skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's always fun to watch non-programmers underestimate the difficulty of human-equivalent AI.
Learn Django and roll your own in one weekend.
"... I want to be looked at. And honestly, I’m not an exhibitionist. It’s just that eye contact has gone the way of proper enunciation, a good handshake and a hug that means something — casualties of modern life. ..."

Gaining eye contact - the face and body as well - means people can see what you are saying matches what you actually think. This type of analysis is understood intuitively by some but there is some science behind the gestures of which the work of Paul Enkman is most interesting ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman TV watchers might recognise his work in "Lie to me" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_to_Me

The "handshake" and "hug" serve numerous functions, one I've always found interesting is the "oxytocin" hack ~ http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-moral-molecule/20081...
This week in search 12/18/09
See also buildr, which attempts to be a drop-in Maven replacement using a ruby DSL built on top of rake. http://buildr.apache.org/
That 10k probably also includes desk+chair+etc.
I've been using HStringTemplate on top of happstack quite happily. REST would be fairly easy to achieve using this approach.
I would venture to suggest that most people would find it easier to adapt happstack directly to their needs than trying to use happs at this point in time.
if i needed need stupid easy backups, i would go with linode, as it is, i go with slicehost.
That's why we need a language with a scalable type system that supports both static and dynamic typing. (Actually VB had that years ago with Variant data types, but the rest of the type system was horrible.)
Thanks for your honesty, brother.
He's using 4G as two things: 4th generation, and link bait.
why is it in Ruby?

As opposed to, say, Clojure or Scala ?
Cushycms.com is easy...
Google, Bing open new criminal opportunities by adding Twitter, Facebook feeds
Avatar:#1 Box Office Seller
Avatar's effects are nice but the story is lacking a little.
Oh please, give me a break. I don't want to have to log in at all. If ip address collisions become a problem THEN you can implement openid. Until then you will never get big enough to make it a problem.
It's not a statically typed language like Haskell anymore?
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Stack Overflow did essentially this, didn't they?

How did they do that?
github for static pages + heroku.
It reminds me of a story (how to apply for a job to teach a mule to speak):

Before ten years pass, I die, the mule dies or the sultan dies... </quote> http://nasredin.blogspot.com/2007/11/ibn-khaldouns-mule.html

taken from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411695
It's not "easy" to make a list, but instead maybe you would be able to work with a tuple (which is easy).

More practically, Haskell is going to ask you implicitly why you want a heterogenous list of functions. In all likelihood they're going to have a common interface at some point and you abstract around that so that the list is still "homogenous" (which is harder, but still pretty easy).
I don't know about Japanese, but in Chinese, all the numbers have words that can be said extremely quickly - si, qi, etc. Because our working memory is implemented as a 2 second loop of audio, this allows Chinese people to have a working memory that's closer to 10 items instead of the famous 'seven plus or minus two' that English speakers have. In 'Outliers' Malcolm Gladwell posits this as part of the reason why asians often seem to be better at math.
The article suggests incremental changes. The 3GS had incremental improvements and some real additions like the compass and video.

What will the real changes in the iPhone V4 be? Voice control? FM Transmitter? Seems too tame. Microprojector or 3D screen seems too far-fetched.
Google is reported to be in talks to acquire Yelp
Erik Smartt wrote about this[1][2], and it hit HN a while back.

[1] http://www.eriksmartt.com/blog/archives/305
[2] http://www.eriksmartt.com/blog/archives/306
* As far as I know, part 3 isn't written.
You might get some good `hacker action' breaking into the computer systems, though.
I've used the extension from passwordmaker.org for quite some time. It implements this basic idea quite nicely.
3GS has voice control already. However, I always forget to use it.
Just better design would solve this problem. Make more effective use of horizontal space.
I'd be interested as well.
I think it would be best to follow the model used by online peer review sites like critters.org.
Ie, you have to do n number of reviews before you would have your own copy reviewed. This worked very well.
I've noticed that people make more eye contact outside of New York. For New Yorkers, this means that you'd like to consider sex, fighting, or some combo of the two. As such, a trip outside of the city can be quite jarring.
This analysis is grossly naive. It notes the importance of kinetic kill in space battles but ignores utterly that the nature of the battlefield depends greatly on the nature of technology. As increasingly advanced propulsion technology makes feasible the next higher level of closing velocities (from 10-30km/s with chemical propulsion, to 50km/s with Nuclear Thermal Rockets and such-like, to 100km/s, 1000km/s and beyond with Orion, NSWR, fusion, pumped light/mag sails, etc.) the nature of battle changes. This is a far more complex topic than this overly simplistic article could ever hope to cover.
Hey, if anyone's bored you could try and prove this game to be NP-Complete...
Ask News.YC: highest rated submission with no comments?
Just curious.
depends on how far in the future you'll go.

frankly I think all the "space battles" will basically just boil down to two space shuttle cargo haulers duking it out to hijack the other guy's shipment
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we already have militarization of space, plenty of satellites up there, are armed to the teeth. The second they find anything important up there, you'll have space shuttles armed to the teeth.
It was Newsweek's N'Gai Croal:

http://bitmob.com/index.php/mobfeed/Project-Natal-Hands-Feet...

>When game consultant and former Newsweek writer N'Gai Croal gave Paradise a test drive, however, the game had trouble reading his steering actions. The footwork (gas and brakes) worked fine, but Croal couldn't steer his car at all. It wasn't clear whether this was a problem of calibration differences between Tsunoda and Croal's very different body types, or if Croal's crazy dreadlocks threw Natal off. But it was working just fine when Tsunoda was at the "wheel."
Ah, that was a fantastic story, thanks for sharing. Reminds me of Arabian Nights, which is really a fine read. Lots of proverbs and fun little stories - you might want to check it out, I'd recommend Husain Haddawy's translation. Looks like the Deluxe Edition is on sale right now for $12, which is a steal. One of my favorite books.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393331660/ (no affiliate link)

On an unrelated note, it's worth reading the general summaries of Ibn Khaldun's works too. A lot of things we take for granted now but were incredibly advanced back then, as well as some good observations generally on how to think and consider things. It'd appeal to the sort of man who generally likes Adam Smith, Carl von Clauswitz, Plato, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khaldun#Works
Yes, I would make the online version the full game, I don't think the online version would cannibalize your iPhone sales. You could try and convert non-iPhone into paying $.99 for the web app after they lose the game. Not sure if iPhone rules probably don't allow for it, but it would be interesting if you could allow your paying web app users to gift someone the iPhone app.
Because the finished, mature, best in class ruby implementation is completely open source and is just sitting there for anyone to adopt, right now?

No need to re-invent the wheel. : )
MongoHub (MongoDB gui)
Seriously. 38 years in the future? That's the same span as from 1909 (the dawn of heavier than air flight and radio) to 2047 (computers, nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, ballistic missiles, radar, submarines, jet aircraft). And from there to 1985 (guided missiles, ICBMs, satellites, GPS). With such a long time frame damned near any prediction may come to pass.

It's plenty likely that by 2047 we'll not only have fully autonomous combat aircraft but we'll have automated aircraft fabricators and aircraft fabricator fabricators.

It's almost as valid to say that we'll be fighting sentient robots in hand-to-hand combat in a post-apocalyptic world in 2047.
this feels fake in a "viral" kind of way.
"We can’t verify if the video is authentic in nature [...]"

In other words, there's nothing of real value in this article.
I can beat that. Last Monday I was fired from Google by Larry Page because I kept saying "Bing!". It's just so catchy. Then I got hired by Yahoo on Tuesday, but got fired on Wednesday by Jerry Yang (who does he think he is, the CEO still?) because I still couldn't get "Bing!" out of my head! I'm hoping I can take this guys job at Microsoft.

I'll upload my YouTube video later today, so it's credible enough to post on your blog.
Just for a rough scope, mine is:

• 3000 lines of PHP (SQLite for storage)

• 500 lines of JavaScript (wysiwyg editor)

• 300 lines of CSS

• 0 code not written by me (well, ok PHP and SQLite)

That implements:

• Articles (including private drafts)

• WYSIWYG editing with XSS protection

• Comments

• Attachments.

• Account management, superuser separation.

• Search, time based navigation.

• RSS, sitemap.
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You should definitely weigh the cost of doing the extra work now versus doing it later. In profitable, stable ventures, time now and time later have similar costs. However, in new projects, time now is dramatically more expensive than time later.

Can you give an example of an OO system that can't be refactored to a data-driven system later? I ask because I've made very similar changes to Cal3D, converting overly-object-oriented code to memory-efficient data transformations and, thanks to unit tests, it wasn't hard at all.
Source IP as an identifier is a really bad idea. As an example, I work at a company with hundreds of thousands of employees. Do you know how many internet IP's we NAT them all behind? 2.

Also, while most ISP's don't assign customers new IP's frequently, they do do it occasionally. (At least, Comcast in Denver does). I finally signed up for dyndns because I got sick of not being able to access my home machine from work every 6 months or so.

OpenID/Facebook connect (like another poster suggested) would be a good choice, but source IP as a login identifier? That's just plain dumb.
So they will update the article as soon as they’ve done some real journalism? Great! I didn’t know you could do that (… do that and keep your integrity, that is).
Lacking this type of a group, here are some ideas to get feedback on copy:

1) If it's a title or something short, take out Google Ads and see which ads yield the most clicks.

2) If you want to get more in-depth feedback, consider a service like http://www.feedbackarmy.com. (Disclosure: it's my service). Feedback Army is nothing more than a front-end to Mechanical Turk. I'd summarize what I expect someone to take away from the copy and ask those as questions to see if the reviewers "get it". Also when you do this, small mistakes (like spelling errors) will get picked up. I see this all the time.

3) I usually find a friend to read my copy. Barring those, I harass my sister on Skype. This works too.

Best of luck!
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An equilibrium will develop.

If you want to fight an interplanetary war, your soldiers have to travel through an environment that will do to them what a wood-chipper does to decomposing animal viscera. It's unavoidable. If it turns out we can't make survivable ships, space is the ideal interdiction environment. Kill 'em out there before they can get down here.

Some areas of space (e.g. certain planetary orbits) are naturally important because they allow you to exert influence on combat elsewhere (e.g. by dropping dense objects on the enemy). So as ships become more survivable, it becomes more feasible to try and garrison strategic positions, and space battles will 'just happen' as opposing garrisons come into contact.
Master Ruby Metaprogramming
There's a very nice sign in ASL to describe this article. It uses two hands, and one of them is a fist with the index and little fingers extended, like the horns of a bull.

(1) I'm pretty sure it was Klima and Bellungi's book The Signs of Language that pointed out that arm muscles are slower than vocal muscles, and therefore ASL does things that spoken languages can't do in order to maintain the same communication bandwidth. (That book was written ten years ago.)

(2) The handshape is only a very small part of what conveys meaning in sign language; one of the classic newbie mistakes in learning ASL is to look at your conversation partner's hands, rather than his or her eyes. A great deal of grammatical information is communicated purely by facial expression; for example, raised eyebrows can indicate a yes/no question, lowered eyebrows can indicate a wh-question, and just looking in one direction or shifting the body slightly can substitute for a pronoun. There are also movements of the mouth that act as adverbial modifiers for a sign, to indicate things like "almost", "carelessly", "with difficulty", "distant in time or space", and a whole bunch of other stuff.

(3) With regard to the hand and arm movements themselves, the location and movement of the signs are as significant as the handshape. The signs for "father" and "mother" differ only in location. The signs for "paper" and "cheese" differ only in movement. Skimming the article, it appears that the authors didn't bother taking location and movement because linguists disagree on how to categorize those other features. But that's no excuse for completely leaving them out of your analysis. That's methodological laziness.

(4) Modulation of movement also has grammatical significance which in English would be conveyed by modal verbs or adverbs. For example, a change in how you make the sign for "to be red" turns it into "to become red". The Klima and Bellungi book above has more of this kind of thing.

(5) There's also the ASL classifier system, which provides a concise way of using the relative position and motion of hands to indicate the relative position and motion of objects in physical or metaphorical space. I once saw a lecture at which a woman very eloquently used this to describe herself advancing through all four years of her college education while a friend of hers kept repeating her "prep" year. (Gallaudet has a pre-freshman year for students who, thanks to the ocean of suck that is the American deaf-ed system, don't arrive with adequate college preparation.)

There have been over thirty years of serious linguistic research into ASL, and judging from the references, these jokers didn't do more than strip-mine it for a list of handshapes. AAARRRGGGHH!
If it's not authentic, I would still find value in the dramatic performance. Great acting, if that's all it is.
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Not all of us are good at finding the right partner. Some of us wait for a very long time and look around to see whether someone fits our preferences and taste. We hesitate for too long to approach even when we come across that ‘Mr. Right” or “Ms. Right”. One of the main reasons why most of us hesitate to approach the other person and strike a conversation is the fear of failure and fear of disappointment.
Two advertising agencies buying Pabst Blue Ribbon through crowdsourcing
I'm sure there's some sort of methodology employed (eg average time from first patent filing commercial application of something to military ubiquity) but it does sound rather like the sort of claims that pseudoscientists make.

I'd guess we'll see this between 2018-2025. The necessary technology is mostly here, the main obstacles to implementation are ethical and political. I would prefer not to see autonomous weapon platforms at all, but suspect that the tactical advantage they confer will be too great to ignore, especially when set against the lives of service personnel (of the side with the technology ready to go).
I thought it is confusing when it says "column segment lands," because I thought a column would show up and land. But you mean when you form a column right?
Or just hire a designer.
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Dramatic? I wouldn't put it past Balmer at all, it's in line with his generally disturbing behaviour.
I'm using Slicehost right now at $20/mo, but I did calculations, and if you pay for what you use on Rackspace cloud (and assuming you use almost nothing), Rackspace cloud comes out less than $20 per month. I'd be switching over if I weren't so damn lazy.
Does anyone else think the ranking algorithm should put additional weight to comments than it currently does?

Increasingly I see stories with a lot of upvotes and few to no comments. Big downer for me--I tend to get as much if not more from the discussions than the story itself. If a story isn't provoking discussion(relative to the upvotes), that should be a notch against it.
Appreciated.
Not a whole lot of those doing groundbreaking work in the field. And there aren't many interested laymen. On the whole, it seems unlikely to cause any measurable harm to the future if said laymen cannot read academic papers for free.
Based on how I, like, hear many people, like, talking, I'm, like, not so sure it's, like, inevitable.
Wow, that was really fun. The description doesn't accurately describe the behavior of the game though, or rather maybe they could be more clear. For instance:

When any square lands, it shrinks all squares below it and in the same row segment.
-> actually, it only shrinks contiguous squares in the same row (of course, now that I re-read it, maybe that's what you meant by "row segment")

That being said, I played that game for 5-10 minutes before remembering that it was an "Ask HN" and that I should come back here and provide feedback ;-) Bookmarked!
I think you make many valid points. Get user feedback, whether by asking or by doing a/b tests or whatever, is definitely the surest way to know if your copy is effective.

Still, I think that getting feedback from your peers can be helpful. Your peers can answer basic questions like, "Does this writing make sense?" and "Is it interesting or boring?" They can also offer suggestions, like "Try speaking to the users emotions rather than simply stating what your product does."

I think it would also be useful to get feedback when it's time sensitive. For example, I'd like to get feedback on the copy of my iPhone app before actually releasing it, since most app sales occur within the first 6 weeks of release. Getting feedback beforehand seems like it would be useful.

I also want to clarify that my intention is not just to share marketing copy for feedback, but also blog posts of any kind - technical, personal, whatever. (Unfortunately I can't update the original post to specify this). In those cases I imagine discussion wouldn't revolve around marketing, but just around writing.

Thanks again for your feedback!
There is no "Real Indian". What you have is a collection of anecdotal evidence, personal experiences and consequent prejudices.

This Indian feels no shame in saying "I don't know".
There is a difference if we agree on our frame of reference, ie: what religion / culture / time and place we are drawing our definitions of good and evil from. But given that a piece of open source software is put out there for everyone from any point and time here on forward it's nearly a given that at some point a user is going to evaluate their actions in a different frame of reference and do something that you view as evil and they view as good.
Generation ADD

I don't know what NJ is like, but come to SF. You won't see an eyeball for months ... unless you wear an iphone on your face.
a hacker who dabbles in IT, will never be as competent as an expert.

And bringing in an IT founder early on, is a waste of equity, since you are giving away a farm when the guy has nothing to do. + all that tuning etc, only matters when you are bringing in a ton of traffic, until then it doesn't matter if your server is 94% efficient or 97%. Worst case scenario, you throw another server into the mix.
> It is based not on sources, but extrapolation of current trends and an attempt at reading the market (...)

Clearly the author is unfamiliar with how Apple operates.

Also, the "3G" in the current iPhone models represents the cell network generation, not the phone generation.
I actually disagree. A high upvote to comment ratio is usually indicative of a great link.
Oddly, I tend to get the opposite impression: If a lot of people voted a story up, yet few people felt the need to add something, complain about it, ask questions, &c., it suggests that it's something both very interesting and high quality.

Conversely, few upvotes and lots of comments seems like a warning sign about the article.
The Arc Challenge in Ruby
As much as I'd like to see open access to ACM and other journals, I wonder how much it would benefit anyone? Surely almost everyone doing that work has a subscription. If not an outright membership, at least the University library will get them the articles.
It's almost as valid to say that we'll be fighting sentient robots in hand-to-hand combat in a post-apocalyptic world in 2047.

Hey, perhaps those are the decision-making drones they were talking about!
What's your sister's Skype username?

I kid, I kid. I've been sending my writing to a few friends as well and that's been useful. However, I'd like it to be a reciprocal activity, as I'm quite happy to read other people's work and comment on it. I also think it'd be nice to, in a way, work together with fellow HN folks for an extended period of time.
Something like stack overflow is not what I would desire. It's simply too large, whereas I'd rather "work" with a smallish group of people. Or perhaps have multiple groups of people, and mix up the groups periodically.
It's already being implemented in the US: Interstate 35W south of Minneapolis has variable pricing with a target speed of 50 mph.

Public transit, carpools, and motorcyclists are all able to use the lane for free.

Video about the system at http://www.dot.state.mn.us/upa/animation/UPA_video.html
If you're interested please email me (my email's on my profile). Once it looks like the thread's quieted down I'll send out an email to everyone. Thanks!
Actually,

I think Ray Kurweil has a good point in saying that every technical specialist has trouble extrapolating for the increase in the power of the tools that the specialty will soon be working with. That applies to programmers as much as other engineers.

When programmers start working with a machine having the level of complexity of the human brain itself, our present ideas about the difficulty of human-equivalent AI may turn out to entirely erroneous. After all, we certainly don't have such a machine to practice on today.
With a 60 second TTL I see most traffic drop off within 5 minutes, and almost all of it gone within 30 minutes. There's a few stragglers who seem to still be there even an hour after the switch, but by and large DNS TTL does work.
No, actually. The Arc libraries were written to make general-purpose web apps. I didn't propose the challenge till after the first version of Arc was released. And the way I chose the problem was to think of the simplest stateful web app I could. If this isn't the hello world of stateful web apps, what is?

There's nothing about this problem that's biased towards Arc's strengths. Take input from a form and print it on the next page. Every popular language already had libraries for such basic things.

I suppose Arc was designed to win this contest in the sense that Arc is designed to make programs short, and winning in this contest is measured by brevity. Is that what you meant?