skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You seem to be putting words in warfangle's mouth, then criticizing those words. Nowhere does warfangle even remotely propose the logic you are describing. It is clear that warfangle is in fact getting the information about the treaty from what has leaked about it.

Assuming the leaks are true, we do not need to speculate that it may be underhanded because it is being negotiated in secret. We can be as confident as we are in the veracity of the leaks that they are being underhanded because of the content of the treaty.

Secrecy is an irrelevant point. If this treaty was produced in an open and transparent manner I would still agree with warfangle that the treaty is unjust and in the US, unconstitutional.

Are you aware that details have been leaked? It sort of sounds like you may not be aware that while to some extent we are still speculating on the contents, it is well-founded speculation, not wild speculation.
The bank account information is valued at $10.00 to $1,000 per account.

What can hackers do with your, say, checking account info (name and account number, I'm assuming)? Are you liable for any hacker-related losses, if you've done nothing wrong?
Schneier: U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google
> Seriously, GCC existed since like ever

Absolutely, I remember using the GCC tools way back when. Not disputing that. But there are certainly older (and arguably better) compilers. And there will be newer ones (like the upcoming LLVM setup). GCC does not hold a monopoly on converting and optimizing high-level language constructs into localized machine code.

> My personal setup could be called Gnome/Xorg/GNU/Linux

Which is fine. Either call it "Linux" or call it a string of alphabet soup if you like.

My problem with RMS is his insistence on only GNU/Linux. Which is absolutely disrespectful to the hard work Linus and others put into the Kernel, which RMS and the GNU foundation was unable to accomplish, and to the folks who've written numerous other things that are the bread and butter of what many people think Linux boxen are for - like the Apache Foundation or XFree86/X.org or the KDE folks or Sun or the various thousands of volunteers that have toiled away writing drivers or firmware or whatever...It's a great exemplar of near infinite hubris to insist it be "GNU" (first) / Linux.

From wikipedia (and I've seen similar quote from him over the years) "Stallman argues that not using "GNU" in the name of the operating system unfairly disparages the value of the GNU project..."

It's unfortunate that he doesn't understand co-opting the work of others under your own umbrella is what's disparaging the GNU project's name. I don't think anybody who is marginally familiar with the topic thinks that the GNU foundation isn't an important thing. But do I have to stick GNU on the front of anything I build out of GNU stuff? What if I decide to write a cookbook about French Cooking? Do I have to call it the "Houghton Mifflin/French Tarts for Tarty People" since Houghton Mifflin published Julia Child's books which I used to learn the French culinary arts?

That's silliness.

Linus happily acknowledges the role the Foundation has played, with very little prompting. The credit is already being granted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ugRM3-twc

But he also says

"Well, I think it's justified, but it's justified if you actually make a GNU distribution of Linux ... the same way that I think that "Red Hat Linux" is fine, or "SuSE Linux" or "Debian Linux", because if you actually make your own distribution of Linux, you get to name the thing, but calling Linux in general "GNU Linux" I think is just ridiculous."

And this same feeling is voiced by others like Jim Gettys

"There are lots of people on this bus; I don't hear a clamor of support that GNU is more essential than many of the other components; can't take a wheel away, and end up with a functional vehicle, or an engine, or the seats. I recommend you be happy we have a bus."

and other unhappy voices in the community including Eric S. Raymond,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy

It all boils down to sour grapes which the Linux Journal correctly identified in this single summary statement

"Linus got the glory for what [Stallman] wanted to do."
Stock Compensation At Startups
Never said I was a Freedom (as in "Freedom") activist like RMS.
I think RMS is restricting my freedom to put words in his mouth.
I don't really have in depth knowledge of Aspartame. Sometimes you hear this, sometimes you hear that... In any case I can't think of any compelling reason for consuming it? All in all it seems more likely that it is poisonous than not - it certainly falls into the "heavily processed food" category, they have to add other chemicals to make it stable etc?

I know lots of people drink it every day - I admit "poisonous" puts it a bit provocatively.

Edit: just looked it on on Wikipedia, this seems to be the cited article: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/104084407015161... - That talks only about cancer and the nervous system, but not about obesity (for instance).
"If piracy isn't kept to a minimum, it will eventually cannibalize the IP market"

meh, smart people will find a way to make money, even when economies shift.
This wasn't particularly funny, and I don't think it's Hacker News.

Belongs on Reddit.
400K is really only 3.5 FTE's if you assume a baseline of 50K/yr

Can you elaborate the math you're using here?
GAE has email-to-web, and afaik all major cell carriers give you email-via-text for free.
To begin with...
On The Blind Men And An Elephant
You might say the Japanese art of Aesthetics is finding
order and beauty in items and situations that most of us take for granted.
I actually think that's a great street. It's dense and walkable. It has enough splashes of color that it's not drab. The buildings are a mix of shops, offices, and apartments, so you don't need to get in your car and wait in traffic for 20 minutes to get anywhere. It may seem cluttered, but it's excellent design for a place to live -- and your eye learns to ignore the clutter in about a week or so.

And it's not all megabuildings, either. I'd wager that there's some pretty green space within easy walking distance.
Bought one today after seeing this thread to make a sleep analysis device and webapp. I am a sleep scientist and I would love to have data of sleep patterns of thousands of people. For accurate yet longer analysis we normally use a commercial product called actiwatch but, as everything in research, is very expensive ( http://tinyurl.com/yhowa64 ).
The only way we could go it alone would be with no free trial, but that's a pretty tasteless option since we're selling something that's never really existed before to a market that's going to want to play with it before they pay for it.

It's an analytics service for casual / social games and in some cases we're talking games that get millions of plays (we've got several like that in our system already) which can translate into tens of millions of events being logged, and while we've spent tons of time making everything as streamlined and cost-efficient as we can there are unavoidable expenses that might predate our ability to pay for them by ourselves.
Dammit, all I wanted to see was the site, and now I'm hooked on a new band.
There used to be Academic Hacker News ( http://hnacademic.com:40106/ ) but it mostly died from lack of activity. It's a shame.
Getting into a PhD program with a low GPA
I'm not a fan of stealth or private beta. I think the best plan is to not have a beta launch.... just start organically collecting users.

No one of significance will notice your software sucks, but when your software is good, investors, customers, and partners will notice.
Sikuli comes at the right time for me, going to use it to automate browser testing and generate reports :)
I agree that this has nothing to do with the phone or Google.
Wouldn't it make more sense to sell it to the Canadians if contiguous territory was a big issue?
It hasn't really been "stealth", it's been "controlled", it's an analytics service (not for websites) and we wanted to be sure it worked + not get raped by traffic we couldn't afford to scale for during development.
Just did with me.
Er, Flash plays H.264. They've already done that.
This is cool, but the headline looks like something written for Fark!
Smart Alarm used to work, but the latest edition simply wakes you up at the desired time every time and it runs on your phone all day.

I was happy till the latest update and now its unusable.
I ran in to all this because of some talks with other HN'ers about computing fabrics, one of the big questions is 'clocked' or 'free running'.

That brought me to post my ideas on using 'life' as a very basic computing fabric, it's already proven to be Turing complete, so now to make it run without a global clock.

That would prove that a clock-free computing fabric of arbitrary size is a real life possibility.

I think it can be done, I'm not 100% sure yet.

That adder sounds like a bit of magic, do you have a link for that?

I can picture the cpu that 'sleeps on 0', basically the transitions are what clocks it forward so as long as you keep sending it 0's it simply never changes state right? (no state changes -> minimal power consumption).
it was a sort of a joke... I don't think anyone takes me seriously when it comes to the stock market--especially after I say I don't own any stocks! :-)
editing it in now. :-)
Unfortunate because it has distorted the original idea beyond recognition. :)
A lot of people know F. J. Dyson only for Dyson "spheres" (the original conception was that of a swarm, SF modified the idea to a sphere, then shell). Though it's obvious he did a lot of other work and that the Dyson sphere was nothing as compared to what he has done. It was just a thought experiment.
Software / Operator Errors Cause Fatal Doses of Cancer Treatment Radiation
Windows 3.1 Online - With Minesweeper
I wouldn't mind reading about how you "got to work" after the launch and managed to build that traffic in about a month. Care to go into more detail, either here or on your blog?
I would collect everything an animal might want to eat, place
them in distinct piles and watch what comes around and what is eaten. You can then form a strategy based on the animals sited or just eat what they do, working up from very small
portions.
From the website:

Sleeping better
Problem:
After sleeping, you may still feel tired - you're getting poor quality sleep without realizing why.
Solution:
View a full analysis of your sleep on our Analytics Platform. You will receive personalized instructions on how to improve your sleep so you can have your best night's sleep, every night
Salary * pension * social security * payroll taxes
+ office space + heating + lighting

Normally for 'profesional' staff costs are 150-250% the salary
Darn, that looks awesome. I suspect it died from the usual "launching a small online community" problems of hitting critical mass, etc. Maybe this - or something like it - could take off given the right amount of care by a group of dedicated folks..
The Execution, Of All Things (Another App Store Personal Story)
Couldn't we model business cycles and also economic downturns / recessions also? Attempt to quantify bubbles if they possibly exist? Or would that be too computationally hard?
mostly promotions and SEO.

I'll see if I can write something up later, since it takes a while
So couldn't somebody at Paypal have a quick look at the reports from the auto-cancel?
Especially for a large long standing customer like Wikileaks?

They did this years ago after the Asian tsunami - they suspended the Red Cross's account because of a suspicous number of new donations!
Presumably, one could tell by looking for competitors with "lower" comscores.
don't worry, when you enter the working world, you might find a revived interest in video games on your time off :P
How would you model something like 9/11? There are too many random events that occur every trading day. Some are good. Some are bad. The best we can really hope for is that we notice things are going to hell before everyone else does. That allows us to get out early and save our own ass. That's the truth about the markets. The models we have help us to understand things during relatively normal times, but they are just models. You can't rely on them 100% of the time. At some point, you have to ask yourself, "Does this make sense here?"
Front-running is knowing an order is going to be inserted into an exchange's book, and sending your order before it; an example would be if a broker saw a client making a big trade and sent his order before the client's, hoping to profit when the market moved.

In most modern stock markets there is not tiered access. My order is just as good as anyone else's, and no participants are given unfair notice of another's orders. Firms can spend money and be more competitive in these markets (e.g. better analysts, faster systems, co-location), but anyone has a fair shot at competing. If an order is public, there's nothing wrong with me taking action based on it before you if my only advantage is superior technology.
I agree completely. I have found a few different artists already and have spent the entire evening on the new site.
Why Can’t the I.R.S. Help Fill in the Blanks?
It's a trade agreement that benefits US corporations.

Whose interests do you think those legislators are truly representing? Take a close look at the health care legislation process and try to find where either party's ideological goals are being represented in writing.

There's lip service being paid to helping the little guy and curtailing government, but in writing the entire discussion is laid bare as an argument over whose handouts go to whom.

And pardon me if I don't hold out hope for the Supreme Court to defend the public good from corporate interest. Their last few decisions in the general arena have been anything but reassuring.
It may be different, but it seems like the last people you want to confront with differentiation are your existing users. I wonder if the best way to release such a radical redesign would be to only default new users to the new interface. Let existing users opt-in to a radically different experience, in their own time.
Richard Dawkins: Growing up in the universe
Is there any other reason latency matters?

Let's say I have a statistical model that is able to identify and exploit statistically significant price deviations. Furthermore, let's say someone has a very similar model. If I'm able to execute my trade before my competitor, I get the profit, and he doesn't. That's one argument. There are many others.
You've just uncovered Rapleaf's business model.
I think your fears are unwarranted. Every entrepreneur seems to have these happy fears. Oh no, what if my site crashes under terrific load! What if super-VC Paul Schmaltz sees a bug in my website!

Even if you get enough traffic to knock down your server, that will just be a boon.

And it's better to get your software out there half-working and get feedback than to build something nice and have to rebuild it after you find out the average user wants something else.
I think you've convinced me. Hmmmmm...
My, that looks like a yummy slime mold!
Yes, but this discussion was about H.264 support in the <video> tag.
Ostriches gave up flying when dinosaurs died out
The public meeting was on the process of negotiating the treaty. They were quite specifically not discussing the content of the treaty, making the secret treaty still quite secret.

The rules of the US Government building aren't relevant. The meetings about the secrecy are being held in Mexico. They nearly required the attending public to sign NDAs and surrender electronics, but last minute deliberation removed those restrictions. Which suggests the ejection of a live-blogger appear quite unfounded.

The ACTA meetings themselves are being held at some other time, in an undisclosed location in Mexico.
AdultFriendFinder Filing IPO
This reminded me of the last time I saw this guy in the popular press when he said he found that dancing like Travolta from Saturday Night Fever was really attractive to women.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Lifestyle/Dance_like_Trav...
Awesome - I was just playing a JavaScript version of Lemmings: http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/. It's like I'm back in 1994 using the old '486!
Once again, are we down-voting based on disagreement?

Do I need to mention Kelo, Citizens, Exxon, Garcetti or a half-dozen other cases where public interests were given short-shrift in favor of corporate interests?

Do I need to post the entirety of the senate health care bill?
Hm, makes me think of http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2008/06/22/observation... .

It sounds... scary. Like it will work well enough at first, and then explode when someone changes their desktop theme (especially icon theme), or wants to upgrade to a new version of whatever. Treating things as change-controlled APIs when they aren't just seems dangerous. Still I guess there's at least some amount of change control coming from platform conventions and human interface guidelines, and this comes closer to operating at the correct level of abstraction to benefit from that.
Tending the Garden of Technology
Someone's already figured out a way to run Conway's Game of Life asynchronously. Check it out:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/wrapper.jsp?arnumber=10298...

I didn't read the paper carefully enough to be sure how it works, but it looks like each cell (or region of cells) maintains a count of how many generations have passed, and it blocks until adjacent cells have caught up to it. So time propagates across the board like waves on a pond.

> That adder sounds like a bit of magic, do you have a link for that?

Sure! Here's the paper:

http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/async/publications/cheng-unger-t...

I'll summarize it briefly. You know about ripple carry adders, where the carry bits propagate across the adder and it takes O(n) time? Well, the adder for each bit can sometimes precompute its carry output. If both inputs are 1, it knows that its carry output will be 1. There are some other tricks like that. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that an asynchronous ripple carry adder can operate in O(lg n) average time, and an asynchronous carry-lookahead adder can work in O(lg lg n) average time. Or about twice as fast as a synchronous carry lookahead adder, according to transistor-level simulations.

> I can picture the cpu that 'sleeps on 0', basically the transitions are what clocks it forward so as long as you keep sending it 0's it simply never changes state right? (no state changes -> minimal power consumption).

Asynchronous design is like ideal clock gating: when part of a processor doesn't need to do anything, it just stays idle and doesn't dissipate dynamic power. In the example of a bit-serial length-adaptive datapath that I mentioned, the leading zero bits are simply ignored, and no processor work needs to be done to deal with them. Here's a paper on it:

http://vlsi.cornell.edu/~rajit/ps/bitsnap.pdf
Having to sign the checks and meet payroll every month !!!!!
I lived and worked in Norway for several years, and each year I received a pre-filled tax return from the government. If I recall correctly, I had three choices:

- Send a PIN code by mobile phone which acted as a digital signature to file "as is"

- Log in to central location on the Internet and click a button to file "as is"

- Sign it and send it in.

If I needed to make adjustments, then only the third option was viable (I only had to do that once).

It literally took me less than 5 minutes to verify and send in. Fairly painless - the only pain being in the amount of taxes I paid, Norway being a socialist country, and all.

The resistance from third party tax preparation companies and software providers reminds me of the Parable of the Broken Window
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Only with vacant possession - you aren't getting rid of Palin that easily
The old site was about discovery. I found more new music through the old T61 than any other way I've tried. New t61 doesn't provide a very good method of discovery. It's hard to see which artists are related.
Nitpick: volcanoes cause 'volcanic winters', not 'nuclear winters'.
I've danced recreationally for about 18 years, also occasionally teaching, performing, or competing, but I found nothing familiar in this article. I imagine it might also be discouraging for many people to be informed by someone portrayed as a scientific authority that dancing ability is determined at birth.

To keep it topical for HN, there is one thing I would say qualifies as a dance hack, although it sounds like a cliche, which is good posture. It should maintained not just while dancing but from the moment one enters the room. Although it's emphasized mainly in ballroom dance, it applies to any form. It works because we read it subliminally as a high status behavior, and faking it won't occur to the people who could most benefit by it.
Accountants need to eat too (to paraphrase a rallying cry of the music/creative industries).
Let them audit and consult instead.
Wouldn't inbreeding cause the opposite of a super-race? Inheriting different genes from both parents can prevent a lot of problems; for example the fact that women have two copies of the X chromosome makes them a lot less likely to be color blind. Having a uniform gene pool means that people would end up with similar genes and be more likely to have diseases.

I'm not sure if/why recombining after a long period of isolation and mutation would be better than staying together and just sharing mutations gradually. It's an interesting question though, there's problem some research paper somewhere that could tell us...
It's pretty clear that both Annapolis and the bay bridge went to BW, but Chesapeake got the Bay Bridge-Tunnel which almost makes up for it.

For all the trouble it would cause, I know quite a few people who wouldn't mind parting with old Baltmo' for good.
Quote: All I ask of you is one thing: please don't be cynical
Yes,

One problem with GUIs from the start has been that automating their behavior is fragile.

Automating actual keystrokes and mouse movements is the most fragile and kludgy of automations. Even drilling to the level of system messages is problematic.

Aside from it's other good qualities, the web is really nice for reducing possible user interactions to a very codified set of operations.

The article here points to ... the wrong way of doing things
Honestly, I'd like to see this same study performed with self-identifying homosexuals screened out from the sample pool, as they tend to have much higher 4d:2d finger-length ratios and could drastically affect the results.

Not to mention, gay guys, in general, are dramatically better dancers than straight guys. (Stereotypes aren't always accurate, but, honestly, anybody want to argue about this one?)
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/03/reminder...

Respect.
Mozilla has not poured any money into Theora that I know of. The primary developers are all working on it in their spare time or as part of their jobs with other companies. For example, Monty is employed at RedHat.

The fact that Theora is competitive to the best proprietary codecs without any real funding is a huge success. Imagine what would happen if Google or Mozilla put a little effort behind that?
One big reason is fraud: It's much easier to catch someone who is trying to lie to you if you don't start by telling them what you know.
Having something to do, knowing what that is, and doing it.
Wow - anyone see the number next to his inbox in the screenshot? 2863 messages!
These kinds of things are meant to run completely under the radar and take up as little space as possible. Unless they're exploiting an existing .Net or DirectX installation.
Bruce Schneier on how US government surveillance enabled the Google/China attack