skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The forensic artist was not aware of the identity of the individual depicted in the photograph"

So... It could be anyone. I bet this is not the first instance a forensic artist uses some picture of someone he knows nothing about and puts it into a wanted people list.

Just imagine how hilarious would it be to be confused with a wanted terrorist (or paedophile, drug-trafficker, bank-robber, whatever) and be detained when arriving (or passing through the US), shipped somewhere to be interrogated, only to discover that was all because someone didn't find a picture in their reference picture files and pulled one from your facebook page...

I would be funny, if nobody could get hurt (or killed) for it.

A couple decades ago, a friend of mine was detained at a US airport because he had the same name a wanted Colombian drug overlord had. It took him six hours to have the Brazilian embassy confirm his identity so he could be released.

I wonder how many wanted criminals travel under their real names...
Thank you for the addition, your memory is mostly correct. I drudged out my copy of GEB, first part of Chapter X, and we're both correct. Both groups of players are given a 5-second glance at the board. If the game is a real game, the pros can assemble the board very quickly, and they do make mistakes but they're mistakes that other pros recognize as strategically invariant, while the normal people take longer (accuracy not mentioned). Given a random board, they both perform the same.

The general point is the same: the pros perceive the board differently, because they see the emergent patterns. My contention is that this is the heart of intuition (or at least an important subset of intuition).
Neat stuff - scroll clock's another fun one: http://toki-woki.net/p/scroll-clock/
Medical Slang
I'd be interested in seeing what Brian Thomas's analysis of the ecosystem is. I couldn't help but think of this article: http://everything2.com/title/Vampire+Population+Ecology as I read about the Humans and Strays co-existing with each other.
I've seen the dragon head they printed at the 26C3, and I was quite disappointed. It is still a cool toy, but not by far what I would have expected.

Still, it can only get better - I guess if you know what to expect, you can also pick things to make where the quality is adequate. Won't be printing sleek iPhone casings for now, though.
MeetingMix (YC S08) Gets Your Co-Workers To Cut To The Chase
And... They are taking forever to rotate a solid color? Like it didn't occur to them to test a desktop without a picture?

That's some QA...
He addresses the topic of "book learning" explicitly in the post.

If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough. "Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter" says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker's Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.
Did the trends for the last day help (http://thecadmus.com/assets/images/lander/image-4.png) you?

One of the problems we currently have is that if you login very often and don't have very much activity, the homepage is not very useful. Kinda like what you mentioned. We are trying different approaches to sort this problem out.

Btw, the trending topics (like Twitter) is currently in the works and should be released in the next week or so.

Thanks.
After consulting GEB, I replied to parent with corrections, we're both largely right in point but got some details wrong. The text claims the study comes from Adriaan de Groot in the 1940's, the bibliography refers to a book published in 1965 by Mouton, under the title Thought and Choice in Chess. If you can summarize the other study, I'd love to hear it.
Startup Advice for New Social Media Startups?
Does anyone else use Olmifon, Provigil, or other mind enhancement chemicals to keep the fuel going so that your startup will be successful? If so, what's your favorite "stack" of pills? Personally, I stick to 600mg of Olmies spaced with 200mg caffies every six hours. Anyway, I have an ethical dilemma and was wondering whether it's acceptable for a CEO to keep a handgun in her desk? Thanks a bunch!
You have a good point ... how is it that women having to work at outside jobs that keep them away from their kids certain to be a positive thing (a "rise")?
[Ask HN] Is clojure really a modern lisp?
It usually ends up being the lisp we point newbies towards. Wouldn't a scheme implementation like PLT-scheme or Chicken be just as good, if not even better? Clojure is too much of a moving animal to be considered newbie friendly in my opinion.

So why is Clojure considered to be a modern lisp?
...and congratulations to all those who used Microsoft development tools to build such wonderful application that cannot be made to work on anything but a specific version of IE...

I hope they now know how bad is the taste of vendor lock-in.
This argument only makes sense when you ignore the second half of what Schmitt said:

...the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

Schmitt was clearly not saying that privacy isn't important. He was simply saying that Google can't protect you from the current (shitty) US laws regarding privacy.
Hooray! Everybody's a winner!
IIRC, South Korea is absolutely dependent on IE for all banking and e-commerce. What will they do?
It's not the most scholarly thing in the world, but this Chessbase biography of de Groot suggests that where de Groot measured the distinction between novices and experts, Chase and Simon were the first to measure differences between random positions and game-like positions.

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3290
Attack targeted at US Defense Contractors is dated Jan 7th
I think it is on the top of their priority list: it's the perfect thing to introduce along with the tablet. "Our new Multitouch store is stocked with apps that are hand-tuned for your fingers, but will still work great on your iMac or Macbook."
Ask HN: Get together in Tokyo?
I know there are quite a few Tokyo hackers on this mailing list; anyone interested in getting together? I've met some interesting people in town (mostly through Tokyo Hackerspace and the Tokyo 2600 events), but I rarely meet software people who aren't trying to sell something to me.
Clojure has all the properties of a modern lisp. It compiles into java bytecode and keeps data and code separate. This is not possible to do with the .NET CLR bytecode representation because of the way it handles unsafe pointers, but it should be corrected in the next edition of LLVM.
Inbox Unicorns With Gmail & IMAP
Blipr: The Story of an iPhone App
An online community that started 50 years ago: PLATO
Supply and Demand in Real Estate / Best time to sell a house
During the winter months I am often asked by clients, when is the best time to sell. When they ask the question, they are expecting to hear what is commonly believed to be the spring. There are two reasons people commonly believe this. The first relates to children in school and the anticipation of a closing date in the summer months. While this reason still remains true, our mass population ( the baby boomer's ) no long have that concern.
The Nexus One does not appeal to all types of users. I know people who would much prefer the Droid.

> Why?

Because some people out there have just got to type with their thumbs on a physical keyboard. Others swear by Verizon.
I have to say, I am quite skeptical of that "we." There's a small media feeding frenzy every time there's any kind of "security" hubbub, but how many normal people actually support these measures after reading accounts of them? How many would support them if the media climate were more levelheaded? Precious few, I suspect.

(Based purely on my anecdata talking to friends and family, it's 0%, but I'm sure there's a minority of folks around who really do support such things.)

Look at the recent "underwear bomber" escapade. There, we had much more credible circumstantial evidence pointing at the suspect in advance (e.g. the dad's phone call about him.) That is a hundred times more damning than this Twitter post -- although still not terribly damning, if you ask me -- and yet, he flew. Was there some great popular outrage that we didn't catch him in advance of his flight? Not as far as I can tell; mostly, there was a great CNN and op-ed outrage.
"He said that the attack came in the form of an e-mail with a PDF attachment containing a “Trojan” virus."

Seems a bit paranoid to make the fuss about that; politics, I suppose. Or maybe there's more than they're saying - which seems quite likely.
Australian Govt issues IE security warning
http://www.ssoalertservice.net.au/view/3bd184c173a3c4e4520bfbe521321216
Live Broadcast Spy Store: Open 24/7/365 (888) 344-3742 or (1818)
HarperCollins in talks with Apple for eBook publishing on its upcoming tablet
That's not surprising, since MakerBot founder Zach Smith is a RepRap contributor and also runs the RepRap Research Foundation (http://www.rrrf.org/). MakerBot's fabricators are based on RepRap designs and software, and they also sell RepRap parts in their store.

The two projects still contribute code and ideas to each other, for example: http://blog.reprap.org/2009/08/one-of-my-partners-at-makerbo....
Unfortunately decimals seem to be harder for computers than people :)

http://screencast.com/t/ZjUwOWRl
Their BOM is open source so you could figure it out with a little Sparkfun sleuthing. In any case I would guess they are at least ramen profitable.
Kyburz - isn't that a name from Bioshock? Didn't even realize that was a shoutout :)

Thanks for the firm kick in the ass - I've noticed that I've been getting to work at 9, leaving at 6-7pm for a while now with alarming regularity. For some time I wrote this off as part of the job (I get paid a pretty sum for it I suppose), but it bothers me more and more.

Do you have any advice (aside from "quit your job!" which I'm well aware of) for getting one's work/life balance back in order?
LG shows off flexible e-Ink newspaper
Oh, that stinks! In Firefox on Mac OS X I don't hear a click. I'm not sure I would've posted this site if I heard clicks!
You're kidding right? In the article it says the guy sent the message to the wrong number and the recipient called the police.
The selection for intelligence is appealing, but the low rate of reproduction impedes evolution. Although breeding by-design is probably a more effective selector, we don't breed for intelligence in a community of dogs nor for the inter-pack relationships, and intelligence is more effective in communities.
I'd like to get together the next time in Tokyo on startup business. Drop me a line on my google voice! I promise I won't try to sell you anything! Thanks a bunch!

Sincerely,
StartupGRrL
The only thing I would challenge is the comparison to the speed of development in computer hardware/web apps. PC's have been a multi-billion dollar business with hundreds of million in investment since the Apple II. 3D printers are still a niche r&D tool 20 years after their invention. For instance 3D systems, the #2 player in the market only spent $8MM on R&D last year. Assuming the 4 majors did the same it is still under $40MM. More has been spent on real time web R&D this year.

That said, I hope the pace increases.
Chromium Dev Tools
The Google Chrome Developer Tools help you to diagnose and fix load, execution, and layout problems in your web pages and apps. The tools can also help you to make sure your web page or app uses the minimum possible CPU and memory resources.
I'm about 6 months into my Seattle stint (not at Microsoft), and I'm already loathing this city. It's sleepy, but not in the charming beach-side small town kind of way, in the lazy "I'm too arsed to go out, ever" way. There's no energy anywhere around here, which is a far cry from any other city I've had the pleasure of living in.

Was the environment - Seattle/Kirkland/Redmond/Bellevue a major factor in choosing to leave?
I agree, there's not really anything I haven't already seen elsewhere in this argument. Ultimately, the iPhone's target audience isn't computer geeks who care about open platforms and robust architectures. Consumers love it because it's the right combination of useful tool, conversation piece and status symbol. I think that this is all it really needs to be dominant for the time being.
The bet uses of it I've seen have been related to projects where aesthetics didn't matter much. ex. I know a student who used it to prototype chassis for a robotics class. The MakerBot let him quickly and cheaply iterate his design and the final finish didn't really matter. You are right that the action figure market has nothing to fear in the short term.
I find both Google and searchyc useful. When one doesn't find what I'm looking for, the other usually does.
Shouldn't the judge of evergreen-ness be from the reader, and not the author? If it really is timeless, people will come back and link to it again and again. I see the Norvig posts on learning to program in 10 years come up again and again here.

It sounds like if you wrote books instead of blog posts, you'd rip the covers off so readers can't judge it by its cover.
Why am I being presented with raw fish?
Perhaps because it is a modern lisp. I am not sure why anyone would direct newbs towards it since it is as you mention in flux. Though it seems like it should settle down some since it had its 1.0 release.
That's a common sentiment among the Microsoft alumni I've talked to:

"Ambivalent about the company, loved my team, left at the right time."

I wonder if that's something specific to Microsoft-ish big companies, or common among people that decide to leave any job?
I assume this isn't integrated with iTunes, right?
Book Online at discounted rates with itacare.travel
AS3IsoLib Tutorial Series - Moving Boxes
true. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/01/18/1623248/Google-Inves...

here's the follow up on that line of thought.
> Why would HTC and Motorola follow the Nexus? What's in it for them?

Considering HTC makes the Nexus, I think it's pretty clear what's in it for them. :-)
Congrats on the launch guys! Getting everyone on the meeting team to buy into using this tool is key. I had pretty good success with using Etherpad for this purpose - found less resistance to using it since it was dead simple.
I can't get enough of these types of blog posts. The app store is a fascinating study of marketing, economics and good ol' bootstrapping. Good luck in your endeavors and thanks for sharing.
There's no timespan class?
Why rip covers off when I can instead obsessively A/B test them and remove elements that hurt the business value of the IP I spent so much work creating, like dates?

Here's the fundamental difference between me-as-employee and me-as-businessman: I will get paid for my labor of January 19th on February 30th, and will never see another penny of it even if what I do today has lasting value. What I do after I get home, though, I get paid for every year if it has lasting value. I will not cheat myself out of that lasting value by setting an auto-expires header on it.
I wish I could comment on those pages.
That doesn't exactly qualify. It was a commune and not a national level Communist Government. Since it was formed within the United States it's members were protected by the laws of a Republic which prevented those very Human Rights abuses.
Even second place in the cell phone market is not a bad chunk of change. Everyone keeps talking about whether or not Android will beat iPhone. They seem to be ignoring the fact that there are still a lot of $$$ being spent on other smartphones (WinMo, BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm, etc). Even if Android never beats iPhone, there's still a lot of users and a lot of money for them to hoover up.
Ask HN: What should you do ?
Time and again you get such questions! I was working on a feasibility and use case of an indea since past 2 months, fighting with myself if it was valid problem and people would use it. I see today 2 startups have popped up. Should I just discard the idea or should I still go ahead ?
> Hint: it's not about evolution, or cosmology. It's about respect for the scientific process.

I agree completely. What part of ghosts, yoga as spiritual, etc do you see as respecting the scientific process?

> (The US is actually a rather startling exception, if you look at a graph of popular religiosity versus any number of metrics of a healthy, successful society.)

You're assuming that religiousity taints all. It didn't have that effect on Knuth (who is extremely religious).

That's why I pointed out that not believing in evolution or "old earth" isn't necessarily a handicap. You can argue that it is, but then you get to explain Knuth and deal with ghosters and the like. (Surely you're not going to argue that creation and new earth are the only misbeliefs that matter.)

>> Ah yes, the folks who think that fire can't melt steel....

> WTF...?

A significant fraction of "the reality based community" consists of "truthers". One of their core beliefs is that 9/11 didn't happen the way it looked like it happened is because the planes "just" spread fire through the world trade center. However, they insist that something else took the buildings down because "fire doesn't melt steel". (They apparently don't know that different things burn at different temperatures and melt isn't necessary.)

> Gonna call "citation needed" on that.

You don't think that ghosters participate in the body politic?
My pleasure. We initially sold the app for $1.99, subsequently lowered the price to $0.99 and eventually gave it away for free in hopes of building the user base then charging. We also hoped it would grow virally but that didn't really happen. It's still free right now.
TOO MANY QUESTIONS! NO JOB FOR YOU! =)
Such directories don't do enough for users, which is why they do not get as much attention as the iPhone App Store.

From the article:

What if Apple did an App Store for Mac software?
I doubt they’d actually do it. Apple loves control and there’s no way that they can have total control over Mac software sales since the current distribution and sales methods are in place and well established.

Apple could release new SDKs for other kinds of machines, which require software distribution through an App Store. This would give them control over such a market.

I think this may well happen. The "Apple Tablet" would be a great platform to get this started. Having such a walled garden would seem great from the non computer-savvy end user's point of view. The user pays an "Apple Tax" and the government polices everything and keeps things clean and safe. As it was and still is (not as much) in the freewheeling "wild west" of the online world, if one doesn't have certain skills, one is a second-class citizen at the mercy of the more skilled individuals. In such a walled garden world, the "law abiding taxpayer" would be the one catered to, and those special skilled individuals become the outlaws. (Or become civil servants and use their skills at the behest of the government.)

For better or for worse, I think that this is actually what a lot of the less sophisticated computer users want! (Witness Linux distros like Xandros.) It's also in Apple's DNA -- getting people to pony up for a well-tended, smoother experience.
You're not thinking long-term enough. When 3D TVs come out (as they inevitably will, if not in a decade, in many decades time) there will be a wave of Avatar box-set nostalgia.
"In sum, the value of empiricism lies in finding the right axioms. If you discover "empirical evidence" that a theorem is wrong, you must either propose a change in the axioms or find a flaw in the proof. Contemporary economists often appear to do neither."

That's not how the real sciences work, though--physics doesn't operate through axioms and theorems, it establishes a few theories and as long as they hold within experimental error, they don't complain too much. When they stop holding, we either postulate extra "stuff" we don't directly observe (most of the outlying planets as well as the Kuiper belt were discovered by measuring their gravitational effects on planets we could directly observe) or use a more refined theory on the edge cases (Mercury's orbit). But all the while physics gathers more and more empirical data, and spends a lot of time trying to make sense of it.

"When I read the Austrian argument that any fixed amount of money-stuff (e.g., gold) is sufficient for exchange, I understand the axioms, follows the steps, and accept the conclusion. When I read the Keynesian arguments for the benefits of monetary expansion and "fiscal stimulus", I see---great clouds of fog."

The other problem I find is that most armchair Austrians take their entire economic understanding from an 80 year old dispute and have no conception of what's happened in the field ever since. Keynes is a dead old man and the field of economics has moved on from his work.

Incidentally, even if you just take the approach of pure reason, it's still pretty fucking easy to debunk the idea of the gold standard.

"Apparently, these restaurant managers are too stupid to realize they're allowed to pay above the current minimum wage, thereby getting those lazy teens off their couches to fill the vacancies without a minimum wage hike. Truly, it boggles the mind.)"

And here you see one of the biggest problems with the field of economics in general, a problem that's only been tackled in recent decades--modeling how actual human beings behave in the real world rather than supposing that each economic actor is fully informed, perfectly rational, and perfectly self-interested. How many 16 year old kids would know whether or not Burger King paid above minimum wage? Of course Burger King only pays minimum wage. It's a cultural expectation. The same thinking applies to the manager--is a fast food manager really going to be fully informed, perfectly rational, and perfectly self-interested? For the most part, his job consists of executing a manual written at the corporate headquarters in a different state which dictates that crew are paid local minimum wage, and quite frankly, the corporate overhead of rewriting the corporate manual to allow wage adjustments to recruit people to work at a fucking Jack in the Box isn't justified.
I don't think it would work. Conan is a funny guy but almost all his comedy is based on mainstream popular culture punchline. On the Internet you're dealing with an audience who has largely turned away from the mainstream spoon fed world to search out their own interests. He would have to drastically revamp his routine because, chances are, most of that mainstream spoon fed audience is going to watch whatever is on broadcast TV at 11:35. This nicely explains the success of people like Jay Leno and David Letterman who haven't delivered a new joke in the last decade that didn't involve simply updating names/places/event to fit their classic routine of pop culture humor. It's not quite the same as the silent film era stars who couldn't make it in talkies but I don't think it's entirely different either. It's just a different skill set and a big transition to make for someone who's been doing basically the same exact show every night for 15 years.