skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 2010, Demand For US Fixed Income Has To Increase Elevenfold... Or Else
Perhaps the first nut with an implanted (say, abdominal cavity) bomb will save us from this.
The Way I Work - David Kadavy of Kadavy, Inc.
If this is a move from the TSA to counter attacks like the man who recently tried to set himself on fire on a plane the irony is that books burn much better than electronics.
Tell HN: I dreamed the iSlate launch. This is what I saw.
1) Steve takes the stage and grins. He knows that we know and we don't. He sets the bar high by announcing that what he is going to show today is bigger than everything Apple has ever done before, bigger than everything combined, and he doesn't think it will get bigger than this in his lifetime.

2) Everything combined. Yes, that's what is being launched today. A new device that combines the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and ... more.

3) Its being called the iSlate.

4) It looks like a bigger iPhone. Its white in color. One single button, slimmer than the air and there is something magical about the screen.

5) It has the ipod, the phone, the safari, the videos, the apps and the multitouch. It has everything you ever imagined and it starts there.

6) Surprise No. 1, Books. iSlate features a dual screen (E-ink/digital). More titles than amazon. Chapter wise pricing. There are comics too. Steve shows away Naruto, wow.

7) No. 2. Hand Gestures. The entire screen has cameras inside to detect hand gestures made in front. Steve plays a tennis game the Wii style. He types a letter at an invisible keyboard. Its magic.

8) No. 3. OSX gets a new dimension to go along with the gestures. Partial 3D windows, panoramic view. Its insane.

And that's when the stupid doorbell woke me up. It was a DHL guy with my new Kindle and I said, "Shit!".
agreed. There is no way anyone is Captain at a major airline anywhere in the world after 270 hours... I'm a licensed private pilot in the US. I know commercial pilots from the states that fly for Major "foreign" airlines and i know the requirements were much greater.
It's true of a lot of commercial code as well. How often do junior devs and contract coders deliver something perfect on the first try, especially if they are coding for their problem and you are trying to keep the needs of the whole community in mind?
> Simplicity

Have you seen the Intel/AMD CPU manuals?

> Specialization

The Symbolics Lisp Machines ran ZetaLisp, Common Lisp, Fortran, C, Pascal, ADA... and you could write and interactively debug (on the source level) a program written in any combination of these.

It is our current machines which suffer from insectoid specialization - for C. Dynamic languages will always be second-class citizens (from speed & complexity penalties) on the braindead C Architectures.
> Talk is cheap.

Talk is cheap. I do not specialize in talk, however. Compare my hot air output to that of the professional blowhards and hucksters who are revered here. I don't hold a candle to them, volume-wise.

And if the fact that I don't release to the peanut gallery every byte of incremental progress I achieve means that I will be dismissed as a blowhard, then so be it.
Andy Kessler: Put Down That Shovel (Gov't Projects for a Recovery)
Is massively collaborative pregnancy possible?
Once the GT300 series hits the shelves that problem will be largely mitigated though, they're supposed to be mostly independent, with a 'variable warp' size.

Of course that will introduce a new level of complexity to the optimization problem.
Cue the inevitable XKCD link:
http://xkcd.com/651/
Wikileaks needs help: legal, technical, and financial
Security whack-a-mole.

Box cutters used in 9/11... ban anything sharp

Shoe bomber... make people take off shoes

Liquid explosive plot... limit liquids and gels to 4oz containers

Guy tries to explode bomb in his lap during the last hour of a flight... no things in your lap during the last hour.

It's comical and tragic.
so the analysis is in the llvm? the diagram is very confusing; it looks to me as though the analysis is before the llvm and applies to three different backends. but then looking some more, it seems to imply you can go ptx -> ocelot -> nvidia gpu (no llvm at all).

(ie i agree with everything else you say - i just don't understand what that graphic is trying to show).
FYI, be careful about using Rinda. It's quite inefficient. O(n) inserts, etc.
Not enough. The woman in the example given had a DRRS, but it disappeared because the skill being used was not rare, nor valuable in and of itself.

The claim in the article is that having a skill that is rare and valuable make you non-nervous, thus being nervous about taking the leap means you don't have a skill that's rare and valuable.

Clearly false - anyone can be nervous regardless of their skills. However, it's worth a moment's thought.
According to the BBC report on this incident, we're there already...

Techchrunch seems to think it was 'electronics' related, but the BBC is reporting that he had explosives sewn into the elastic band of his underwear.

So if anything, TSA are likely to ban clothes on planes.
i don't understand this either. "wariable warp size" sounds like a small efficiency fix for when things aren't multiples of 32, or when they exceed 512. a "variable warp size" doesn't alter the fundamental problem SIMD approach - you've still got a multiprocessor with slave processors that are doing very similar work.

for me, the big advances in fermi are a unified address space and some kind of cache for the global memory. neither of those change the paradigm, but they may make life significantly simpler when programming the thing.
I notice that as I have matured as a web developer I have embraced a more and more minimalistic approach. It is interesting to see how a similar effect has happened through history.
I'm hoping this is a temporary over-reaction, or over-stated, or both.

However, I've got a trip to the USA in mid-February (coincidentally flying in from Schiphol) that is probably going to be cancelled if this is (as the more extreme rumours have it) a permanent ban on in-flight use of electronics during all stages of flights to the US.

And I really don't think I'll be the only person cancelling discretionary visits.

Given that the numbskull suicide bomber in question apparently tried to inject some sort of accelerant into the powder in his trousers using a syringe, I pity any diabetics trying to fly anywhere in the next few weeks ...
Multiples of 32 are nice, multiples of 1 are better :)

(and let's hope it goes that far down), that would make things a lot easier as well.

Unified address space I assume you mean across multiple GPUs ? Global memory cache is a double edged sword, that eats in to the transistor budget at a very rapid pace, effectively you already have a cache, you just have to fill it yourself.

GPU programming is definitely a step back in the ease with which you can write programs, but if your problem maps well on to a GPU the speed increases are simply astounding. What would have taken you a cluster with 100 boxes now sits under your desk and consumes 250 watt tops. That's really very impressive.

The way intel seems to edge in to gpu territory and nvidia into cpu territory will make for some interesting stuff happening in the next couple of years.
In terms of startups, the question to consider is if you need a valuable and rare skill to make a valuable product.

I would guess that you need several valuable skills to build and market a great product, but those skills do not necessarily correspond to having several fantastic job offers as this writer suggests.
Purchasing an app on an Android phone is a distinctly different experience than purchasing your typical shopping cart product online. "Cart abandonment" is just not a significant factor in the Marketplace.

You enter your card ONCE, and from that moment forward, the process of buying an app is nearly identical with the iPhone (UI aside).
My interpretation, which I will further inform later today by scraping through the source, is that Ocelot takes in PTX from the Nvidia compiler and spits out LLVM bytecode, which can be JITed to run on an x86 (using LLVM's JIT) or compiled by LLVM to run on any other architectures it supports now or in the future. I think the diagram may mean that Ocelot presents a single CUDA device which may do any of these things (x86, GPU, ???-via-LLVM) to execute a CUDA kernel behind-the-scenes, transparently to whatever made the kernel call.
No, I no longer have access to that machine anymore.

Interestingly enough, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_in...

mentions the same rumor, with a reference to a old unavailable edition of Byte magazine.
I just did the same thing, and therefore have the exact same suggestion.

Looks like a cool little service, however.
We're essentially a large consultancy who bills by the kousuu -- "unit of engineering labor", somewhat arbitrarily defined as "what we think one engineer should be able to do in a day". Projects are successful if we bill more than N * K * the average labor cost of producing one kousuu, where K is the number of kousuu and N is a constant representing overhead, profit, and the cost of sale.

Projects are sized based on a negotiation between us and the customer. It is then broken into parts, which are given their own kousuu value, via guesstimation by a senior engineer on the team. (You'll notice this process involves an awful lot of guesstimation. This tends to converge on reasonable numbers because guesstimation is happening among multiple actors who don't have an incentive to collude -- kinda-sorta like a market of players with imperfect knowledge can converge staggeringly quickly on a good guess of the intrinsic value of something.)

We then measure how many kousuu of work you complete for a particular project per day you report you are working on the project. That is currently our primary productivity measure, although we also track customer satisfaction, "claims" (a backchannel by which customers here get free work done to fix issues in the deliverable which are determined to be due to our mistakes), subjective quality assessments from the engineers, follow-on business from the same customer, and any value we can extract from the project for the company. (For example, in a 10 kousuu project if we manage to extract 2 kousuu worth of functionality that the customer paid for into our internal framework, then deploy that to seven customers and charge them each for it, we make out like bandits.)

Anyhow, we keep obsessive records of who does what and how long it took, so figuring out productivity is "just" a matter of dividing. (We only figured out the dividing trick recently. Hard to move a large organization from the way it typically does things, you know?)
Hmm. A country that:

1) doesn't hold US debt and does not do substantial trade with the US (sorry Canada, Japan, Mexico, et al)

2) Has large reserves of gold, petroleum or industrial minerals.

3) wants skilled English-speaking immigrants

... that leaves South Africa, Brazil, and... maybe AU?
I think "Thinking Forth" fits in there as well.
needs moar grendel
Excellent points about the article but, in my view, it is too extreme to say that patents are a "waste of time for startups."

Patents can and do help startups with their positioning for funding, among other things, though software patents usually are a waste of time, as is any strategy based on the idea of using patents to take on a large player in the marketplace, unless one wants to become a patent troll.
Please post your findings!
Two years spent in and out of courts across the U.S. cost i4i $10 million in legal fees.

Ouch.
But they do run on different web servers. The first is a custom Arc-based web service, the latter an Apache install. What could be a more direct error message than stating plainly that the information isn't available?
Congrats to you as well!
These sound like good ideas, but it doesn't change the fact that, every once in a while, roads and bridges need to be rebuilt. Our transportation infrastructure has been in need of an update for years.
These are all fantastic advise for any open source project. A couple of days ago, I was arguing that for NoSQL projects in particular there is an additional required step: making sure that it is easy to be used from major frameworks and that this integration is "as seamless as possible" (you can read the whole thing here http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/299775877/nosql-to-people).
With all the NoSQL solutions around, right now it is quite difficult to pick the one that fits your problem. Making it simple to try it out will generate a lot of use cases and that will make further adoption even easier.

:- alex

ps: (excuse and/or ignore what probably can be seen as a plug) on MyNoSQL (http://nosql.mypopescu.com) I am trying to follow some of the most promising NoSQL projects and Redis is one of them. And according to the stats, there is a lot of cool activity around Redis.
Oops. That should have been, "And why did we ever ban something our ancestors were so loyal to for?"
Getting Clojure and Slime installed [screencast]
Way too much contrast and no apparent design. Just use some simple div with borders to give it structure.
ahh yes good choice! Thanks!
An interesting argument (as always from zerohedge) but one that seems to be predicated on the idea that the government has no intention of reducing the deficit. Opponents of Keynesian policies always argue as if fiscal stimulus is meant to function as a new normal rather than a temporary corrective.

By analogy, this would be like alternative health folks pointing out the downsides of permanent antibiotic consumption, although antibiotics are usually only administered long enough to overcome the progress of disease. The Fed will certainly put up interest rates, almost certainly during 2010; I just think they're trying to hold off doing so to any substantial degree until growth hits a steady 3% and unemployment falls below 10%.
Method for generating mazes from images
Any CSS preprocessor is basically transparent in its native language (in this case, PHP). The only time systems like Sass need a compile step is when they're being used with languages other than those they're written in, or with static CSS. Scaffold isn't transparent in these cases, since it simply doesn't support them.
USB Hourglass Random Number Generator
They do take privacy seriously. What exactly is your worry with them tracking the fact that your IP address clicked on a particular adword advert?

Silly thing is, people spend all this time+effort, when your ISP knows everything you do anyway. Do you trust your ISP?
The article is contradictory: in one context being nervous is a bad thing but in another context it is considered good.
There are far more valuable “100 million pound” sterling banknotes known as Titans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_pound_sterling
It's not that wild really. You don't need a whole lot of information to get different vowels. Consonants are harder, but only in the sense that you need more electrodes and training time. The synthesis of speech (as opposed to the sampling of phonemes you usually hear in computer speech) is well understood and can be managed with (IIRC) about 16 parameters.
Reading the tweets suggests no books either ("no personal items in your lap" is mentioned in one). I think he must have used a laptop to try and hide what he was doing.
Neither medical idea is feasible.

You don't need 100,000 biologists to sequence every cancer; you need 100,000 Illumina machines (or, take your pick of next gen sequencers).

You don't need to scan all old medical records right now. You need a system that makes it worthwhile for doctor and patient to have digitized records. (And I'm not talking about "doctors will get punished until they go digital" as being an incentive. I mean true, medical or productivity-oriented incentives: your job will be done 10% faster; you will be able to identify trends in your patients' disease patterns; etc.) Once you provide the medical world with software that actually improves what it's like to be a doctor, or improves patient care, or both, we'll gladly jump aboard. And sure, you can threaten with payment withholding at that point if you need to.
Perhaps I should embark on a start-up that sells strengthened chambers capable of withstanding explosives to replace traditional seating that the attendants lock you in before take-off.

EDIT: Or redesign the seating layout to turn the cabin into some kind of panopticon where all passengers can watch out for any suspicious behaviour. They can have a voting system which detains a passenger if the number of concerned fellow passengers passes a threshold...
Anyone know what Manhattan-based startup incubator he's talking about?
I get that. It just seems kind of perverse to transmit in clear because scheduled encryption has risks of its own. Last time this was posted I mentioned that while interception of drone video by the Taliban or whoever is probably not that big of an operational threat, bigger strategic competitors like Russia and China have probably accrued a good lot of intelligence by amassing such data in quantity. Perhaps the NSA's thinking is that this is less critical than exposure of dynamic encryption models to the wild.
I doubt there's any validity to this claim, just another TC bad reporting most likely.

Banning electronics on flights would be the final nail in the coffin for air-travel, even just on international flights it would piss off so many corporate travellers that the airlines wouldn't cope with the losses - many large corps only accept 8hr+ flights for business trips because the employee(s) can work while in flight.
There's already a LaTeX bot called watexy.
Why not just sedate everyone...

I'd be slightly more open to this policy if the TSA was going to start paying for in-flight alcohol. I don't necessarily want to use my laptop around alcohol in-flight. (Or soda, for that matter - though I usually get water bottles for the cap.)
Actually the paper, or at least the abstract, argues for the need for such an encyclopedia:

"Our results strongly support the need for systematic 'phylogenomic' efforts to compile a phylogeny-driven 'Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea' in order to derive maximum knowledge from existing microbial genome data as well as from genome sequences to come."
Forgive me for asking, but why is this link here on HN? I mean, he's a great guy and all, but what is the relevance to HN at this point?
Huh?

I wonder if a CS article would ever receive any attention on a finance website.
Consider PageZipper ( http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/pagezipper ) or AutoPager ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925 ).
Ugh, I'd much prefer that to all the dehumanizing and paranoia that is present-day air travel. Knock me out and send me FedEx, please. Probably takes about as long to recover from a horse tranquilizer as it does from plain ol' jet lag.
Guess it's time to short Cisco's stock. It's not about the free soda, but its all about the free soda.

http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2009/12/22/can-a-single-...
being passed out for a 20+ flight to Asia sounds good to me :)
If this is using a spring-loaded rewind, it's potentially dangerous.

One of the kids in my school up was blind in one eye (it looked terrible). He was next to one of those vacuum cleaners with a retractable cord and the end of the cord flew up and hit his eye when his mother was winding up the cord.

I'm pretty sure they don't allow spring-loaded rewind cords on vacuum cleaners any more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel

I've never seen a coffin hotel in person, but it sounds much nicer than the cattle car I'm faced with this evening. I'm guessing they can't do it because we couldn't evacuate within the FAA's 90 second deadline. Hm, maybe make an escape pod out of it...
Al Qaeda Failed. What About Us? Ten Questions.
Its valid: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/us/27security.html. Which is actually linked to in the article.
Doesn't mean that it's not a good proxy.
Forbes, Inc, Wired and WHIR
After that, we'll have to send our entire bodies through the x-ray machine.
Frontpage > JavaScript scriptlets > PHP > MySQL > Apache > OO Coding > MVC Based Coding > Digg FE Developer :)
That's what I thought at first too. Then I pulled my head out of my ass and realized that Adam Smith, in roughly 1800 or so, had no way to even conceive of what it was I would be doing for a living 200 years in the future and was, in fact, talking about plain oldfashioned engineering, something humans have been doing for ages. When I write code to solve a particular problem I am not, as I am sometimes wont to think, performing a spectacular feat of futuristic wizardry. Instead, I am doing something quite similar to what my ancestors have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years on the plains of Africa and elsewhere, which is to create hopefully useful tools out of whatever materials are available.
I wish some of our politicians had the balls to stop this paranoid mess and say "No, we can't guarantee 100% safety, learn to live with it".
Personal accounts on the new rules from flight crews and passengers:

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...
Oh, absolutely. It's certainly evidence, which is why it's an interesting read, but can't be taken as incontrovertible.
Are they talking about the long term though? I think they are mainly discussing the situation the government is committed to in the 2010 fiscal year.
like rescuetime?
Tsst, don't say things like this. They can be reading HN.
Books burn much better than electronics; but they're far less explosive than laptop batteries.
I suppose we should count ourselves lucky this guy didn't blow himself up on a plane.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/middle-east/2833157/Bomb-in-ana...
This isn't a CS website. "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Moulded around his body parts" (source: BBC One News at Ten). Start your sausage-sizzle jokes now, dudes.
Beat me to it.
One man's story about a million dollar bill.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscit...
I think the sales tax issue is a big one, but I'm not sure it's really that big.of a deciding factor for most consumers. I've been paying sales tax at Amazon forever (I'm in KY) and it hasn't discouraged me from using any of their services. I go with Amazon for the convenience and the fact that I can often find free shipping offers from them on many itmes, which more than offsets the amount of sales tax I have to pay.

That said, I could be entirely wrong. :) If I didn't live in a small town that was at least an hour away from all major retailers other than walmart, I might be using Amazon a lot less.

It would be interesting to see some statistics on their sales in states that pay sales tax vs. states that don't, provided they also took into account the overall spending patterns of the people in those states.
(1) For me, a Trash-80 and lots of spare time. But for you, find something programmable that can help with your normal day-to-day life. Scheme, python, or lisp are pretty good places to start.

(2) You don't really know a technology unless you have a project you want (want) to finish. Before then, there's no motivation to go deeper.