skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The actual article (linked and quoted in the BoingBoing one) goes into the connection in much more depth, pulling quantum mechanics and the Big Bang into the mix:

http://forgetomori.com/2009/science/folding-the-yoshimoto-cu...
Google Cluster Data
Sure, crap only wins in the short term and psychologically speaking the last 10 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

I have a coat older than Google. I have drill press older than the entire internet. I have books that predate the transistor.

This is all new and we are just barely coming to terms with a giant sea change in every industry and cultural institution.

We need more ideas and techniques to try, old ones, new ones and everything in between.
I find the fact that the name of the wolf is "Ossian" kind of fascinating because that's also the name of a fabricated poet from the 18th century:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossian

It's like they specifically named the wolf (tongue in cheek) to do fabrications.
Recycling is not reasonable where I live ( even if I want local trash pickup I have to pay a company that isn't the city), but throwing out and recycling should be synonomous where recycling is popular or common.
Thank you! It is a feature of FlowPlayer.

We will improve the home page so that one of the videos plays back automatically. Thanks for the idea.
I'm not sure why you chose to pick on a single word in my comment above which is clearly not relevant to the main point. You have failed to address my main main point, which I'll restate here:

People are outraged by this for a perfectly good reason. The penalty seems too large for the deed. This is not simply a case of those-entitled-kids thinking that they deserve to be able to steal music for free; this is a reasonable response where someone is being bankrupted for the moral equivalent of speeding.
Wow. Yes.
> A few dynamite and ball bearing bombs dropped in trash cans in the food court could probably get you into the hundreds pretty quick.

Indeed - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bombings_during_the_Nor...
This hack has been received with more enthusiasm than many of my better-engineered features.
A "Standard" to rule them all is probably a bad idea here, but I agree that PDF is really not appropriate for any data you'd like to process further.

The datasets can really vary in terms of characteristics, so while XML might make sense for one, CSV might be completely appropriate for another. And that's perfectly OK with me, so long as they document the fields and how to parse it.
After we built StimulusWatch, we waited patiently for data.gov to arrive, and quite honestly it was shameful from day one. No other site is needed to shame data.gov. :-/
Maybe not, but they're closely connected. Kurzweil's methodology, from what I vaguely remember of reading his books years ago, is to take his extrapolation of Moore's law, and apply it to non-CPU things. This is sane, because to get a Singularity, you need those non-CPU things - you can't build a Singularity just because you suddenly have a bunch of exaflops; we just don't have the software.

If computing power keeps growing, but we aren't getting actual new benefits out of it, then that does drastically affect the accuracy of the 'overall' prediction.

(Even if we had literally infinite computing power, I don't know whether we could build an AI quickly; the theoretical models I've heard of like AIXI exist only as theorems, and though we would be able to brute-force the space of all possible programs, how would we know which one is the AI we want? This shows you that Moore's law likely is not the restraint on the Singularity.)
What I do is have a separate *_debug.html page, which loads the js files individually. I.e., I have a python build script that auto builds the main.html and main_debug.html from much smaller html, css and js files. This is particularly useful when debugging older versions of IE.
For the live non-debug version I also YUI-compress the concatenated js file.
Can you post a how-to? This would make a pretty great present.
More to the point, I'm curious if you priced out what a 250 square foot apartment in Mountain View would cost, if it's even available.

I'm not doing this to save money, though that will be a pleasant side effect. I wouldn't be willing to live in 250 square feet, if I couldn't consider the whole country my living room. I agonized over all of the stuff I've had to give up, and I'll probably do a post about it, entitled something cheeky like, "Remembrance of Things Past" or "Requiem for my Things".

The loophole isn't that it's super cheap to live in an RV (though I guess it can be); the loophole is that I get to travel all the time while living my mostly normal life, running my company, cooking in my own kitchen, sleeping in my own bed, etc. and as a huge bonus, I'll probably spend about $800 less each month on housing.
Precisely. This is nothing new. Go to a park with a dog or a guitar (that you can play, of course). See what happens versus going there to just take a walk.
My point is that the penalty sounds large for the "deed" in large part because the "deed" is so incredibly easy to do.

People had almost exactly the same complaints about sentencing during the Sun Devil era of computer security; hackers were just exploring, hadn't intended any harm, and surely hadn't cost millions in damages. Public opinion settled in the other direction.
I do not agree with this premises of copyright because it violate actual property right.

I believe that deontological ethical principles(In this case, libertarianism) override any utilitarian scheme to improve the economy.

However, I also found no evidence to suggest copyright and patent improve the economic wellbeing of civilizations. In fact, I feel confident enough to argue that copyright and patents harm economic progress.

While I am open to evidence that copyright and patent can improve the economic condition of men, but I am closed to ethical justification. Unless you can prove why copyright does not violate property rights, my opposition to copyright will remain stern.
Chess Intuition : The Frontal Cortex
See http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/07/harry-potter-and-digita... and search for "Recorder Identification Code". I don't know if there's a way to subvert this.
Since people are losing tort cases, I'm pretty sure the legitimacy of the word "damage" is a settled issue.
Lessons for U.S. Preparedness From Haiti Relief Efforts
If you have a single BSD server you're out of luck, but it might be worth it to get a small specialized server just for dropbox.
I'm viewing in Chrome 3.0 and haven't experienced any problems. I do not have silverlight installed at all.

Wouldn't that be ironic - If a large number of visitors were using Firefox, Safari & Chrome?
The Path to Rails 3: Introduction
These sorts of softened/smoothed functions are particularly useful in games and animation. I've personally used this function for animated sliding board game pieces in a 3D simulation. The piece launches from one square at full speed and then comes to a nice soft stop after some amount of time. Much more attractive.
Is Big Brother headed to the backcountry?
The Open Directory Project
(Short attention span version: Amazon is spooked.)

I see why: I just bought a Kindle because I'm in English grad school: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/18/buying-a-kindle-why-didnt-i-t... and realize that I'd rather have a Kindle than buy another ~$200 worth of Nortons and so forth. Two days of using it shows what the Kindle is missing: iTunes for documents, especially because .pdfs still don't play nicely on the Kindle. The closest substitute I've found is Calibre at http://calibre-ebook.com . It's not good enough or well-thought out enough and probably never will be. I'm tempted to start trying to produce an iTunes replacement, but I'm not good enough too.

This leaves a very wide hole for Apple, even leaving aside the hardware issue.
Does Google Dehumanize Intelligence?
[$669.5 million is] an attention-grabbing 275 percent
increase from the second quarter of 2008.

Anyone else get annoyed by this very useless factoid from the very first paragraph?

--

The movie industry has the very same problem. This summer's blockbuster movie is created. Unfortunately, screenings reveal that the movie is terrible and no one actually wants to see it. So what does the industry do? Spend millions on advertising, hoping for a very strong first weekend showing.

And, like the airlines in the story, they wonder why (Avatar aside) sales are falling flat.
KIPP?

Also, I'ma huge fan of the Underground History of American Education (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/)
I'd recommend adding a video tour. Right now I don't know exactly what it does without signing up and toying around with it.
The Truth About Robots and the Uncanny Valley
To borrow. He's married (Hence the dog. Dogs are like training wheels for people planning to have kids.).
Soldiers told to stop handing out food
I find the headline very disturbing.

It says "Obama" supports the verdict, when really it is Obama's administration. I am not a Washington insider but something tells me more likely than not, Mr Obama was not personally involved in this decision at all. He has more important things on his mind right now, and other fires to put out.

I worry a lot about how so many people think "I voted for Obama, ok he's in office, my job is done!" and then they sit there and do nothing and wait for Obama to pull off some magic and make the world good again. In the meantime the other side has a whole army of crazies pushing their agenda.
What's wrong is that the total cost isn't being disclosed up front. It's just like advertising "$10 iPod" and then charging $200 in shipping and handling.
The economics of the NYT paywall
Where the first chapter is free, so you can decide if you want to pay to get sucked further in.

Serialized works used to be one of the ways periodicals attracted readers (and advertisers).
"Does anybody care a damn what someone's sexual preferences are like?"

Who's the troll now? This discussion is clearly related to the article.
It seemed obvious to me in 1994 that Web content syndication was eventually going to be the answer to your question ("How can I afford to subscribe to 15 different providers?")

People laughed at me then, they laughed at me when I said it again around 2000, and they'll laugh at me now.... but that still doesn't change the fact that it needs to happen, and eventually will.

It could be that the coming wave of tablet/e-reader platforms will be the last piece of the syndication puzzle. It's a safe guess that the New York Times will have someone at the Apple event next week, pitching a subscription deal. If they offer me access to several other major metro papers/special-interest broadsheets along with that NYT subscription, they've got a deal.
As flipper points out, the problem is that the hard maximum is not differentiable; that is, the differential of max (x, y) is undefined when x == y. Most numerical approximation techniques require a smooth, differentiable function, so this is bad.

A related problem is that of bounding. Suppose I want to minimize the parameters in a set of nonlinear equations; I can numerically differentiate the equations to get the gradient and the Hamiltonian and then I can minimize that. But I may want to impose additional criteria, like x > 0. I could just say the function goes to some preposterously high number when x <= 0, but then we have this hard corner problem again. Instead if you use a continuous function like a logarithm to impose your bound, it affects the solution space minimally, makes for a solution that will not wander outside your bounds, and is differentiable.
Your argument is that the airlines had a prescient view that their revenues would decline relative to their competitors, and before that happened implemented baggage fees to partially offset that fall.

With natural experiments like this it's painful to disentangle cause and effect, but with the timing (fees, followed by revenue declines) I'm inclined to see the author's explanation of fees being a more likely cause.
My favorite piece of numerical linear algebra is the pseudospectrum. In some sense, this is a set that gives you an indication of whether your eigenvalue computations will be accurate or not. Understanding non-normal operators really requires an understanding of this object.

It also has a surprising connection to the local solvability of pdes and pseudodifferential operators by helping to construct quasimodes ("almost solutions").
When to let go. A decade with Travelstart.
Should have used ASP.NET MVC. It's wonderful. I'll never use ASP.NET forms again, unless I'm forced.
That chart looks a bit like a function approaching a chaotic phase transition aka singularity (which is hinted at in the last few grafs).
Censorship and Media In An Expanding Internet Population
Ask HN: About choosing a job
Hi, I'm currently looking for a job that suits me. My goal is to be a startup founder but I've some difficulties right now:

1) I don't have friends who want to do the same.
2) I'm a inexperienced programmer(actually learning Python/Django).
3) I don't know people with the same interests.

So I think a good job for me will be the one that helps me with the difficulties I've right now. I'm looking for Python/Django jr developers but in Buenos Aires there aren't too much places using the Python programming language.

Now I'm looking for an alternative. I don't know if a job in which I'll have to program in another language like Java, PHP, C# could help me in my goal.
Search has "issues" I wonder if the modern electronic card catalog has a place in the grand scheme of things.

I think search has made us lazy, I admit to typing a name into the search bar rather than typing the URL into the location bar even for simple .com addresses.

I have been trying to unlearn this behavior, by setting up and using bookmarks more effectively. If for no other reason than to avoid giving Google any more of my personal data and clogging up the internet with trivial requests.
To have strong feelings about what you want in a partner makes you misogynist?! This is too much.
You could, but would it have any effect? I'd like to see okcupid doing some controlled experiments and see if stuff like changing the photo to look into the camera works or if people don't look into the camera for another reason that correlates negatively with attraction.

The aspect of "signalling" how biological animals act a certain way to show abilities (i.e. stick out chest for masculinity) is interesting because there is so much room for cheating. I wonder if we are hard wired in a sense to only signal the truth or if there is a arms race going on between the cheaters and the evaluaters.
YouTube to Introduce Limited Film Rental Service
if everyone did it, there would be reduced incentive to create and hence a lower standard of living.

Let's not assume this either. Maybe this would result in more people who actually want to create, rather than doing it for the money, entering the industry. It would also avoid the middlemen who just skim off the top and don't add a lot of value.
Cisco Systems tests IP router in orbit
The point still stands that the life ban would not have been handed down if they had found he had broken the rules before awarding him the first prize. The life ban can only be to save face having erroneously awarded him the prize.
Thank you.

Yes, I must have yanked that from the documentary about Feynman called "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", which I saw when it first aired as an episode of NOVA in the 80s. I just looked it up because I haven't seen it since, and it's one of the first thing he mentions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srSbAazoOr8

I totally agree that Roissy (and especially his followers) take the linear dominance hierarchy all wrong.
How can that be? They have socialized medicine!

The Heritage Foundation praising Canada: the mind boggles.
Serving better ads in Gmail
It was too much for the OpEd writers, too; they don't like being locked inside a paywall any more than the rest of us like being locked outside of one.
Um, no.

Some of these "datasets" are links to web sites: http://data.gov.uk/dataset/england-national-crime-mapping

Some are applications based on UK data which are run by non-governmental organizations or individuals:
http://data.gov.uk/apps/post-box-finder-0

It's unfortunate RWW chose to take a confrontational and disparaging tone about US open data efforts. The US provides a vast amount of open, public domain, datasets.
If copyright contracts naturally occur in a free market, than I am willing to concede that.

However, it seem to me that copyright has power to reach third-parties, not those who are originally involved in an transaction between authors and buyers.
How is giving people the option to make things public disrespectful?
I can has rss feed?
It's worth noting in this context that the poster, Christian, is probably OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder, who has a math degree from Harvard. So I'd guess the results are pretty solid, though I agree it would be nice to see the raw data as well.
Can someone explain why proprietary vendors are trying to pick up open source clients? It seems like an odd form of advertising.
> children under 8 should be automatically de-selected

"should" doesn't matter if SOP is that they are.

> there is a redress option in place for those that are afraid they may have a similar name.

That's the claim, but the folks involved say that the redress option doesn't actually work.
Why exactly does Kinsella's political philosophy matter? He is upfront about what he believes, so I don't think he's trying to deceive anyone. I also don't think that his political orientation means anything "from a legal perspective." Meaningful patent reform would almost certainly take place in Congress, not in the courts.

Also, although you may still believe that his conclusions are fanciful, I think Kinsella is actually trying to be practical. Instead of arguing that IP shouldn't exist at all, he is advocating specific reforms that he believes would reduce the net costs of our patent system to society. I don't find his suggestions fanciful, because the US has already moved in the direction Kinsella advocates for at least patent publications.
Well, it's not like I know that for a fact, but I don't know why they would make their user count seem less impressive than it is. If they were just counting active users, they'd almost certainly say "4 million active users" very clearly.
Thanks a lot for your feedback Matt. It is very interesting and valuable. I can tell you know a lot about the industry and how it deals with OTAs.

First of all, LetMeGo is not only about low prices: it's about offers customized for each traveler depending on his/her needs (VentureBeat nailed it down here: http://bit.ly/5vioZZ ). Nevertheless, given that LetMeGo's pricing is "semiopaque" (the bids submitted by the lodging are ONLY visible to the traveler that submitted the itinerary), we think that some lodgings will offer prices below what they publish in CHAINWEBSITE.COM. This would be relatively similar to the way hotels do with other opaque-pricing service like Priceline and Hotwire that allow them to forget about parity. Time will tell if this assumption is correct.

By the way, we are not counting on large chains for our success. In fact, we want to work primarily with independent and small hotels, bed and breakfasts, and the large vacation rental market. Our system has been designed with them in mind first. Why? Because this area of the industry has a lot of potential that hasn't been discovered yet, and because I am against large corporations with too much power.

In reference to the chicken/egg dilemma, we have secured access to large databases of lodgings. We are inviting them all to list their lodgings for free using a very intuitive interface. They will only pay us a 10% commission per booking after they get paid.

We are staying away from the GDSs for now because most independent lodgings don't use them (outside the US independent lodgings account for more than 80% of the market). Also, because our service, as I mentioned above, is about custom offers and service, and not only about real-time and the-lowest pricing.

I had the "pleasure" of chatting with the VPs of Revenue Management of two of the largest hotel chains in the US and in the world. As you predicted in your comments, they didn't like LetMeGo's model. That, for me, was a good sign.

Thank you Matt!
Since the fees are advertised (though not included in the fare), I don't think you can say that the total cost isn't being disclosed. Anyone who has traveled since early 2008 is presumably factoring the baggage fees into the cost of their travel (as I do).

What's really irritating (to me) is passengers who are using advanced check-in so they can go directly to the gate -- with their oversize bag in tow. Once there, they are told they will have to gate check the bag but most airlines don't seem to be charging for gate checked bags. I don't care about the airlines losing the revenue, but I do care about the hold-ups and hassles it causes during boarding.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1066008
Correlation is not causation.

The two airlines that still don't charge for luggage (Southwest and JetBlue) are the ones that have no union workforce, no pension liabilities, and in the case of JetBlue, new and fuel-sipping planes.
Mac-specific, but cool. http://developer.apple.com/hardwaredrivers/

I've been working against IOKit lately.
Interesting. When I get back to a fast connection I'll track that down. Thanks.
Why does it seem unlikely? It could be that he is using these technologies purely out of personal interest.
First twitter and now a website?

Looking over the content on the site I was depressed by all the philanthropy and environmentalism. Not that these aren't good things but I think Bill has been so successful at building software and corporations that his time would be better used teaching people these things.

Imagine the articles and insight we could get if he would convert into someone like Paul Graham.
The passengers gate checking bags aren't entirely innocent in the inconvenience caused, but I think the majority of the blame belongs on the airlines for trying to wring every last cent out of passengers.
Awesome, thanks Tony!

I find when a person at company X is on HackerNews, company X is pretty good.

I'm going to give CBT a go.
If you've ever looked at hunting magazines this happens a lot. Hunters use light triggered shutters and flashes for scouting purposes.

http://www.cabelas.com/trail-cameras-1.shtml
Because Facebook know very well that people don't read things, they should but they don't, and they take advantage of this. The point is it shouldn't default to public (which it does if you've never touched your privacy settings which previously defaulted to public).
It's really easy to shoplift too - just like shopping without waiting in line. I don't see any reason to think the ease of doing something makes people forgive it. Maybe that's a small contributing factor? Seems unlikely to me, since there are so many "easy" crimes that are not forgiven.

It seems much more likely to me that it provokes outrage to penalize highly because it's widespread and laws against it are mostly unenforced. And if that's the case, the analogy with computer hacking is invalid, because only a tiny minority of Americans would even know how to crack a computer.

Other widespread, generally unpenalized acts-for-which-you-might-be-penalized-by-the-courts (hereafter "acts")[1] provoke outrage when they are enforced with heavy penalties, Other easy-to-commit acts are heavily penalized and provoke no outrage. Therefore, it seems to me your analogy is suspect.

1) Better than "deeds"? You threw scare quotes on that word for some reason. I'd rather just call them crimes, but I don't want to provoke an argument over the word.
"Dropbox couldn't do that because each user would be searching a different data set (their own files)."

I don't really understand the claim here: they'd have fewer machines but also far fewer users and a much smaller (collection of) datasets.