skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"We are disagreeing about the merit of the parent making all the decisions about what the kid is allowed to watch."

We are? OK, I guess that's something to think about. I kinda think it's part of a parents job to decide what young children see and hear. Hard core pornography, extreme violence, cultist propaganda of most kinds, and various forms of hate speech, all fall into the category of "things young children shouldn't have to figure out yet", for me. They'll see/hear it all when they get a little older, and that's OK, but we're talking about the Veggie Tales age group: 3-5 years old, or so.
Youtube may have competition.
How close were they in your network? I'm curious what your line was. Did you mention your mutual contact? Or was there some kind of shared interest?
Google, Microsoft may be eyeing Digg.com
Poll: What's your favourite Browser
I love firefox. Lately I've been using Firefox 3, also when I'm designing I use Opera a lot because in my experience if Opera displays it right, then it's well coded.
Firefox 2
Firefox 3
Konqueror
Internet Explorer 6 (just kidding)
Internet Exlplorer 7
IEs4Linux
Netscape
I'm going to start with Firefox 2, because of all the great plugins.
The only things I really have to do to feel at home in a Gnome desktop:

1. Fool with the mouse movement and screen resolution settings.
2. Set shortcuts for "Show the panel run application dialogue" and "Run a terminal". I use Shift+Win and Shift+Tab for those, respectively.

Once I've done that, I almost never have to use the mouse for non-browsing tasks. I could probably improve on that by changing out the window manager for a keyboard-friendly one, but I'd have to learn something new, and I'd have to maintain the wm setup instead of riding along with whatever the distro wants to do (which is far less likely to break)
Solar Synergy
EU regulators appear likely to approve Google-DoubleClick merger.
Prayer before decision making... not in place of decision making. What you are saying is a lot like saying you want to pray food into your stomach. It just isn't going to happen. You have to take action but are you going take your action in the context of the "world" (world tells him he does not have the skills to run such a large company) or do you take action in prayer (the world says one thing, but look at what has been created, you are not so bad as you think you are).

He listend to what the world was telling him and his creation was taken away from him. He put his company into the hands of people who didn't care what happened, it was there "job" and they would go out and get another "job" when this job was done.
That's a great list, right now I' trying Avant Window Navigator, I'll just add Exaile! for music, Geany and Bluefish editors for coding and of course The Gimp.
Couldn't resist this one (sorry!):
http://www.toondoo.com/View.toon?param=182598
The business applications of such aircraft will be far more valuable than the military applications.
English is my favorite novel language, but I didn't have much time for reading fiction in school. ;)
Firefox 3 for me... almost all of the FF2 plugins work if you force them to and it's so fast. The nightly builds are better than the point releases.
Here's some example code in Python for talking to the GTalk servers to other GTalk-supported emails other than @gmail.com and @googlemail.com:
http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/618

If you're connecting to talk.google.com to send the messages, you should be able to send to any logged-in user address. This feature is really important for our teams to use this tool.

So far it's very cool, though. Keep up the good work!
OmniWeb (Mac only). :)

It uses the WebKit (Safari) engine, so it is great at rendering.

Its preferences are very smart...one of my favorites is "block images matching known ad sizes". Preferences can be saved per-site, nice for cookie management. OmniWeb also lets you create a list of regexes for things to always load and things to never load, e.g. files from known ad servers.

It has some unique features too. For example, you can "yank" any text field from a web page into its own window, at which point you can make it as big as you want. Also, its tabs show miniature web pages.

The "downside" (if you can call it that) is that the browser isn't free. But it is cheap at $15, and for something I use 100 times a day I figure I can afford it.
tar's specialty was writing archives directly to tape (Tape ARchive) and minimizing tape-seeks as much as possible. Yeah, it's a pretty old program.
Ask YC: Any hackers here ever in an online coding competition?
If you've used Top Coder or submitted in the obfuscated code contests, what's been your experience? Do you see value in these as a mark of a good hacker?

Would you be more likely to hire someone who did well in these?
Python ranking top on LinuxJournal Readers' Choice
vote 1 for konqueror... it's plain shit, but at least uses little ram and cpu. in my old pc, I can't stand to use firefox 2. Haven't tried firefox 3 however
An out-of-left-field option, if your goal is only to make some money working with ML: go into independent game design and create a game around a ML system.

It's not something mainstream gaming would be interested in using because the goals are different - there the development process is enslaved to some well-defined intellectual property, and (with rare exceptions) does not roam freely enough to allow more than a "good-enough AI opponent" - but if you developed a concept and brought it to market yourself, making sure that the result is fun to play and easy to learn, as well as a good use of tech, you have a shot at a decent revenue stream. Probably not enough to live on, but the beauty of independent gaming is that you can keep revising and expanding on an innovative concept, gradually growing your own market over a period of many years.
Pandora's (http://www.pandora.com) is pretty cool to run in the background. I've discovered lots of new music through the site..
I find trance excellent for coding. It's relaxing yet energizing, and not distracting.
Basically any topic where you know what hypothesis look like, and there is lots of data floating around.

Medical diagnosis is an area where ML should be used, but isn't. It's been discovered that a decision tree beats a cardiologist for heart attack triage, but no one will touch it (1). In research, it is often used to discover genetic regulatory networks, and other such things. Basically, ML is replacing what would be a boring job for a grad student.

Also look at marketing. Thanks to their ML systems, Walmart knows that people buy poptarts to prepare for a hurricane.

(1) If a cardiologist kills 10/1000 people due to human error (whoops, forgot the aspirin), it happens. If a computer program kills 5/1000 people due to classification error it's 5 lawsuits waiting to happen, provided you can find a cardiologist to say "In hindsight, I would have gotten that right."
No, no they didnt
"Sometimes, music with lyrics in the language I'm learning"

I assume you don't mean programming language? If that's what you did mean, where can I get music with lyrics in Python, Lisp, etc?
I met a guy at a university commercialization seminar that was trying to make ML/decision tree stuff for medical diagnoses and such. I don't think he was thinking of triage but much more basic decisions. I hope he got some funding, but this was also in Pittsburgh.
The primary reason they have success is that they are really really good at marketing.

This discussion is a good example - here we are talking about them, and probably referring a few users to them in the process.
Every Piece of Startup Advice is a Lie
Startup:  How to keep costs down in early days
6 tips
Seconded. Open source it?
I would fight anyone, verbally, fists, or pistols at dawn claiming that Steve Jobs is not arrogant.

Not here though, it'll be fun to write but boring to read.
I kinda think it's part of a parents job to decide what young children see and hear.

Yeah, that is the thing I've been disagreeing about.

I don't think "stuff the parent thinks is good/bad" is a reasonable criterion for what a child gets to see or not. It should be the child's decision, with advice from his parent.

The fundamental issue is that if you can't persuade someone of your ideas, that is a bad reason to force him. If your child wants to see a religious video despite your advice, then he should see it. If it's full of dumb ideas it won't be very persuasive anyway, right? Certainly not more persuasive than the wise parent..?
I think the primary difference between arrogance and self-confidence is success.
My old lead-hacker was in a few.

Got disqualified in one too because they didn't believe he had built the stuff himself in the allotted timeframe :-(
First I change some of the default global shortcuts. I'm used to ctrl-esc popping up the general menu. (A habit I acquired from WinXP). I also remove any desktop image and setup four desktops, each a primary-ish color. I then select a fairly minimalist theme to reduce wasted chrome space.

I also give common menu items numeric or unique leading characters so that I can navigate the main program menu more easily without a mouse.

I have some shortcuts for popping up gvim with my One Big File of notes, and another for bringing up /tmp/crap.txt for scratch space.

I adjust the icons, systray, etc to use minimal space ( though I don't care for show/hide task bars; I prefer to always see it). I set it so that I only see the aps assigned to current desktop.

I think the biggest souping comes from a collection of command line scripts I've assembled to automate various this. Basically, if I don't have a super-direct keyboard shortcut for something then I have a Ruby script to make it happen.

Assorted apps I add in: Mercurial, Gimpshop, gvim, ruby built from source, VMware server, Firefox with 2-dozen add-ons, Pidgen, kvirc, Picassa, Inkscape, and the Gnome terminal (though I use Kubuntu).
This guy is a genius; if you haven't seen his talk on human computation (which explains some of this stuff in more depth) I highly recommend it:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143
many thanks, these are good ideas and your examples are awesome
How do you give a three or four year old decision making power with regards to the media they consume? Buy some DVDs and let them pick the ones with the best cover?
how about an online "hot-or-not" type of game for docs where you are given the same diagnostic information that would be given to a cardiologist and you can see if you can beat the decision tree?

I think someone made something like this not too long ago for stock prices vs. random walks..
>Besides, what does an "MIT-caliber mind" need growing up?

Forget about growing up. At age 17, they need someone to walk them through the college admissions game. Most poor/middle class folks don't have that.

When I applied to college, I figured it was grades and SAT's. I didn't have anyone to tell me to engage in activities to fit the admission's office checkboxes (i.e., "leadership experience" or "community service" looks better than "programmer at a .com"). No one told me that "ambitious, will try to graduate college early" doesn't make admissions officers happy.

Overall I'm quite happy where I wound up. But admissions coaching would have helped if I were rich enough to have it.
I'll second that. My suggestions are: American Beauty, Atonement, Braveheart, Gladiator, Lord of the Rings I II III, Meet Joe Black, Requiem for a Dream, The Last Samurai, and There Will Be Blood.
If you could mount a powerful cell phone repeater it would be more valuable than an Aerostat as whenever a cell tower is taken down, you simply need to fly one or more over an area to cover it.

They might even be a cheaper more efficient way of covering densely populated areas than paying exorbitant land fees and the constant battle to get them placed. I really don't see how a plane that can fly for 5 years wouldn't benefit the Cellular industry.

It would also help wildlife studies. I mean simply program one to follow a high density of radio transmitters, and tag as many birds as humanly possible before they migrate and then you've got perminant tracking and monitoring of the birds flight positions. The plane could be equipped to transmit the locations through a satellite telephone link or other such device.

I'm sure there are thousands of uses. Terrain mapping, you just strap a camera to the bottom and GPS and you could have it build up a high detailed map of an area. I mean it would be a lot more useful for any industry that requires land surveys as getting a high detailed map with a wide angled lense would allow you to build up a topological map.

Hell you might even be able to spot useful resources, or really anything visible from altitude. Police could use it to find recent graves with infrared and optical sensors and it'd be cheaper and faster in open areas than using people.

As I write this I realise the list is literally nearly endless, so I think I'll save myself the time and STFU now before I get carpel tunnel!
I won the solo division for the Rails Rumble a few months ago. For me, the most valuable part of the competition was how inspirational it turned out to be. Seeing how much was accomplished under severe constraints (48 hours, max 4 people per team) shed new light on all my other development efforts.

I imagine that people who do well at such competitions would be better hires, but that would be due to other factors - passion for coding, good time management skills, etc. I doubt it's a major difference, though.
s/^(.*)$/\1\?/
Was he using v's, y's, d's, and p's?
Its probably more than just a general UI tweak, but I would definitely recommend switching window managers/desktop environs from Gnome to Ion3. Its made to be navigable with only the keyboard(you can use the mouse, but you don't need it). I find it makes me a lot more productive - makes switching between lots of windows very easy.
Looks like a misguided reaction to their rhetoric, and the related design strategy of not attempting to please everyone.
I listen to a lot of Pandora... but recently, I realized that iTunes has radio stations built in. A really good trance station is Electronic -> ABF Underground.
This is cool, but how much pays for EC2 and how monitze his site?
Do You Memorialize Failure?
Is that url your page?
How to cool down your MacBook Pro (really!)
> If you want to be in a research type position, you'll need a PhD in CS with a dissertation on ML.

Comp Bio works fine too. Same difference.
Sebastian Seung's research group at MIT is using machine learning to automatically segment the profiles of sectioned axons and dendrites in electron microscopical images of 60 nm serial sections. A very hard problem, and currently in high demand among neuroscience labs.

The purpose: to reconstruct all neuronal connections of a piece of brain tissue.

http://hebb.mit.edu/
Most of my practical advice is nothing too special. You could get video previews for some shows, or get descriptions or read reviews and explain what it's about to child and see if he likes the sound of it. You can offer to get more of the same kind as something he likes. Parents already do these things at least sometimes.

What parents don't generally do is have an attitude of trying to get whatever their child likes. They do that "within reasonable limits". Reasonable being a matter of their own judgment. They have preconceived ideas about what shows are bad, and try to avoid their child finding out about them instead of refuting the bad ideas. They fear "bad influences", instead of thinking that the worse an idea is, the less persuasive it is.

One consequence of this attitude is that sometimes children want something, and their parents refuse, supposedly for the child's own good, and the child gets upset. Plenty of parents would, if their kid saw an episode of Veggie Tales (or whatever) and liked and repeated some ideas from it, say "omg the evil christians are polluting his mind" and forbid him from seeing the second episode that he's looking forward to. That's the wrong approach. Keeping people ignorant of ideas you think are bad is not the path to the truth.
yep pyweek.org mostly
enya
If the coders for 37signals are arrogant then they are automatically on my good-list. For better or for worse, I have come to see that it is these arrogant, idealistic, committed people who are usually the visionaries.

That said, the best of luck to them.
Opera. Though once I get some free time and get a little better at C, my secret wish is to resurrect Dillo (http://www.dillo.org/).
1. not everybody has a laptop. I have a own custom build laptop.

2. If I am joining a startup as a founder (or early employee with lots of equity), I will buy my own laptop, otherwise you are just being cheap.

3. That guy is smart. There might be legal ramification with doing personal work on work equipment. So, he wanted to keep his personal and work equipment separate (or maybe he had too much porn on his personal one, who knows).
I used to be a Camino guy, but Firefox 2 with the Vimperator plugin won me over.
no. i just found that whilst looking for ucontrol. should have made that clearer.
I buy the 3 year warranty on apple laptops and let apple deal with any problems in heat. That said, there are times when I need them to run full bore without the fan on, say when I'm mixing audio, so here is the fix...

Before you get the computer cranked up, put on shorts. Place the laptop on your bare legs with plenty of skin contact area. Now as the computer needs to dissipate heat it can send it straight into your legs where your advanced mammalian temperature control system can easily dissipate it. My G4 powerbook never turns on a fan in this configuration even saturating the CPU for long periods.

The disturbing part, is that I always expected cyborgs to come about for benefit of humans, instead I'm donating my body to serve the computer.
Not if you need to maintain any contact fields other than the (short) canned list Highrise offers. We could not use Highrise because of this. (I know nothing about Rails, but I wondered whether it might be related to their inability -- if it's not just refusal -- to add a feature that their users, judging by the forums when I was evaluating, were clamoring for.)

I was frustrated by the 37s attitude. "We don't comment on development plans" was a common refrain from their staff. So... no hints on where you're heading or whether there's any plan to add a feature I so desperately need? And the focus on simplicity over suitability to customer needs was also surprising.

"Use it or don't" seems to be their take on customer relations. It's their business and they can run it how they want and, yes, I can think of lots of rationalizations for the way they do things, but they're not a company I want to do business with. Maybe, as an earlier poster wrote, 92% of their customers are happy. I wonder how many potential customers they've lost.

Maybe it's a good thing: It leaves a place in the market for a better product, and maybe a better company.
Lots of good suggestions here. I'll just add a quick one - Ubuntu doesn't enable subpixel smoothing on fonts automatically, and if you're using LCD displays it's a nice thing to have.

You can find this option in System->Preferences->Appearance, Fonts tab.
How to get your roommates to clean up the apartment, AKA, writing text messaging apps!
Tag grouping for smarter search.
Coming Soon: Nothing Between You and Your Machine
When I'm on Windows and have 40 tabs in Firefox (with Firefox closed), I often open IE6 if I only need to look at a quick piece of information (like check my e-mail). Opening Firefox would take two minutes or more (just to load the tabs). Same goes for Opera and all the other browsers. IE is built right into Windows so it already has all the necessary components loaded.
For this last project a lot of what I listened to was the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack by Bear McCreary.
Put me down for Safari. I use WebKit nightlies which are very fast, and passes the most Acid3 tests right now. ;) The latest additions for :nth-child are a godsend and I can't wait for it to be implemented elsewhere. (No more odd/even classes!) Since I'm on an old iBook, the speed difference between Safari and Firefox is amazing. I don't know if Apple's cheating or Gecko is just unoptimized for the PowerPC.

Note that both like to eat RAM like no tomorrow. I haven't found a decent one that doesn't like 256MB+ after an hour's browsing.
to sometimes visit us in MKE. or us to visit in Chicago.
pandora FTW!

stations i created
"rabbit in the moon"
"hacker radio"
"garbage"
"fluke"

any other cool strings to create stations off of?
speaking of which i hate nautilus.

any suggestions for something better. windows explorer sucks too, but its better than nautilus and finder.
EC2 and S3 rock.

I sit on the ec2ubuntu google group
http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu

its a great group, and Eric Hammond created one of the best images i have seen yet. the original image was only ~100MB in size. Eric has done a lot of work to keep the images fast and small. He has put a number of optimizations in that few of the other public images have.

As far as loadBalancing goes, we are going with Round Robin DNS until we HAVE to move to something more compliecated.

Nettica offers some great tools for setting up Dynamic Round Robbin DNS records.

RightScale is not so much a load balancing company as it provides you with some webui stuff to manage servers. EC2 in firefox is a much better start.

WinSCP is a god send. It makes it so easy to put files on your instance. I am still trying to figure out how to either Wine install WinSCP on my Ubuntu install or to find a replacement.

if you need anything and are an ubuntu user, join the group and email me.

bandwidth between EC2 and S3 = 250Mb/s which is faster than most disks I know of. Latency is about 20ms. Accessing 2 xml files during a read/write still seems fast for the web.
Bottom Line Philanthropy
ok another question, is there a way to get tiled icons in for ubuntu's desktop? i don't like it when long filenames wrap around.

(*X indicate image data)
example

XXXXXXX Title with extension.ext

XXXXXXX file date

XXXXXXX file size
Groove Salad at SomaFm:
http://somafm.com/
Google Calendar Sync
No SeaMonkey?
Always a weapon first.

What a world it will be once Thag evolves far enough to make it a hammer before he makes it a club.
I've had that problem too. There was a competition, possibly in 2004, to win an old BBC Micro by writing a program on a BBC Micro. I wrote a program to draw a spinning tetrahedron with back face culling. I was disqualified because they thought that I'd memorised a type-it-in listing from an old magazine. I also won the 1996 IOCCC Best Layout.
The soundtracks to Batman Begins and the Battlestar Galactica mini-series are not dissimilar to that for There Will Be Blood (which I've just been to see).
Ditto with pyweek and also LD48.
"The fundamental issue is that if you can't persuade someone of your ideas, that is a bad reason to force him."

Classic. I wish I could be there the day you try to persuade a 3 year old with your ideas. Have you met any young children, ever? You'll have a cantankerous and unhappy 80-pounder on your hands in no time, as they watch crap, consume crap, and learn crap from mainstream television and movies. I'm more laissez faire than most when it comes to kids, as I was raised in a very relaxed household and I think it works out very well in encouraging independent thought, but it's just stupid to imagine that a 3 year old can make wise decisions about their consumption. They simply don't have the knowledge to make reasonable choices, and you've never had the infinite "why?" conversation if you think they do.
safari ftw

(I'd just vote but I can't.)