skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"No, it wouldn't make you worth any more. To make this more concrete, are you seriously suggesting that given the choice between saving the life of someone with bad skin and saving the life of an otherwise identical person with good skin, you could cite skin quality as your justification for choosing to save the one over the other?"

Having to choose between any two people in that situation would be difficult. This is getting rather far afield, though.

"I suppose it might look from your perspective as if there is some kind of weird "taboo" on judging people, but really it's just that you're doing it wrong. People aren't valued according to a weighted sum of their qualities and virtues."

If you haven't noticed a massive taboo against judging people, either we live in very different cultures or you haven't been paying very close attention. Would you suggest a better way of judging people?
Are you still doing iPhone app development? Help me out here:

1. Do you use an iPhone or Android phone as your primary phone? One problem I have over developing for multiple platforms is I can only have 1 primary platform (1 desktop/laptop + 1 mobile device). It's the only way I know to ensure the product is good. How do you do it?

2. It's early, but how's sales like compared to iPhones?

3. How's UI like? I had a G1 dev phone and haven't been much up to date with the developments of Android since. In particular, (a) the UI library - do you still pretty much have to cook up your own style because the native ones are terrible, and (b) how do you deal with compatibility over different handsets?
The Quants: Formula for a Meltdown
Answer: Destroy the industrial base of most of the rest of the world, import 1600 top Nazi scientists, find a nuclear-armed expansionist global-superpower enemy with a fundamentally incompatible political ideology, and raise the top marginal tax rate to 91%.

Worked last time.
xyzzy <shfit>+<return> doesn't work in minesweeper, which was the first thing I 'tested'. I also tried xyzzy <return> <shift>+<return> because that's how I remembered it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xyzzy)
Who else tried running MS-DOS > dir right away? :)
http://i49.tinypic.com/11b2o7m.jpg
24 w/ opera
Pirating music, movies, and software is already illegal, and people do get prosecuted for it.
basic reverse engineering skills, very strong C / C++ skills, ASM & how to use a debugger, being able to look at Memdumps and making any sense of it, little electronics helps too.
I lived and worked in Finland for a few years, ..., I had three choices:

- not do anything, in which case I agreed with the pre-filled tax return

- sign it and send it in, ...
In several earlier posts, I argued that mastering a rare and valuable skill is the key to generating a remarkable life

I'm a passionate proselytizer of this. So many many of my peers have made major choices about what to pursue with little to no critical analysis of what they want out of life and how the chosen path will get them there.
If by 'better Pandora' you mean 'available where I am' then yes, I'd like a better Pandora.
It's not that I consider it unethical: it's not wrong, but it does seem like taking the easy way out, rather than making your product strong enough to stand solidly on its own. Then again, you can't always predict how things will play out. For instance, I don't think Apple intended for the iPod and later the iPhone to target the narcissist within, but as they became popular, they became status symbols, and it happened anyway (and less artificially).

To the latter half of your response, I'm working on it. Even if my original comment was a bit snarky, it was a still a prompt for conversation on the matter. I'm well aware of the popularity of things like this (Farmville, anyone?), and I'm trying to understand it.

I'd be interested in your response to my suggestion that people are much more obvious about this online. While people certainly do things for status in the real world, almost all would take offense if you gave them a gold star for getting a date. Why are people so willing to cede authority (judgment) to a website? The game element doesn't seem to explain it all.
Learning from 10 yrs of Bugzilla data
indeed... feels weird to see the internet truly becoming the tool of the masses.
Similar requests:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052676

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057133
Wow, isn't a democracy with such a powerful lobby grand?
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071568

Although as so often happens, the first submission sinks without a trace, a subsequent duplicate submission gets an upvote on the "newest" page, makes it to the front page and thereby gets noticed generally. This is one argument to suggest why the duplication detection algorithm should not be tightened significantly - if a link has any real merit, and it's news rather than something old that someone has run across, then it has several chances of not being missed, becuase it will get submitted several times.

Earlier submissions of the same story also sank (mostly) without trace:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071533

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1071093
Ask HN: What do you think of grammatical inference/induction
I'm wondering about AI methods and have read about this but in my ignorance I have a hard time understanding what their performance is like.

Any hints?
It's actually a lot more like the travelling salesman problem, for which there are no algorithms (well, some heuristical algorithms).
The do say that it does fuzzy matching, so it can still work with minor changes.

I don't think any program guarantees that the GUI is a stable API! I do wonder about its ability to handle unexpected conditions, or for the scripter to know that these conditions exist in the first case. For example, if the GUI changes based on the day of week, the script will probably either get very confused, or do the wrong thing. I imagine there's some way to do conditionals (if you see this, then do thing 1, otherwise do thing 2) but it's hard for the scripter to discover all the possibilities. Still, might be useful for some things.
Any idea who the other contenders were?
"As an intellectually mobile loner, scene-setter, systems lover, obstinate rebel, techno-prophet, sensual philosopher, courteous progressive, close listener, gentle heretic, sound planner, adviser explorer, pedant and slick conceptual salesman..."

I stopped reading after this.
maybe link to the download page:
http://incubator.apache.org/cassandra/download/
I disagree that I’m putting words in warfangle’s mouth. He said, ‘The fact that they are so secretive about the negotiations as to eject and ridicule third-party observes proves that they are not acting in the best interest of said third party observers.’ I don’t think that it in any possible way proves such a thing at all, and I was making a guess as to the premise warfangle was assuming to arrive at such a statement.

You’ll note that I haven’t made any statement one way or the other regarding the treaty itself. You shouldn’t infer that I am for or against it based on what I’ve said. Yes, I do know the details have been leaked. You’re missing my point entirely, because the content of the treaty is completely irrelevant to what I’ve said. My point is simply that the fact that the treaty is being negotiated in secret has no bearing on the relative merits of the treaty itself. The secrecy is just an irrelevant procedural technicality of the negotiation process that’s being framed as some nefarious underhanded move that should invalidate the treaty. It’s being used as a scare tactic in place of debating the treaty itself. Argue for or against the treaty on its content, not how it was arrived at.

I’m perplexed at how it isn’t clear to people that the treaty is being negotiated in secret precisely to prevent just such a mob backlash as is occurring. And it’s not to prevent a backlash because there is some corporate/government conspiracy to control the masses at work. It’s because there are concrete procedural difficulties in negotiating something like this when the parties involved aren’t able to speak freely without having 6 billion rabid critics jump down their throats at every proposal.
Task Coach 0.78.2 su LinuX
Typical Stallman ... having principles and living by them.
I won't (really really shouldn't) go into specifics, but it was pretty darn easy to tell.
Well, they did construct a computerized version of the method the slime uses to construct the network. Also they say that it's suitable for use in a dynamic network where traffic flows change and nodes are added and removed.
The following quote illustrates the article pretty well:

[..] advances that had earned their discoverers several
shelves of Nobel Prizes

Hyperbole as a style form is all and well, but this is just misrepresenting the truth. This journalist didn't rethink what he was writing for even a second.
Sylvia Engdahl's Space Subsite, http://www.sylviaengdahl.com/space.htm , is a good place to start. She has several essays plus links to organizations.
The Brain Surgeon, the Janitor, and the Six-Inch Pizza
Monitor local venues for foursquare specials
Monitors the foursquare site for new local venues with foursquare specials. Currently for venues in Berkeley, Oakland, & Emeryville, CA but feel free to clone & adapt!
VMware Infrastructure Web Access
There are lots of examples of techniques that won their inventors Nobels in Econ (and sometimes even sciences) going on to being used to make lots of money in finance.

A famous example being the Black Scholes model for option pricing, which won its inventors the Nobel Prize in Econ. Myron Scholes went on to create one of the first 'quant' funds (LTCM) back 1994 (which flamed out spectacularly during Russia's crisis in 1998.)
Musicians should give away their music and make money off concerts and T-shirts.

Why not give away the music onlne and also sell CDs?

Authors should give away their books and make money on the lecture circuit.

Or do like Doctorow and give away the actual contents of the books as well as selling printed versions.

Programmers should give away their software and make money from consulting.

Alternatively, open source the software and charge for a hosted solution. At this point you're not charging for the software, you're charging for the server resources and bandwidth that a user consumes.

I'm not a fan of creating atificial scarcity, as in DRM on bits that cost nothing to duplicate, but if you're also making available formats that cost to produce, then why not charge for those? They're not artificially scarce.
man, there was no web browser in windows 3.1. not even in windows for workgroups 3.11.
Beyond Testing: Specs and Behavior  Driven Development
I did this. I had a 2.6 undergraduate GPA. At the time my policy was to go to a class three times - for the first lecture, for the midterm, and for the final. The rest of the time I spent working on my own projects. I then went on to get a job for a couple of years, and by the time I decided to apply to grad school I was left with a 2.6 GPA and not a single professor who knew me enough to write a recommendation.

So I took three of the hardest graduate CS classes I could find as a "non-matriculated student" (basically no degree, you just pay as you go for "professional" education), got a 4.0 that semester, and got each one of the three professors to write me a recommendation. Next semester, I was in grad school.

I maintained 4.0 for one more semester, until it slipped to 3.9. I always proudly tell this story every time someone talks about undergraduate GPA as a predictor of anything. (Actually, I would much rather hire people with a low undergrad GPA that shot up in grad school, than a high GPA all around).
She does what she hates
Here in The Netherlands, downloading a data file with your data for their tax application is possible since last year. The application even encourages it. On top of that, there has also been a Linux version for the past three years :)
Bowtie - An ultrafast memory-efficient short read aligner for DNA sequencing
Yep, it does.
Lots? Can you name a few beyond Black-Scholes that are applicable to derivatives trading? From looking at the list of Nobel prize winners, I can't.

Interestingly, in a course on statistical physics, the prof showed that by performing the correct transformations on the central equation of the Black-Scholes model, you can actually reduce it to a plain diffusion equation. He wondered whether it was reasonable to hand out a Nobel prize for that.
Humans looking for extraterrestrial intelligence might be looking for intelligence "similar" to humans, but might not "mega-intelligences" also be looking for things similar to what spawned them (i.e. similar to human level intelligences)?
The submission could also be counted as an automatic upvote, achieving the same effect, while still allowing tightening of the duplication detection algorithm. One article with two votes is better than two articles with one vote. For low numbers of votes, I guess it shouldn't matter the first few votes are old.
Disappointed to see the 'type' command didn't work.
To the best of my understanding, the difference between "homosexual" and "faggot" is about the difference between "African-American" and "nigger".

Objectively, the meaning is the same; but you wouldn't use the first to insult someone, and you wouldn't use the second in a policy document.
Good luck with redistributing that ffmmpeg-linked build of Chromium.

Or do you think that end-users are going to compile their browser?
Artwork selling itself on eBay
Every time I see a story like this, I wonder how much we are being held back by the fact that it's hard to get several such projects to combine their efforts. Isn't that an awful waste?
Although I like the minimal setup i.e. just a bookmarklet, I don't see why I would ever use this over ubiquity. Perhaps browser-independence? If that's your thing, I'd recommend http://queri.ac which has plenty more features:

* users can subscribe to public commands

* commands have optional query history

* public user, command, query pages

* command tagging

* commands have a powerful set of options, just like in a commandline, which map to url parameters: http://queri.ac/options_tutorial

For more sites that have been doing web commands for years: http://delicious.com/tag/site:type=cmd
I think that limitation would become a major bottleneck long before you reach Dyson sphere size. Internode communication is already the major bottleneck for modern supercomputers, which limits the possibly achievable computational speed for every problem except for strictly parallellizable problems that do not require such internode communication.
Where can I find information about this hotline? I did a quick google for "national tax hotline" but nothing came up...
That's too bad. It means you're giving information about yourself to whoever's running quixapp.com
Stay Safe from Flu and Colds at Walks, Exercisers Less Likely to Catch Colds
The point of the article really is about creating more inventors/innovators and the author tries to use Jobs as the personification of innovator.

Even though the article makes some good points and I agree with the spirit of Friedman's suggestions, the actual results of any of his suggestions would not come about for 8-12 years.

Instead, by focusing more on the green energy economy that is clearly showing a rising demand, the US can be well positioned to take advantage of a bigger wave.

Going deeper into the specific policies, decisions and attention focus of Obama would likely take the discussion here in a clearly political & polarizing direction so I'll end right here.
Certificate Authority provides free certificates
Examples of using Ruby Splat(*) Operator
A lot of folks on here are saying that this is cool but useless because there are better ways to click a button on a screen. If you read through their paper (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/projects/sikuli/sikuli-uist2...) you'll find more practical examples of what can be done with this type of system.

One such example is to track real time images of a webcam pointed at a baby and using Sikuli to watch for a yellow dot placed on the baby's forehead. Another is to track movements of something across the screen; in this case a bus moving along Google maps.

I agree that there are better ways to do most of the things in their examples and that they should probably re-work their videos a bit, but just because this system doesn't solve your problems the way you want it to doesn't mean its useless.
The current open source managed OSes are really very different from each other, with only small bits of overlap. You really only have a few contenders at the moment: SharpOS, Cosmos, and Renraku. Of those, SharpOS (GPLv3) and Cosmos (BSD) are C#, and Renraku (CDDL) is Boo.

SharpOS's goals were never particularly clear (they seemed to be building a full OS), but the project seems to be largely dead; they're now a part of MOSA (I'll get to that part in a moment) though, so I'm curious to see where that goes. Cosmos is making progress, but it's not intended as an OS, but rather a set of components you can connect together to make your own OS. Renraku is still fairly new (about 7 months old now, although it's fairly far along) and is intended to be a full OS, when all is said and done.

MOSA is the Managed Operating Systems Alliance, and originally was intended to be a compiler (JIT and AOTC) and a set of specifications for managed OSes to work together. However, at this point they're building their own default kernel into it. Interestingly, they're diverging greatly from the existing managed OSes by using separate address spaces.

At this point, the field is young enough that I think the more people trying things in different directions, the better. There are a lot of unanswered questions, but the more approaches people try to take, the better off we'll all be.

I will say that the primary reason that Renraku is not MOSA-based (despite me being involved in the very early days there (although I didn't end up doing much)) is that they're solely C#-focused, like SharpOS and Cosmos. Renraku is pure Boo, which gives us a flexibility that's we believe to be impossible using C#. Even though we have to do many things ourselves, we think this gives us an advantage that will carry us through to v1 in a few months, and a usable managed OS in 2011.
Pretty much the same in Sweden. But we can make corrections online on most parts; securities, real estate, deductions etc.
Magic wand bomb detector deemed fraudulent, inventor imprisoned
1. My primary phone is a Nexus One, I switched from a first generation iPhone. I still have it but I'm not writing iPhone apps at the moment.

2. It's a free app so sales aren't a factor. I did get an email from somebody who liked it about 10 minutes after it popped up in the market, so there are at least some users out there.

3. The built-in widgets are fine for my purposes, although I only needed a few buttons and a text view. For testing I set up a bunch of virtual devices in the emulator with different screen sizes and OS versions, and I didn't have any problems. I was able to stick to Android's layout managers which do a decent job of adapting to different resolutions. (And I'll be interested to see how Apple deals with future higher-resolution devices, since most iPhone UIs use absolute pixels).

This is just a hobby for me so I have the luxury of focusing on what I enjoy more, which is Android by quite a bit. Of course if I had a plan for an app that I expected to make a lot of money, I'd have to go with the iPhone.
I haven't pre-ordered, but was planning to buy one once they actually started shipping. I don't care at all about any advanced features -- just basic reporting and whether it will be able to wake me up at an opportune moment each morning.

It isn't entirely clear to me at this point whether I'll be able to do that without paying a monthly fee. It sounds likely that this may be possible, but I'd prefer to be sure before I buy.

Hopefully their website will clarify what is free and what is not before they begin shipping devices.
I don't see how you seem to equate users data, with source code. The two are entirely different things.
I attended a lecture about this at Oxford. It has also been done for Britain's railway system and came quite close to the post-Beeching layout.
HN Meetup Tel Aviv
> it looks like each cell (or region of cells) maintains a count of how many generations have passed,

Hah!

That's exactly what I came up with :)

I finished it at 5 am this morning and it works.

The code is here: http://ww.com/asynclife.php.txt

Thanks for the other papers, I'll be reading.

edit:

I've written a blog post about all this:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/asynchronous+life

I can't read the IEEE paper without paying for it, so I think I'll forego the honour of doing so, pity because I would like to see what they came up with exactly.

Especially whether or not they clued in to the fact that if you have a 'generation' counter you only need the lower two bits of it to keep going forever.
I did too :)
I have flash lite on my shitty noname nokia I bought for 20 eur, I can play youtube videos on webpages, and it even played some flash games I made with HaXe. I am certain iPhone has much better cpu than this ordinary phone, so I don't see technical merits in apple's decision but exclusiveness and closing itself in walled garden.

same for java btw..
The only difference between what they're doing and what every other SSL issuer is doing already is 20 bucks. A cheap-o certificate from GoDaddy or your favorite reseller does no more than validate domain ownership by e-mail as this freebie does.
I tried to get a certificate for my own domain name, but I was not allowed to create an account "pending verification". So really, maybe this is not as easy as the article suggests.
That would be the whole point.
Shit, I upvoted you by mistake ... now I have to give a response.

> Ok, why the poison? Maybe the owner simply wanted to do something cool.

So doing something cool means intruding on other people's rights? The threshold must be getting really low these days.

Really, people should start paying attention to the online world, and what does "property" mean in such a context.

And if your online presence on a social network is so fragile (since, after all, Facebook is a business and the users don't really have lots of implicit rights) ... than there should be national campaigns against it (after all, your online profile being mismanaged could cause some people more harm than smoking, so why the discrimination?) ... not to mention that people think of Facebook as a "common carrier" which couldn't be further from the truth.

Isn't it easier to just play nice and stop acting like a douche bag?

> It's an URL, not a wife.

It isn't just any URL, it's the link to your online profile. Your friends might have you bookmarked, Google might have you indexed by that URL.

It's like saying domain names like "sex.com" aren't worth anything. Well they do.
Or starting notepad.
Pasword haking Downloads - AppHit.com
This would be a dream-like scenario for Germany.
Here you have to fill out all the fax forms you get sent (empty) and include copies of all receipts. This includes receipts of your payroll, earnings from bank accounts, etc. They have a new software so that you can submit your tax return online but there is nothing pre-filled unfortunately.
"We should institutionalize that somehow."

Everybody should have at least 10000 followers on Twitter.
New Website for sharing IDE's themes and tweaks
A new website lunched, aimed for sharing the themes, plugins, macros and more, of your favorite IDE.
Dude, that advice worked, and it was cool. Thank you.

Also - Why's interview was quite mad, like Why.

Why, we miss you.
Yup. Hardly anything new here (besides, spammers can get SSL certificate from "regular" certificate authorities).

So basically that's the same that's CAcert.org has been doing - providing people the free alternative to expensive ones.
The article struck me as anti-intellectualism run amok. I didn't even see a hint of anything indicating that quants were especially to blame.