skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do not know. Although the current form of life has been around for quite a while --- who knows how many attempts have failed before that?
Is it me or should that read "boost" not "boot?"
The MUSHROOM Project hardware support for objects (ancient but interesting)
If only I could play "canyon.mid" with Media Player...
Because prior to seeing it happen, slime mold configuration wasn't expected to be equivalent to railroad optimization. And then it was.

Saying things are obvious after they've happened is 100% useless. Demonstrating you have the mental models to say these things predictively is pretty exciting, though.

If you can do that, go become a scientist. Use those models. Publish papers. You'll get into Science, too.
One other little addendum that I think is important: make sure that you blog on a fairly regular basis! Nobody will bother to subscribe if you don't keep making good content for them to come back to.

This is something my startup does poorly. We haven't yet gotten into that habit, and since we don't pay attention, weeks go by without a post, even though we have great ideas on things to write about. This is one thing we've talked a lot about making sure we improve upon in the future.
Correct, I'm a big boy and I can handle it. :-) No one should ever feel bad for me... I got a free roll on life. I'm playing with the houses money and my life is 1,000x better than I ever thought it would be.

Seriously, I've been fighting with these guys for a decade trying to get them to address the fact that their data is wrong and HIGHLY DAMAGING for startups looking to get ad revenue.

They ignored me for a decade, and this email was the FIRST time I've really been able to get them to address the issue.

I try to take these inside conversations and put them in the sunlight and part of that is writing with a certain, well, flair (at least 20 pieces of flair in fact).

You can be sure I'm laughing and smiling when I write these things, and more so when folks like Comscore or Kiretsu Forum take the bait.

Now that Comscore has engaged the debate other folks can move it forward. I think Comscore will do the right thing here and move to a freemium model like:

1. Free for companies with under 50M impressions
2. $1,000 a year for companies with 50m-250m impressions
3. $5,000 a year for companies over 250M impressions

If they did this they would build a funnel of clients and a ton of good will. Compare that plan to their current plan:

1. Pay us $5,000 for accurate stats or...
2. Don't pay us and we will use our old and admittedly inaccurate system for counting your stats--thus damaging your company and ability to get advertising.

best j
Want to see something really unbelievable? Follow the "via" on this post and figure out who originally blogged about it. This story got digested through 6 levels of blogs! Unluggd came from TechDigest from psfk from Laughing Squid from Urban Prankster from Triumph of BS from artist's original site. Now that is quite the telephone tree!
Do what Twitter founders did.
Let's talk about TC for a minute:

1) they send less traffic than they did back in, say, 2006. It's only 3,000-4,000 uniques.
2) one backlink from them doesn't appear to be worth crap any more in Google. Google (as far as I can tell) looks much more at the heterogeneity of your linkbase than it does any individual link from a high PR site (maybe Wikipedia's excluded here, but I don't know).

Patrick and Peldi's advice to target 40 smaller blogs with personalized pitches (there's that interesting content thing again - interesting to an audience of one each time) is probably better than TechCrunch traffic in every single way you slice it.
Wind Turbines Leave Clouds and Energy Inefficiency in Their Wake
The last line was petty. No need to sully a well-written response like that... offering to answer any further questions instead would leave me much more impressed.
Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified
Pope to priests: Go forth and blog
A start-up idea...

A calculator app which can be configured to only perform certain, allowed operations. Teachers could announce that the next test would only allow a particular calculator configuration, and students could run the calc app on their phones/laptops with those restrictions (or none if they didn't want to prepare well for the test). Then, at test time, the teacher passes out purpose built "calculators" running the calc app as configured by the teacher for that test. The calculator would be free, but the teacher kit would be sold to schools. What would be the hardware cost in bulk for a cheap device that could run one TI calculator-like app? If students today can be required to buy a $100 TI calculator, could they be required to buy a flash-able "calculator" device?
> If you start with two disconnected cell groups, how do you know when they collide?

You create 'dead' cells in between that connect the two populations.

That's also why you can't remove them. Remember, this is a simulation of a fabric, the dead cells not being there all the time is an optimization, in a real fabric all cells would exist all the time.

The async component is the fact that there is no global authority supplying a clock, each 'peer' is on its own from the moment of power-up.
> Can this idea be further generalized?

A silly generalization: At birth everyone draws a lot --- or throws a die with fifty sides --- to decide which state he will belong to.
Thank you, I got a lot more out of:

Cassandra – A highly scalable, eventually consistent, distributed, structured key-value store.

Than I did out of:

0.5.0 final
* avoid attempting to delete temporary bootstrap files twice (CASSANDRA-681)
* fix bogus NaN in nodeprobe cfstats output (CASSANDRA-646)
* provide a policy for dealing with single thread executors w/ a full queue
(CASSANDRA-694)
* optimize inner read in MessagingService, vastly improving multiple-node performance (CASSANDRA-675)
* wait for table flush before streaming data back to a bootstrapping node.
(CASSANDRA-696)
* keep track of bootstrapping sources by table so that bootstrapping doesn't give the indication of finishing early (CASSANDRA-673)
Disappearing ships in the Panama Canal
Sports Highlights
Words That Lose Money : Ecommerce Optimization & Marketing
make sure that you blog on a fairly regular basis!

A few years ago, prior to starting my current day job (and long before I started participating on HN), I blogged three times a week or more. I wrote a few gems and a lot of, ahem, filler, got a wee bit of traction but not too much (though it was PR6 at one point, which is great for geek bragging rights and of no use whatsoever otherwise), and burned out eventually.

I think blogging regularly is a practice which auto-commoditizes your content, which is probably not the best idea for a time pressed startup which has sharply limited resources. For instance, a fairly typical article for me would have been a 30 minute exploration into a thought I had that day. Roughly one of those in ten would attract attention outside of the folks already reading my blog.

These days, I blog about a fifth as much or less, but am much smarter about topic selection. While I still have scratch my own itch articles every once in a while, if I'm going to spend my time on something, I try to do it right such that it doesn't just fall into the background noise on the Internet. That means being choosy on topics, going for stuff I know will probably be popular, making smart tactical choices like writing self-consciously for reading on the Internet (H2 tags, bolded call-out bits, visual engagement, etc) rather than doing my usual stream-of-consciousness rambling, etc.
Timely article as I sit here filling out my returns thinking at every step "doesn't the government already have this information somewhere? and if I were to get audited, wouldn't they just call on those same resources?"

There are probably no more than 4 things I would have to add (charitable contributions, out of country property ownership, working abroad income, etc.) to make it complete. Literally everything I'm typing in has already been submitted, withholdings, gross incoming, marital status, employer(s), stock ownership, education, medical expenses and insurance, personal property and on and on and on.
Exactly. Without concrete results showing up in the next year or two, Obama would have to face the "He Did Nothing!" challenge when it comes time for re-election.
thanks, loved this wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_cellular_automaton

can't help but think about all the variables in the game of life that are missing. for instance, the rising/setting of the sun, and shadows cast by growing plants to the East stunting growth on those in the West, etc. The CA graphs in the wiki article almost represent some of those missing variables.
"Rule 30 updated in cyclic order" resembles a 'seasonal' population.
"Self-clocked rule 30" could represent the lifetime of the individual plants.
"Self-synchronous rule 30" portrays where/when population equilibrium is reached.
The original Rule 30 resembles patterns seen in the microscopic or macroscopic, rarely seen in our human scale.
I'd be interested to hear what Google/Quantcast/Compete have to say about people vs cookies and if/how they tell the difference.
I never even received a status delay email from WakeMate. I had to learn about it on TechCrunch.

As a matter of fact, in checking my email archive, I've had NO communication from WakeMate. The only thing I have is my Paypal receipt for my deposit. And I see that now they have switched to Google Checkout for payment processing.

As an early adopter, have I slipped through a crack?
Oh I see, I misunderstood the whole situation! I agree, your issue is pertinent.
Yikes!

'Countries disadvantaged by the unequal and undemocratic information flow have to protect their national interest.'

Translation: We (the government) cannot stand on our merits.

-

'As many as 81 percent of those polled are opposed to Chinese government accepting Google's demands.'

Translation: At least 19% of those polled were brave enough to publicly disagree (at their peril).

-

'Unlike advanced Western countries, Chinese society is still vulnerable to the effect of multifarious information flowing in'

Translation: Wait, multifarious? Untranslatable multispeak!
Why did you stop?
I can't understand how anybody could release an Android app with no screenshots! I know we're all coders and not salesmen, but we all experience the frustrations of liking a project and skipping it because it gives the impression of being all talk and no game.
It looks like the credibility of the IPCC is diminishing by the day. I hope some trustworthy body which is concerned about climate change but strong enough to avoid the kind of bias and shoddy lack of rigour we've seen from the IPCC can come through to take its place.
Ok, so the main loop is like

for c in cells: c.update()

And update looks at the values of the neighbors and updates accordingly. Seems straightforward, but I'm sure there will be pitfalls :)

I'm going to start in about 4 hours, I have other work to do now.
My favorite parts of the article:

The 2007 study should be seen as a snapshot of what was known then. Science is progressive. If something turns out to be wrong we can fix it next time around.

In this case, it turns out the mistakes were fixed the first time around: before the paper was published.

A hint: in general, when writing a review article, you don't both to write about stuff that isn't finished.

At most, you give it a brief mention in a section "future directions and open problems". You discuss it with superlatives like, "this looks promising". You don't, however, pass it off as part of what is known.
An Introduction to AI in Games
So much for a transparant UK government I guess.

David Kelly is one of the first victims of the Iraq war, and I really don't give a rats ass about any government whitewash operation until they come clean with all the documents they've got.

Until then it should simply be classified as a murder.

Also, Dr. Kelly was right in every aspect of his criticism in the run-up to the war and he should be remembered as one of the very few voices of reason in England during that period.

The blood of this man is on the hands of Tony Blair.

more here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245599/David-Kelly-...
As publishers, why should we be supporting any of these services, Quantcast included? Am I really going to have to put 12 different JS includes on my site and pass on my users' browsing history to these companies just on the slim chance that some advertiser is using their stats? I get enough complaints already about the Google Analytics tracking (and that's after putting it on the bottom of the page to minimize the chance of blocking the page, thus hurting my stats).

Everyone is talking about "pixels," but actually giving publishers blocking JS includes. This means that as a publisher, you're going to have to prioritize the user experience versus tracking, and also prioritize the tracking! If you put the Comscore JS under the Quantcast JS, then the slower the Quantcast JS returns, the lower your Comscore stats will be (because it gives the user more time to navigate away from the page). It seems like it would give an incentive to the analytics firm to serve the tracking JS as slowly as possible.

I wish we could just make portions of our Google Analytics data public and be done with it. I don't think the "pixel include" race is going to scale very well.
It's the same story but three different articles. The article linked here has better photos and is better written. So it doesn't surprise me that it got attention when the other two didn't. Though if anyone is interested, one of the other two has a (soundless) 38 second video showing the growth of the slime mold. Pretty cool stuff.
One of the first things I do on a new windows box is put a batch file called ls.bat in a directory in my path that just calls dir!
Exactly the same thing going here.

It's funny how such a seemingly meaningless architectural decision can turn into such a disruptive feature.
Dilbert on The Cloud
Traffic coming a TechCrunch link still converts way higher than most traffic. Why? Because the article is read by ~50,000 people and only those actually interested follow the link.

That's my experience at least.
7 Funny Longest Names
Oh man, that's awesome! Have you considered modeling a more "real-world" computing fabric? Your cells would have randomly-distributed computation and communication delays, and you could make some sort of visualization of the time waves propagating, and it would just be really cool.

I initially didn't think this would be possible to implement in simple physical hardware, but your insight that you only need a two-bit time counter changes things.

Of course, ultimately, I think what you'd want to look at is amorphous computing. It's a fascinating new branch of computer science that looks at organizing a large number of unreliable small processors, sensors, and actuators, with only local communication, into a working system. Here's the big intro paper (Abelson and Sussman are among the authors, BTW):

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/amorphous/papers/ai...

I think you'll really enjoy amorphous computing. It's already getting some use in wireless sensor networks, especially the stuff having to do with establishing reliable communication channels, or figuring out the spatial distribution of the sensors based on ping times, or keeping clocks more-or-less synchronized.
I liked the "fix someone's pain" message in this. It's easy to write software with more and more features (or spiffy never-heard-of-before features), but in the end it really should be about solving a problem for somebody. Well, assuming that you'd like to make some money doing it.
If you stitch together photos, sometimes something that crosses the join will be in one image and not the other.

I submitted something very like this some time ago:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=(50.333689,-4.149201)&hnea...

Make sure you have satellite imagery turned on. In this case the two overlaid images give you two copies of the breakwater.
Apparently DRM was dropped 18 months ago, and mentioned in a previous O'Reilly announcement. This current post linking to the announcement of sales going up is simply inferring that one lead to the other.
I would agree with what you're saying. You said this in your post itself, that content has to be interesting. Blogging once a day with short, filler content won't get anyone interested in what you're saying.

However, at least in my situation, I've got double digit numbers of ideas of things that would be interesting to write about, that I could probably write up in just a few hours (each). But I just haven't, because I haven't made "write an article for the blog" into a legitimate to-do item yet.

I guess the other nice thing is that I'm in a niche that few people know about. I could blog about things that are fairly basic, but many people would still find them interesting.
Like the laser harp show ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Tfoto7sokk
concert given in 1990
The lasers where going up to the Arc de triomphe (actually relayed from the top of the harp for security reasons I suppose)
Reminds me of one of those neon static writing pages I had as a kid. You'd press on it with a stylus and it would stick to the backing, making the color change to be more bright. To erase, you'd just pull it from the backing to unstick it. Low tech stuff.
The Recipe for a Great Leader
Hybrid, not artificial, intelligence
Asynchronous circuit design
I followed close to the same plan as the original poster, rarely going to classes. I had a medical disability note so I was able to do so without repercussions, but used my time off to focus on research which landed me a great job once I was done.
The 2007 study should be seen as a snapshot of what was known then.

We now know that "snapshot" wasn't the intent because the "no glaciers in 2025" claim was included even though they knew that it was wrong because they wanted to influence the politics.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scie...

FWIW, while they're trying to distance themselves from the claim, they've kept the immediate author on-payroll. Are they buying him off or protecting their own?
First thing I do is install Cygwin.
Yep, you got it.
Many good points here.

Rich Hickey has made a lot of good choices in designing the language and its core libraries; it "feels" like a good fusion of Scheme and Common Lisp, richer than the former and not at all crufty or impossibly massive like the latter.

Could you give some language design examples that differs clojure from other lisps?

I heard someone speak about 'data' is separated from 'code' in clojure.. any examples of this?
Another place where random strategies can help. If the turbines are placed effectively randomly rather than rigidly in a grid, any direction will be as good as any other (within a small margin).
You can always use a clock and a counter to delay for a period of time that you know is greater than the worst-case time that the operation could take. Or randomize it up a bit. Or design the logic to take similar times for all crypto operations.

Here's another cool thing: by using a dual-rail encoding (one wire being high means a bit is 0, the other wire being high means the bit is 1) you can design logic that consumes roughly constant power no matter what the operands are. This makes power-analysis attacks a lot more difficult.

Here's a paper on all this that you may enjoy:

http://www.gemplus.com/smart/rd/publications/pdf/MAM03as.pdf
Reminds me of something fun we used to do when we had ample free time as kids: We would put random color patterns with crayons on construction paper and then overlay the entire page with black crayon and then scrape through the black to 'draw' with colored fills (the fills being the previously hidden background we made first).

Try it - it's awesome for kids.
Nothing I read in the replies or MA's commentary actually countered the substance of Jason's argument.

Fred's line: "someone has to pay, so pay up." That sounds like a straight-up mobster.

Linda Abraham's line: "we measure people" (what about dogs? I wondered), "we have a slightly cheaper option of 5K". IOW, we can be flexible in what we hit you up for. Oh, and we have cameras in people's homes, so we know the difference between people, machines and cybernetic half-breeds.

MA's line: this person is right, someone needs to get paid, Jason's wrong. The judge and jury in one persona, but logic-free.

But all this doesn't address the core fact: that people using ComScore to evaluate a site (why can't these people pay?) can be greatly influenced by the sites paying ComScore for "auditing" and other ancillary services to make sure they "get counted correctly". 'Cos you know, if you don't pay up, some "accidents" might happen.
Pachauri: the real story behind the Glaciergate scandal
You didn't strace it to see what was going on?
> Oh man, that's awesome!

Thanks :) It was a lot of fun.

> Have you considered modeling a more "real-world" computing fabric?

That's what this is leading in to, the simplest unit is just a way for me to know that it is doable. If I can't do 'life' then there is no point in going any further with it.

One of the HN members here is very far in coming up with a higher level concept but I feel that it needs to be done from the 'gate level' up.

> Your cells would have randomly-distributed computation and communication delays, and you could make some sort of visualization of the time waves propagating, and it would just be really cool.

I did that for a bit, it is easy enough to show the generations as colours.

> I initially didn't think this would be possible to implement in simple physical hardware, but your insight that you only need a two-bit time counter changes things.

Yes, that's what made me really happy :) I realized that with a 'full' generation count you could make it work but that would always limit the maximum generation count to the number of bits in the counters. So why not turn it around and see how few bits you can use and handle the 'wrapping' properly. The number is 2, and that's low enough to use a simple 4-to-1 demultiplexer to select the right state line (current or previous generation).

> Of course, ultimately, I think what you'd want to look at is amorphous computing.

I had not heard the term before, more reading to do!

> I think you'll really enjoy amorphous computing.

Yes, that sounds like it is exactly the way to go.

I will write a fair sized article at the end of this month about where I feel computing is headed, this as a follow up on the new years day posting about what we think the future will bring.

I thought the question was an important one and I'm hitting two birds with one stone here, first the interest in cell computing and second the information I'm gathering to answer that question about the future.

Fascinating stuff.
Get notified of new RubyGems releases over Twitter
Wikileaks isn't the answer to problems like this. If you have to rely on a dubiously ethical web site that tries to position itself outside the law, some pretty fundamental things have already gone wrong.

For a start, we have to ask why the legal power exists to seal records in this way, who has the authority to order such seals, and what kind of oversight exists to make independent determinations about whether such seals are in the public interest.