyclopedia salesmen.
Got it. I just wondered if there were standard-Django features you wanted to use, but couldn't (easily) without AEP. It sounds, however, like it was all the other in-package goodies that made AEP desirable.

If there were a "GAE django starter project" that included jQuery etc. but made use of use_library(), would that be interesting?
The original goal of the Namesys filesystem (what eventually became ReiserFS) was a similar attempt to replace fixed hierarchies with a form of tagging. While the original paper is no longer accessible, I found a copy here: http://www.dmi.me.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/reiser-...
My list is a fairly random sampling of the huge search space of available domain names. I'm planning to keep adding more names in the future, trying to strike a balance between good names (short but readable) and more names (requiring more storage). Fortunately, the App Engine Datastore has linear complexity for the number of query results, so adding more names doesn't slow down the searching.
If I see another article thread that I am unable to downvote any of the comments I'm going to start thinking seriously about leaving HN.

Not a threat, simply pointing out that somebody is getting a little too heavy-handed with the social engineering for my comfort.
Recently I've been reading books about different facets of human nature. Some of my favorites:

- Spent, by Geoffrey Miller (evolutionary psychology, sex, consumerism)

- Gang Leader for a Day, by Sudhir Venkatesh

- Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely

Here's a short blog post about these books and a few others.

http://ogeid.com/weblog/2010/01/some-books-about-human-natur...
The War of Art (again) - I reread this book at least once a year. IMHO one of the best books ever written on the creative process, no matter what you're creating.

In Defense of Food - Best criticism of the problems with reductionist "nutrition-ism" I've read.

They Made America - Good, quick history of some of America's most revolutionary inventors, businessmen and women.
I don't think you understand the "be civil" part of the guidelines.

You asked a question, got a civil answer and responded really rather rudely.

At first I thought this elblanco guy was a bit whiny as well, but now I'm starting to see the pattern of bad behavior behind his point.

After your response (and a few others), I think he is perfectly valid.

If my karma were high enough, I would certainly downvote...nay flag your comment as a clear violation of guidelines.
I'm 61 and my brain is probably a bit better than it was when I was younger. But I do a lot of math, programming and music, not to mention politics.
I understand that's annoying, and hope to improve it. The system reports digit.com free because it doesn't have an A record, but I will fix this by checking SOA records in the future. I'm not sure why 6af.com is reported free, maybe there was a temporary DNS problem when I checked it. It should be updated in a couple of days.
The print version was covered here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980927
Not for one thing or another, but the 99.9% I quoted is probably a little high. Even after 9/11 there have been at least two that we are all aware made it past security, we're not hearing about those that didn't unless there is no way around it.

So you probably don't need thousands, you probably need on the order of several 10's or so to get through once.

Keep in mind that there is a reservoir of 1000's if not 10's of thousands of people that would gladly give their lives to do damage to others.

They didn't pick a guy from Africa for nothing and a guy from England last time, those are much easier to escape profiling (the first time). I wouldn't be surprised if the next one would be asian, assuming they have such a person in their ranks.

No filter that has to pass the number of passengers that we're looking at here will ever be perfect, and if you study the filter long enough you're going to find holes.

And suppose the filter is perfect, then move on to other, softer targets until through lack of activity the filter loses its effectiveness.

Basically any place where lots of people gather (lots is something larger than 50 or so) is a target for a potential attack.
I'm mostly annoyed at the sensationalist headline, this has got nothing to do with the game itself. They knew their suspect used a service provided over the internet by a company based in California, and used that to track their suspect. The article actually doesn't say how, but I'm guessing they knew his US ISP and address, and sent that in their request.

Oh, and the company happened to be Blizzard, and the service happened to be World of Warcraft, but that's completely irrelevant, it could have been any service, and it's not like the police officers played the game, so the claim that the law reached into the game is completely false.
Yes, that would be interesting because the startup time for loading the zipped Django 1.1 package is significant. Maybe app-engine-patch can be tweaked to use_library()?
Google will be the Microsoft of 1990-2000: scary, dominant, and increasingly hated (by nerds at least).
The simple fix that's been recommended quite a few times here, that of requiring a comment for each upmod and downmod, seems to me a reasonable and minimal fix that makes the user more judicious with their votes.
great replies guys... some very good pointers, especially ventureloop was a great find for me.
thanks for the inputs again.
probably another area for others interested in the field are domains on finance (like imurray suggested). i found
http://www.cerebellumcapital.com/ pretty cool.
but no internships, only jobs.
Not really for a procedure, but for more complicated, long-term disease: multiple sclerosis, cancer, arthritis, diabetes, etc. Knowing your genome will likely allow you to predict how you might respond to certain therapies.
This whole thread should be captured in time as an example of rampant abuse of the modding system.
Having just spent the past two days reverse engineering an API that used protocol buffers, I can tell you I would have much rather done it against XML.

Why didn't you have the descriptor files? Optimizing for ease of external reverse engineering seems rather counter to the authoring organization's actual goals.

If you want third parties to be able to interoperate, give them the descriptors you use.

As for parsing, I guess I don't get what the big deal is.

Writing lots of code to read and parse data types as text, especially when no schema is available, is time consuming.

Protobuf is necessarily validated. The input types are known-correct, conversion to the domain model is direct and straight-forward, and it's exceptionally easy to generate code or otherwise automatically deserialize to native representations.
MIDLAND WEATHER ALERT AM/FM (HIDDEN NANNY CAMERA W/DVR)
introduce the tenants of Objectivism

How much rent do they pay? And what kind of landlady is Ms Rand.
Interesting, but as I understand it this $500 is supposed to be your real pension, not some other form of income, thus requiring most of visitors of HN to wait some half a century until retirement in Panama :)
Atlas Shrugged - finally got around to reading it after dozens of recommendations from good friends. Shocking how relevant and prophetic it is, especially with respect to the events of 2009.
Anyone read 'Crush It'? Gary Vee seems like a scamster to me, but it seems really popular in the wider tech community right now. I'd trust HN better than my Twitter contacts...
Although actually released in late 2008, my favorite book for 2009 was Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
Whether it is rational or not, I don't know. It very well may be that society is optimizing an objective function quite different from the one that you claim it should.

Consider the emphasis that our legal system places on the criminal mind (mens rea) which is often necessary for something to be a crime. If we really weighed all deaths/crimes equally than we could dispense with intent and only consider the act itself.
Given that Jason Baker just got out of school and is espousing a bold "I'm too smart for X" opinion (where X is, in this case, code comments), I'm not too inclined to pay much heed.

His blog post is the #1 story on slashdot.org right now, so being bold beats experience:

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/01/01/226232/Myths-A...
The java build world is perverse. Maven and Ant are imperative, highly limited, domain specific languages using XML for syntax.

If that doesn't set off just about every warning bell in your head, consider that Ant performs character set decoding and re-encoding when copying files. By default it will decode every file with your system's default character encoding and then re-encode it with the very same format. As far as I can tell all this can possibly do is introduce errors. When copying a binary file the best-case scenario is that your JVM throws a runtime error, but it's more likely that ant will silently corrupt the copy.

The Ant team's solution for this problem? You might reasonably expect that they would provide an option for binary files which does a byte by byte copy. Instead they suggest that you change an environment variable to an encoding which "does not seem to contain illegal character sequences."
But what about iChat video capabilities? That seems like a pretty fun application.

An electronic picture frame that can receive videophone calls from the grandkids? Classic 21st-century technology concept.
Yes and I thought it was great. It only takes a few hours to get through which is a big bonus. My co-worker was a big "anti-veynerchucker", thinking he was all talk with no real message. But he had a read of it on my Kindle and is now a complete convert. He ended up dragging me to a talk by Gary and starting his own video blog too.
It seems though, that people are assigning an equivalence of "agree" to "has value", and "disagree" to "doesn't have value". At least this is how I've been registering the use of the vote.

Opinions appear to vary wildly as to how it should be used, but the ones that appear to make sense to me are the ones that would make sense in an actual conversation:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021371

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021634
I love tablets!!

I believe they are the future of computers, and Apple will design the thing the right way, changing the interface if necessary.

A computer doesn't need to be attached to a typewriter machine.

It's good news for everybody. The acers and eees will copy the design and will make it affordable.
Indeed. From the perspective of a learning algorithm, what would it think about either of these links? They've both been shared on Twitter, both been retweeted at least once on Twitter, and one has been curated here on Hacker News.

Alas, ultimately actions taken by people can always been simulated by spammers. We talked about this a bit on Fred's post: how do you know the act of sharing is legitimate and not spam? Hacker News employs votes, but that data isn't easily extracted by a learning algorithm in a general sense. I can only assume that part of solving this problem in totality is coming up with a way of determining the realness of the human curator. Otherwise, spammers will attack as soon as it gains any sort of momentum.
Finally got around to reading 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' Blew me away. So much better than the film adaptation.
Who cares about them? That's not snark, I mean it seriously. Humans are intelligent creatures with desires. Trees are leafy lumps cellulose. They have no brain, they have no intellect - a tree cannot feel pain or pleasure, joy or sorrow. Sure, it can live or die, but that life has no moral content. The natural world is only valuable insofar as it's useful for creatures that actually are morally relevant - i.e., humans.

That's not saying we should pave the forests - forests are nice, I like having them around. But it's the human desire to have a forest that's meaningful, not the forest itself. If humans want houses more, then it's perfectly acceptable to knock down the trees, turn them into lumber, and build houses with them, and spit-roast the animals over a wood fire in the backyard for the housewarming party.
I suppose it's just a bizarre coincidence that this was posted on January 1, 2010 then, as opposed to (say) October 18, 2008?
I don't think a quota makes sense. But a comment/vote does.

I don't want to limit the amount of times a person can disagree with me (at risk of allowing for disagreeable persons).
There's inspiration everywhere.
The author doesn't. The author says that there will be more middle class women with jobs, but fewer poor women with jobs. He/she wants to help the poor ones.
He/she also points out that, while they're in the work force, they make less money, and provides evidence that this is because they take time off to raise children. He/she thinks its a detriment to society overall when a woman, who is equally capable as a man, makes less money just because she has a gap in her resume. That's not inconsistent.

No I think that you misunderstand my point. I'm not saying that the author isn't correct in that. In fact, their social programs to correct that may be right. The problem is that a significant majority of women in higher education is no more correct than the reverse. The author has a good point in saying that certain things need to be corrected from women's perspectives, but never mentions the possibility of taking actions to correct other deficiencies in the workplace (in this case, higher education). He or she proposes social programs that may be entirely well deserved in order to equalize the difficulty of being a working mother, but the current trend in the number of decreasing men in the workplace signifies a systemic problem in early male education. To bring up that statistic and then dismiss the consequences is what I was criticizing.
The java build world is perverse. Maven and Ant are imperative, highly limited, domain specific languages using XML for syntax.

Maven is declarative, not imperative.

Ant is broken in many respects, but your provided example is not true. Ant only attempts re-encoding of a file if you specify text filters (aka variable/string replacement). It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that string replacement breaks on binary files.
I'm all for catching a drug dealer but it seems unethical for Blizzard to willingly give up one of their players' information. As the article said "they didn't have to respond". Instead they choose on their own to give up the info. That doesn't make me trust Blizzard. Of course, I'm not a drug dealer so I have nothing to fear, but still, they seem a little loose with information about their users.
...or perhaps I only converse with crazy people :)
Flatland & hierarchies in UI design
Why would tablets be the future of computers? At home I have a 22" widescreen standing on my desk, in what way would my computing experience become better by me carrying that around?

Why would Apple successfully design the thing the right way? They have a good track record, but past performance is not a guarantee of future performance...
The common trend here seems to be a concern over not cannibalizing existing markets. Two examples are the case of flash memory being delayed by a decade or more, and also Microsoft releasing a bloated Vista with the expectation that faster processors were on the horizon. Too bad there can't be some legislation to encourage a synergistic effect.
I think that's off topic. Just as gender balance in higher education was a problem when it was 70/30 in men's favor, it will be just as much a problem if it is reversed.
> A decent portion of the population against downvoting aren't against downvoting per se, it's downvoting without a comment or counterargument.

I would absolutely agree with this statement.
I love this idea but plain tags are simply not enough. I still have a need for hierarchy. If I can have tags like "programming/ruby" and "school/2008-fall/ecology" be organized like mini-filesystems I would be completely sold.
I understand Asian family names work, but the proper way to address him in English is "Dr. Lee".
Expose is a lot older than even Leopard, but what he means is that they were changed in 10.6; therefore there were some (if small) UI changes.
That is horrid.

After comparing human to human conversation and bot to human I feel like goal of conversing with computer is so far away.

People communicate through such narrow channel. Few words, almost no grammar and they still can stay perfectly in sync. If bot tries to imitate the style it descends in pure nonsense. If it does not it still seems like it's not capable of understanding anything.

I think another approach would be to ditch grammar and just build some kind of word and word combinations associative database fed with extensive memoirs of single person.

If bot spots a question it should respond with closest word combinations found in database. Also it should remember what was said and use it as a context while seeking for answer.
Posterous slideshows inside your Facebook feed
In case anyone is wondering the parent post is a duplicate post that I made by accident. (Wireless connection dropped me and when I reloaded the page it reposted.) Unfortunately I can not delete it because someone has voted on it, and I can't flag my own post apparently. Anyway, mods please delete the parent post.
Game Theory At Work
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Theory-Work-Outmaneuver-Competiti...

PayPal Wars
http://www.amazon.com/PayPal-Wars-Battles-Media-Planet/dp/09...

Stealing MySpace
http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-MySpace-Control-Popular-Websi...

Predictably Irrational
http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Hidden-Forces-D...
Why not just "programming ruby" and "school 2008 fall ecology"?
The Machinery of Freedom (David Friedman) -- Great book on a potential anarcho-capitalist society and how we could push the US government in that direction.

The Game (Neil Strauss) -- See nopassrecover's response; he explained it well.

Little Brother (Cory Doctorow) -- A fantastic novel about freedom and technology.

Makers (Cory Doctorow) -- A great novel about people who create, whether technology or business models. Perhaps the best book I read this year.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Cory Doctorow) -- The story of a man working in Disney World, which is now part of the Bitchun Society (a post-scarcity, post-death society). A story of love, betrayal, and death; how can you go wrong? Worth it for the concept of Whuffie (you'll need to read it to really get it) alone.

Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson) -- The evolution of a society towards post-scarcity, written around the story of a young girl's growth into an adult. Best post-cyberpunk book written thus far, IMO.
Thanks for this great post, it really sets a great platform to explore AI and its development in the future. So glad you highlighted that Google's technology is so much more than just Pagerank which people seem to want to oversimplify quite often
With or without Larrabee, the number of cores and threads per core on x86 processors will not decrease.
Sounds about right.
I second that...I am completely addicted to it.
I finally finished "Godel, Escher, Bach" in 2009, after starting and giving up on it a few times previously. A great book, but it does require a lot of time and some serious thinking with a pencil and pad to do some working out (or at least it did for me).

The best book I read in 2009 (and possibly ever!) was "Fooled By Randomness" - a fantastic book that I can't recommend enough. I also read the sequel, "Black Swans", that was interesting but not in the same league.

"Made to stick" was also a great book, with lots of great marketing advice that is simple to follow.
Jan. 1: A Good Day to Die
Hopefully, netbooks and FLOSS can free us from this x86-only world. I would love to have an 8-core ARM in my netbook.

I remember my IBM z50. It used some parts that were used in a Pentium notebook sold in some markets. Because of this part sharing with a Pentium notebook, the MIPS processor in it could run for 10+ hours on a single charge.
Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis
http://www.amazon.com/Liars-Poker-Rising-Through-Wreckage/dp...

In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan
http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Food-Eaters-Manifesto/dp/01431...

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management - Roger Lowenstein
http://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Managemen...
have you read midnight's children? if so, how does satanic verses compare to that? i thought children was wonderful, but everything i've read since by rushdie has been a disappointment (often flat our boring). i often wonder if i give him another chance and take on satanic verses....
It should also be bad PR if they give out their customers' information when they don't legally have to.

It's also possible they didn't realize the subpoena wasn't legally binding.

Edit: They didn't just give out his info to the police: somebody gave his character name to the press. Near the top, it says "(WoW Armory listing for Hightower's character)" which links to http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Bladefist&...
What does Gmail use? It stops almost all spam. Aren't they using a single big database?
I think that the screensaver adaption is just right, though :)
bradfordcross: good overview, with one minor point. I wouldn't think of Pandora's problem as one mitigated with semi-supervised learning. That's usually applied to a situation where you have a small number of labeled points and a whole mass of unlabeled data; often the task is then to determine low density regions to define boundaries of natural clusters.

In Pandora's case, they have TONS of labeled data. All you'd need to do would be to run a decision tree (or a categorical-variable version of PCA) to (1) determine that many of those features are strongly statistically dependent and (2) reduce the number that need to be populated for any given song.

You could probably also do supervised learning on their massive sound database to infer lots of these features automatically (i.e. i bet you can pick out male vs. female vocalists without having someone listen to it).

Combining these (supervised learning on historical data + decision tree on historical data) would likely vastly increase their per-song labeling throughput. Only "global" features like song genre would have to be input by humans.
Fun with the CouchDB _changes feed and RabbitMQ
OMG I love this stuff. My wife brought some home about a month ago and damnit - they taste as good or better than most homemade pancakes. We buy them at Costco - try them if you see them.
College In America (Visualization)