skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Natal definitely has potential to revolutionize HCI, but I find it hard to believe it will help Xbox match the success of the Wii.

I cringe every time I see that video from E3 of that poor woman flailing on stage, swatting virtual dodge balls. Like Tony Hawk: Ride, when games start becoming too real, they tend to stop being fun.

Also, consider amputee or wheel-chair bound gamers who don't fit the typical body shape. Perhaps a small market, but a potential PR nightmare when Iraq veterans are told they don't have enough points of articulation for Natal.
It doesn't say outnumber.
I've never seen cod liver oil being recommended over purified D3 in gelcap format. I'll do a bit more research just to make sure, though.
The chunking behaviour is transparent unless you have a side-effect in your sequence function, which isn't sensible anyway. The chunked behaviour performs significantly better for the majority of cases which is why it's on by default, I believe.

Rich (creator of Clojure) addressed concerns similar to yours in this reddit discussion:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/afyav/clojure_1...

He also discusses chunked sequences in a video here (near the bottom of the list, the sound is pretty bad):

http://tomfaulhaber.blip.tv/
I actually tracked down the ruling and tried to go through it unfortunately its a scanned image pdf so I couldn't really search for what I wanted.

But this is fishy all around. The Executive doesn't have the ability to make things legal or not legal (especially retroactively - and they do have the ability to pardon which in a way makes that moot).

But from further reading it looks like the Obama "Office of Legal Counsel" wrote a brief stating that the searches were legal. However this doesn't make it so. (an extension of the whole John Yoo mess). What this is is a huge grey area w/o black letter law. Anyone can say its legal/illegal but the courts will still ultimately decide who's right.
> I am unconvinced and still think the claim is false advertising.

A port of Python 3 to Parrot is under active development (with the knowledge of PSF, which will probably hold the copyright on the project soon). It needs more developers, but what project doesn't?

Pynie is also a first-class project. Any changes it needs to run well it will get. (In truth, we test it and a few other high-level languages against Parrot trunk before we release our monthly versions.)

If you refuse to believe that Parrot developers are sufficiently serious about achieving our goals and that we work on them with every release, well, that's your prerogative. It would have been nice if you'd looked at our Languages page first, however.
The can't support was directed at file locking, which is mainly useful for binary files that can't be merged.
Deleting information posted publicly isn't practical. Your posts are likely to be archived in numerous places (e.g. google cache or archive.org).
Untitled Page
Makes me think of the Newton hand writing recognition. It was pretty amazing for its time. But the errors made it worse than a keyboard for most people (as decided by the market, at least). Natal could correctly recognize 90+% of all motions correctly, but if it occasionally makes a mistake that causes your character to die or the opponent to score a goal on you, the public might stick with their Wii-motes for now.
Big city left with no bookstore
I like this idea a lot; however, I don't like beeps. Ubuntu (and possibly other linux distros) now supports desktop notifications via Notify OSD. So instead of having the other machine ssh to me and beep, instead I use a utility called "notify-send" to create a desktop notification pop-up. You can install notify-send on ubuntu using:

sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin

Then call notify-send like so:

notify-send "Back to work."

The text can be anything you want, and you can also supply a summary, an icon, etc.
From the release announcement: "Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages."

Did you miss the word "aimed"?
I don't get it ... what's AppleWorld?

My first thoughts is that it will be an amusement park with Start Trek-like themes and with chapels where you can get married by a Steve Jobs look-alike.

No wonder publishers were the first to get gaga about cloud-computing :)
Apple quickly realized that apps would one day overtake .coms. They knew that mobile devices would overtake PCs.

Indeed. Which is why they spend a full year denying that the iPhone needed native apps and trying to shut down all the jailbreak work before finally caving and shipping an SDK with the next rev of the hardware.

Apple got lucky with the iPhone; it was the right product at the right time, and the App Store was a once-a-decade gold rush. But it certainly wasn't in Jobs' master plan for world domination.

I kept looking for insight in this article and not finding any.
Seth has a new analogy: "The edge."

As in, either "smooth out the rough edges," or "have an edge."

I can see this as his next book title.
I know the man can walk on water, but can he actually bypass the 3rd branch (judicial) of government and decide what is and isn't legal.

Hell if he could do that than why have a ruling at all on political contributions.
"when you simulate evolutionary systems you can create systems far more complex than the algorithm used to generate them, the problem domain, or any other factor prior to running the simulation."

Possible. I have to admit I'd have to think more carefully about this, but I'm not sure it's a knockdown win either. In the real world, the extra information comes from the environment in its capacity as a selection mechanism. It is a large source of such information. Simulations tend to have a radically simplified selection mechanism, what with not containing reality and all. Just because something looks complicated and can't be effectively gzip'ed doesn't mean its actually high in information, it's tricky stuff. I'd be much more inclined to buy this, if evolutionary programming was much more impressive than it actually is and actually routinely pulled off programs that were clearly high in information value.

(I've actually spent a bit of time with evolutionary computation. It has one of the largest hype/reality ratios in computer science.)

"Reproducibility does not involve the lab that made the discovery sending the devices used to make the discovery to another lab."

This is an artifact of the fact that is impossible to do this with physical objects, so we've built the mechanics of science around not being able to do that. Don't mistake historical accidents with scientific imperative. While it is still absolutely desirable that simulations as independently-constructed as possible and give as similar a result as possible, if there was an equivalent in the physical world of being able to rigorously examine someone else's experiment we would be doing that. How long would Cold Fusion have lasted if that was available?

Science is inevitably a product of its environment. We don't demand particle-physics precision from the sociologists not because it is undesirable, but because it is impossible. We don't pass around experimental apparatus to each other for examination not because it is undesirable, but because it is impossible. It isn't impossible for simulations. We're allowed to tweak our procedure in response. Science is not a religion.
Arg. Accidentally down-voted. Sorry.

[EDIT] I'm not sure why I got down-voted. Is this a 'revenge' for my mistake (not necessarily done by the parent poster)? Is apologizing for my mistake something that I shouldn't have done? Color me confused. (Note: I don't believe that this post deserves to be up voted past 1.)
This closed world is close to possible with control, which is exactly what Apple has achieved with the iPhone. They limit which apps make it on, and which content can be displayed. I do not doubt that sooner than later Apple will offer filtering for internet, and will package it in an appealing way (security). It seems foolish now, but just wait.
That's a good alternative. Can you do something like that in OS X?
> 1) Stop subsidizing air & road travel so much

Huh, I get that road travel is subsidized, but never heard about air. Do you know how that shakes out? Federal government or localities building airports, or providing some sort of free coordinating services, or some such? I had always just kinda assumed that airlines were renting or leasing airport space and covering most of the costs from it, but that was just me idly guessing.
"I seriously don't understand why people don't just like reading that much"

Although the article mentions Amazon, it doesn't bother to even entertain the possibility that a bricks & mortar bookstore is unnecessary. Furthermore, I find browsing for books on Amazon to be a much better experience than standing around bookstore shelves. Clearly, some people have a strong emotional attachment to bookstores, but their apparent grief seems over the top.
It's probably a little early for them to have given back.

But eventually I would expect them to make available apps, services, etc. that they use to run SF, so that other cities can use them and contribute.
NYC has tried that - the system started out as 3 competing companies, but in the long run, it makes sense to have one system with one set of management/employees
If any tech company is creating their own "world", it's Google. Apple should be the fearful partner here.
I still read a number of RSS feeds (Reg Braithewaite's Homoiconic, RailsInside and Adam Wiggins' blog, to name three at random), but yeah, I'm starting to drop RSS feeds as well.

Joel Spolsky and 37signals are great examples of blogs I usually don't need to see, but the good stuff winds up here.

Unfortunately, HN doesn't have a good way to get "best of" except current day. Things just bubble up and down too fast. So blogs where I'd want to go back and read everything (PG's articles, say), I can't read entirely through HackerNews.
This is at least partly why it's hard for older people to learn new things, while 5 year olds seem to pick up things in days. As you age, you become more cautious, a natural progression caused by continuous exposure to pain and suffering. It gets the point of irrationality. What's the risk in trying out a new language? In reality, there really is none, you've just got to fight past it.
The chapter on the entropy principal is very illuminating. Chapter 10 I think. People forget the link to the combinatorial basis of entropy.
The opportunity cost of pursuing this is huge. Cut your losses at 100 hours and spend your time looking for new clients.

Spend $5 and buy a used copy of "The Check is Not In the Mail" http://www.amazon.com/Check-Not-Mail-Without-Customers/dp/09... it will give you a number of suggestions for how to structure an engagement to avoid some of the problems you faced here.

The real warning sign on this was the inability of the company to set a date for a partial payment, telling you to "be patient" instead.
The mobile computing platform has a long ways to go before it will overtake desktop computing. For check-email-and-view-web-pages type tasks, it really works well, but I don't see people doing 3d-modelling, desktop publishing, software development or just plain spreadsheet work on a mobile device in the near future. Maybe I just don't have the vision to see interfaces that will make these operations doable on a smaller screen.
I think if I get a take down notice I'm going to consult a lawyer :)
Massachusetts had a similar policy back in 2003, but I don't remember what the outcome was. I think the policy was thrown out(??).

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-131911.html
Web Tablets: The Tipping Point is Nigh
I want a neural interface to "feel" that my important processes are up and running. In every given moment I want to feel the functions getting called, smell the call frames, and the rounded corners of the system calls returning values different than -1.
Understanding the web to make search more relevant
In case andrewwarner sees this: Ask Seth about what he proposed when his school did a play that his kids were in. Great story.
I was just looking up this information for a project I am working on. I think the caselaw you are interested in knowing about is Section 230.

If you passively host third-party content, you will be fully protected under Section 230.

If you exercise traditional editorial functions over user submitted content, such as deciding whether to publish, remove, or edit material, you will not lose your immunity unless your edits materially alter the meaning of the content.

If you pre-screen objectionable content or correct, edit, or remove content, you will not lose your immunity.

If you encourage or pay third-parties to create or submit content, you will not lose your immunity.

If you use drop-down forms or multiple-choice questionnaires, you should be cautious of allowing users to submit information through these forms that might be deemed illegal.
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

-Albert Einstein
I haven't tried it, but it looks like there's a similar growl command line utility called "growlnotify" that you could call:

http://growl.info/extras.php
Several satellites take high resolution real time pictures of global weather they run 24 x 7 for years and that's RAW data. There are several of these plus radar stations etc. NOAA uses a subset of that information to make weather forecast (they normally toss out old data and data from the other side of the planet because it's not useful even if it might make a slightly better forecast). We can make highly accurate block by block forecast an hour ahead over major cities and just about any point in the US. However, there is little point in reading that level of detail from a forecast for such a short period of time. Sometimes when the forecast is 50% chance of rain over the next 8 - 12 hours they know where and when it's going to rain they just don't know where you are.

edit: One of the world's largest scientific data systems, NASA's Earth observing system data and information system (EOSDIS) has stored over three petabytes of earth science data in a geographically distributed mass storage system. that's just Nasa and a lot of their data does not make it into EOSDIS.

The goal of science is to understand the world. Running the same simulation on the same data and getting the same result only tells you that the machine running the simulation is not broken. What you want is to run a different program with different assumptions on different data and come to the same conclusion. This is actually used to make 7 day forecasts. They run a few different models with different assumptions and pick the average result. Over time each model is updated independently to maintain its independence.

PS: You don’t validate E=MC^2 by doing the exact same experiment 10,000 times. You do every type of experiment that you can think of which relates to E=MC^2 looking for anything which does not work out the way you think it should.
One difference will be that in the time you speak of, a person could just leave and start over. More recently, people had several major chances to reinvent themselves early in life, as they went off to college or to work. Most of the world was not in your small hometown. Increasingly, though, there will be no place to go where you are unknown, and there's no frontier to go to if the social pressure becomes unbearable.
You really need to read Jupiter by Ben Bova.
this seems like a problem with a simple solution. someone should open a mom & pop bookstore.

especially considering the support being shown by the community for books.
The weird part is his overall thesis is at least not bad. But then the article is just a long string of misinformation arriving at a somewhat accurate conclusion.
I believe most countries that are the target of the US military see an immediate drop in petroleum production and our single largest source of oil imports is Canada.
Thanks for the feedback. The snowflakes were in there from the holidays and we're pulling those as soon as I get around to it :)
I'm glad someone else shared my opinion, I found "Apple quickly realized that apps would one day overtake .coms." to be a particularly absurd thing to say. When placed in context of the entire article it made more sense seeming as though the piece was on a whim (or possibly a dream/fantasy) rather then hard evidence or a deep understanding of our industry and culture.
no.coment.my.comet.was.my.luck.super.lotto.winer.
am.was.in.my.walet.same.nigh.the.arm.robery.thrre.
men.like.swat.team.stom.my.stor.with.gun..sying.polic.police.i.say.dont.shot.am.the.owner.one.of.them.sys.we.
receve.inf.thats.robery.her.search.me.gun.in.my.hea.down.idon.see.what.they.
took.my.24.k.ring.in.the.tbl.was.missin.but.i.didnot.know.they.was,after.the.tikt.isearch.for.the.
tiket.lader.all.my.clouth.is.lost.but.same.nght.they.shot.tow.sht.my.window.i.live.up.
star.i.get.scred,.my.son.we.go.the.store.to.spend.time.mybe.saver.but.the.bad.luk.come.to.me.i.
close.my.biz.imove.far.awy.iyar.lader.god.send.me.to.my.nighbor.the.man.wer.i.burches,the.
ticket.when.he.saw.me.he.jumb.and.told.me.my.store.win.super.lootoo.and.u.the.one.i.saw.u.in.the.vidio.
and.inssist.u.the.one.many.time.said.i.could.not.talk.any.thing.i.lift.i.ask.they.
told.is.gon.u.canot.do.
any.thing.but.allways.i.remember.and.hrt
Nevertheless, such a pod would be rendered obsolete by the SurvivaBall. At least the ball travels around with you.
http://survivaball.com/
Celebrity Blog
>"I'm not sure why you were downvoted (comment currently at 0). "

Probably because the US does not actually subsidize gasoline. So, the first comment is factually wrong.
Only for US Americans:
"The Competition is open to data analysis experts (“Participants”) from the fifty (50) United States (“U.S.”) and District of Columbia (“D.C.”)" http://competition-files.s3.amazonaws.com/OMOP_Cup_Competiti...
Wiki page on McCandless:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless
The speculation is that he died either from eating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedysarum or Hedysarum with "Black Patch Desease" fungus : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizoctonia_leguminicola

I just watched the movie about him "Into The Wild" -- pretty interesting.
Yeah, it's just awful. Not even worth the trouble of shorting.

http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/DXY/charts?countr...

I use it as an example because it's actively traded.

If capital flows out of bonds, it most likely goes into stocks

Pass the bong. What's been going on is simple: Bernanke has been scuttling the dollar in order to force people into all forms of risk. Money has been going to bonds and stocks both, the riskier the better:

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
Rails and Merb Merge Update: Rails Core
Strange that any post in which I make an argument that the reaction to China of late is overblown gets harshly modded down with no counter argument. Talk about censorship!

edit: this phenomenon isn't going to make me stop arguing against the neocon anti-china perspective, it will only make me more determined.
It all boils down to where your majority revenue comes from:

Google: advertising. Can they diversify?

Apple: hardware. With desirable hardware, you calculate what is the price point to maximize profit and execute.

Some other random comments about the article:

1) Share price is meaningless in isolation. $10 can be very expensive while $3,000 can be very cheap.

2) The rumor mill now has Google Tablets as well. Wow, I must have been asleep

3) AppleWorld must collaborate with Virgin Galactic.
You are not allowed to use electronics during take-off and landing, and emitting devices in duration of the whole flight. Imposes certain restriction on your PAN-enabled shirt, socks and underpants..
The best part is how he says it in past-tense as if it has already happened.
It says "one day".
I don't believe that COBOL was designed for the masses - after all, this was 1959, when there were so few computers and it was believed by some that ultimately we would only need one!
Also, SQL came out of academia and I don't believe that was for the masses either.
I would say however that BASIC was intended for the masses, and as such it was successful. A generation in the UK learnt BASIC on the ZX80, ZX81, Spectrum, BBC Micro etc.
Perhaps the bookstore ought to be a non-profit offshoot of the literacy campaign mentioned in the article.
"Why not use three circles with an orientation indicator?"

!

"Or words?"

!!

That last is great. "Now, what sort of well-known symbols can we use to represent colors? Think. Think."
Active Record Query Interface 3.0
The "City and County of San Francisco" is one legal entity.
Ok, I disagree with most of what you see below.

1) I had no problem understanding what the site is for. It's clearly VOIP for social networking, and the colorscheme and design indicates it's aimed at gamers. Further reading supports that.

2) I'd put this in the category of "attractive, professional looking". You've met the minimum required "attractiveness quotient", now it's time to focus on your core business value and customer acquisition / support.

That said, here are a couple design tweaks I did notice (OSX 10.5.8, FF3.5.7, btw):

1) The footer height is standard on all pages except the home page, where it is substantially taller.

2) On the home page, the "Unlimited free voice" is very visible, but the "Social networking integration" blends in. I would suggest making the latter more dramatic, and possibly changing it to "gaming" or something like that if that really is your primary market.

3) On the FAQ page, the hover color and the selected color for the question links is the same, which is confusing.

And a structure issue:

1) Right now, the FAQ page requires actively clicking on a question to make its text appear. Much better is to have the links jump you down the page; this makes it much more likely that people will read all the FAQs, which gives you better educated customers and fewer customer support issues.

Good luck with it!
At first glance, this looks like it has "massive rewrite" all over it:-/ It does look nice, but that's a lot of very widely used code that's being deprecated.
It's striking to me that the discussion is over 15 years old now, but the issues and arguments surrounding Lisp haven't changed much.
iPhone users don't depend on Google Maps & Search per se; rather they depend on maps and search, which at time of this writing there's at least one other major provider (quality, market penetration notwithstanding). This can be swapped out.

What I would not like to see is only 1 search provider, 1 map provider.

Reminder: must check whether there is an OpenStreetMap iPhone app.
Cloud Computing Brokers: A Resource Guide
note taken :) Thanks
How does Goldman Sachs make its profits?
Healthcare displaces information technology as favorite of venture capitalists
Yeah, skeletal tracking is an open research problem. It's hard. Very hard. But believe me when I say, the tech has come a long way since that demo...
I personally think that OSX has more in common with XP than 7 does with XP or OSX.
It's got post-hoc reasoning written all over it.
I'm not so sure it is factually wrong. here is a reference.

http://www.progress.org/2003/energy22.htm
Google (GOOG) CEO Steve Schmidt

Heh. Apparently, from inside AppleWorld, all CEOs are named "Steve".
LMAO...here's the key sentence in that article:

Disclosure: Long AAPL

Seriously, how could you possibly have an objective opinion about the proper valuation of arguably one of Apple's biggest competitors, Google.

Moreover, Apple's P/E right now is 33. Let me repeat that. 33!. If the two stocks prices are two switch places, then Apple's P/E sky rockets to an absurd 80. So you should be getting long $AAPL? Hmm, not at these levels...