skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So... they're trusting information provided by the user's browser (referral links, cookies, javascript... whatever) to determine whether or not the article should be displayed to the user....

This makes me want to pat the NYT on the head and tell them how adorable they are.

The fact that they're 1+ years away from implementing this may indicate that they have some knowledge about how technologically stupid this idea is, but are hoping that investors don't figure that out.
It isn't clear from the article but based on the newsgroup name this talk was part of a sci-fi convention. Should we assume that HN readers share language characteristics (and maybe cultural interests) with sci-fi fans?

I would think so, but maybe there's self-selection bias involved.
Good points. I think including Jack Dorsey in the meaningful success category suggests the OP was a bit wooly-headed. Unless I missed the news of Twitter's exit.
Very young in fact -- I think I remember reading an article that claimed that very young babies could "read" facial expressions, at least in the happy-versus-sad sense.

I can't find any references to it online in the thirty seconds or so I'm willing to spend on it, but I did find:

http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2009/11/10/bosto...

...which says that babies start learning facial expressions at 6 months of age.

Autism is different though; it's not just a lack of ability, but a lack of interest. I distinctly remember reading that, for example, during a movie where the scene is primarily depicting two people talking, a "normal" person will watch the faces of the actors, while the "autistic" subject would tend to focus on the light switch in the background. I doubt this is universal, and the article may have even been about one person in particular, but at this point correlations between autism and difficulty with interpersonal emotional interpretation are accepted as generally true.

...I think this has an interesting, though probably coincidental, consequence: sci-fi shows and movies tend to focus much more heavily on objects and technology than faces and acting.
What does anonymous mean? ie. Do you keep a log of IP addresses tied to the content uploaded, and where are the servers located?
On the other hand, I'm not sure how much they care if they don't get to monetize the audience of people technical enough to forge a referrer (or even use an extension that does it for you). I suspect pretty much no one on HN even remembers what the web looked like pre-AdBlock, but it hasn't actually killed web advertising.
Typical geek response. :-) How long would you like to debate this, and to what end?
Even if you are rich, case law alone is so onerously large that perusing it and studying it would take a lifetime. I spent about ten minutes trying to find out just how large the corpus of case law is, and could find no references.

Score one for the little guy, though: Google Scholar indexes (some; not sure how much of the corpus is covered) case law, as of Nov. 17, '09: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-gov...
His hack isn't about running commands inside Emacs, but Emacs in fullscreen mode and Emacs window management - and... Vim can do pretty much the same as what he shows in that blog post and in his screenshots.
I'm tremendously surprised by this (I don't doubt you're right, I've just never heard of it). I can't find any mention of this online, do you have a link where I could read about this?
Mendeley looks awesome. I didn't know I needed until I saw it, yet now that I've seen I realize it is exactly the sort of thing I've been looking for.
Yerli Diziler
Yerli diziler Pres. Barack Obama urged his audience at Washington's Vermont Avenue Baptist Church to "get back to basics" as Americans face the challenges of a new age
As the father of a geeky seven-year-old, the “struggling with turn-taking” section really hits me where I live. (Not that I ever exhibited such maladjusted behavior when I was seven, or seventeen, or thirty-seven. No, never! Well... hardly ever.)

A special-needs teacher at my son’s school has suggested that he get training in what’s called “social pragmatics”; this is an actual subfield of speech-language pathology that focuses on the social use of language as distinct from pronounciation, syntax, etc. We’re not convinced that he needs to spend 45 minutes a week focused on this subject, but other people might be interested in knowing that this kind of training exists.
While there is commonality, I have to say from experience Sci-Fi geeks and Computer Geeks are very different. Yes one interest overlaps the other but I find the "geek essence" (yes I just coined that) to be different.
You say that like it's bad. =)
I guess my point was that the fast languages are generally not the ones that are good for developing the fast algorithms. It is harder to experiment in a language like C than it is in a language like lisp or perl.

The other thing to point out is that there is no reason for memory usage, concurrency or speed to be problems in dynamic languages. These are all issues with the implementations of compilers/interpreters that we are using.

It just so happens that dynamic languages have only recently come back into vogue, and we have forgotten (at least in ruby and python) all of the work that was done to create efficient implementations of dynamic languages.

Examples being how well Lisp stacked up against C as early as the 80-90s, projects like StrongTalk, stack based languages like forth... the multitude of papers on efficient scheme implementations.

Dynamic languages were declared 'slow' and therefore were dumped in favor of C by most programmers. This has caused a gap in the knowledge that we have about implementing dynamic languages. Which is a shame, because there is a lot out there for us to relearn.
I really wish Drupal had a design team capable of making things as attractive as Wordpress.com. Why didn't they get one of the big Drupal graphic designers, like Acko, on this?
A Pilgrimage to SkyMall
Internet Wideband Audio Codec WG approved
Can Movie Computer Screens Help Us Design Better User Interfaces?
Very true.

It seems like the bank has a security system in place whereby only authorize computers with credentials may log in - not just a username and password. These computers need access to the accounts to be enabled by the bank, initiated by an email.

The fraudster spoofed Hillary's email address from IP addresses located in Romania and Italy. You would think the bank would have an adequate verification process (and done their due dilligence, such as a phone call) to determine that these emails were spoofed - red flags should have been going up everywhere.

If this is the state of security at that bank, keeping your money there is about as safe as keeping it in a suitcase on the street corner. All you've got going for you is security by obscurity.
Apple Before a Launch: "It Can Be a Little Frightening"
Sharp Solar Hybrid SH6230C cell phone heads to China
Now an easy to remember domain name and you're good to go!
edit: http://tinyurl.com/givemyip
Schneier: Scanning Cargo for Nuclear Material and Conventional Explosives
With a heavy heart, I'm deleting my bookmark to http://www.moanmyip.com/
Code Contracts seem rather silly. C#/VB is statically typed, no? Method contracts should be implicit in the method declaration, then.

Granted, this gives you more control over what literal values may be passed to a method. But isn't that (part of) what exceptions are for? What additional value do these add?
http://whatismyip.org has an easy-to-remember URL and no crap either.
Dear Silicon Valley: Stay out of My Car
HTTPbis
We (Songkick, yc s2007) have a floor of a warehouse just up the road from Silicon Roundabout. There are about 8 startups based at our place (including Habit Industries, also yc s2007).
This post gives a really measured, non-sensatinal view of what it's like to start up in London. We're really enjoying building Songkick here.. It's changed for the better even in the two years we've been starting up.
Btw - we have deskspace going at our place - see here: http://www.gumtree.com/london/17/50884217.html
http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/frantic_steve_jo...

"Frantic Steve Jobs Stays Up All Night Designing Apple Tablet

CUPERTINO, CA—Claiming that he completely forgot about the much-hyped electronic device until the last minute, a frantic Steve Jobs reportedly stayed up all night Tuesday in a desperate effort to design Apple's new tablet computer. "Come on, Steve, just think—think, dammit—you're running out of time," the exhausted CEO said as he glued nine separate iPhones to the back of a plastic cafeteria tray. "Okay, yeah, this will work. This will definitely work. Just need to write 'tablet' on this little strip of masking tape here and I'm golden. Oh, come on, you piece of shit! Just stick already!" Middle-of-the-night sources reported that Jobs then began work on double-spacing his Keynote presentation and increasing the font size to make it appear longer."
Drupal hosting has been around for years hasn't it? Most shared hosting services seem to have one click installs.
Except, of course, for all the computer geeks that are also sci-fi geeks.

looks around his office
http://whatismyip.org/

A bit easier to spell/remember.
Fulltime about eighteen months. We were one of the winners at Mini Seedcamp London last year.
The American Dream Need Not Be Realized in America
Presumably the victim's credentials (likely just a password or PIN, and possibly the proper response to a "secret question") were obtained with a trojan keylogger or some other means. The question is who's fault is that? Not really the bank's. The bank's claim that they honored a properly authenticated transaction is not completely unreasonable.

What the court is really being asked to decide is whether simple password authentication is "reasonably secure." What are the alternatives? Seems that they'd have to use a physical smart card or fob device to generate one-time passwords, or use an alternate communication channel (email? SMS?) to verify that the authorized user is attempting to authenticate. Any of which substantially decreases the perceived usability of the system by a typical business customer.
>Has Goldman Sachs ever missed an interest payment or otherwise failed to met a financial obligation?

No they got bailed out before they had to. A luxury that no homeowner who defaults has yet seen.
Fresh perspective from inside the GFW. The picture painted reminds me of V for Vendetta. Censors monitoring everything. A government stretched thin to protect its hold over the people.
How could outsiders help from home?
I suspect the end result of lawsuits such as this will be more legislation, especially if they are ruled in favor of the banks.
The article mentions that the bank had gotten requests to register two new computers for the company that was sent from the company's internal email. This makes me think that their bank credentials weren't the only thing compromised. This in turn suggests that the company's security practices could be improved.
Ubuntu is switching the default search from Google to Yahoo
Such vulnerabilities still exist in PHP, Python and Ruby, because they are written in C. And they are much easier to exploit because almost every web app uses one of these languages.
Thanks, you're an excellent writer, I'm looking forward to your next contribution.
Every conversation has a limited bandwidth, and the participants usually have a shared understanding—an agenda—of what topics constitute an appropriate use of that bandwidth. When you say something that goes beyond that agenda, even if what you say is true, you risk annoying the other participants, not just because you’re injecting noise into the communications channel, but because you’re asserting a right to change the agenda of the conversation. If you do this often enough, they are more likely to come away with the impression that you’re arrogant and rude than remember your corrections to their false understandings of the world.
That's what I was thinking. For example if it recognized that you were holding up two fingers in a "V" for victory it would show a little on-screen message (e.g. "Ready for input"). I'd love to be able to give a middle finger salute to my TV and have it understand that I NEVER want to see this program again.
I've bought two solar chargers in the past, and neither worked on my iPhone, although they did work on other phones. The way I understand it, the 300-500mA output of this and other compact solar devices just doesn't cut the mustard with the iPhones, which have a current requirement above standard USB specs. If I'm wrong, and/or you know of a pocket-sized solar charger that'll do the trick, do let me know.
China is slapping western companies in the face while laughing. They're such a huge market, even though these companies disagree with their rules, they still want in and will do things they otherwise would not do. Their greed is getting the better of them.
It looks like a fairly powerful static analysis framework, well beyond what the C# type system can prove. Not sure what exactly it can do, but the static checker dialog box allows you to enable:

Implicit Non-Null Obligations
Implicit Arithmetic Obligations
Implicit Array Bounds Obligations
Redundant Assumptions

If it can do a good job of checking these statically, I'm impressed!
Being from another continent, i don't even get why is even necessary to catalog people (and sometimes how it could be done) either in the geek or non-geek category.
Each one of us should have a multi-faceted personality that makes hardly possible to confine ourself in whatever definition we apparently seems to adhere to.
I don't use AdBlock. I use a popup blocker, but I think if I am looking at a website I should at least give them the basic revenue of viewing the advertizing. Sometimes I even click on one if I am feeling generous to the content holder. It's much the same with authors, when buying a book I like to click the link Amazon.com from their website because it maximizes their revenue.

PS: The problem with the newspaper model is it provides so little value. In the old days they survived on advertizing but there are far more locations for advertizing now, so the pay is far lower. Take the Haiti incident, there was a 7.0 earthquake which killed or injured a lot of people and destroyed most of their infrastructure. All the important information in an SMS post and everything after that point is just entertainment.
Original article linked here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1080459
http://www.drupalgardens.com/create-site

Firefox 3.0 or higher required.

Firefox version 3.0 or higher is required to use the Drupal Gardens beta. While support for other browsers is coming soon, for now Firefox provides the optimum Drupal Gardens experience.

:(
Yes. And such systems make the first click very easy. Unfortunately, the second and subsequent clicks remain notoriously difficult.

Gardens is an attempt to address issues beyond that first click.
The big advantage to code contracts is that they prevent null reference exceptions at compile time. Catching potential problems at compile time via static checking is preferable than throwing an exception at runtime. Your code is more resilient to bad data.

Having a formal checking mechanisms like code contracts also helps tools like Pex generate better sets of test inputs for automated unit testing.
The path to something great will be littered with people who don't like you.
Isn't this just an ego related thing common to every human? Showing to the world that you know better?
This is absolutely the case.

I'm now used to first class functions, currying, etc. C++ actually has them, hidden in the stl and boost::function. Whatever I can't do using those, I can usually do by creating a family of classes which only implement operator() (I've only needed to do this once or twice, and it might have been avoidable).

Due to using a language with native dicts (and syntactic sugar), they are now part of my vocabulary. This means I immediately reach for std::map or boost::unordered_map when it makes sense.

Similarly, python generators and haskell lazy lists have made view sequences as reasonable objects to generate and iterate over. Custom iterators are just the same thing with added verbosity.

If I never used higher level languages, I'd still be treating C++ as C with objects.
I will make 100 redesigns because I'm sick of startups
It was also a summary of the direct observations of a field professional in a large group of subjects.
Ah, but i do find the speed test available at http://www.whatismyip.com/ useful.
As satire, it's not particularly funny. I think that's what probably threw some folks off the scent.
My bank wouldn't let 1% of that money to leave my account without calling me to verify.

Some banks even send clients an SMS after each transaction, just in case.

So in this case, because of the amount, I think it was really the bank's fault.
How is the iPhone not a tablet?
No it's not unreasonable that they honoured the transaction. However my bank, HSBC, required me to call and contact them to make debit withdrawals over $400 when outside the country. Their approval period only lasts for 6 months (the length of time you're legally allowed to stay in most foreign countries) before renewing it.

At the time I also had to clarify that I would be making wire transfers to a foreign account. I believe my parents had to do the same from their bank when they transferred over 10K into their own foreign account.

Why UK banking has these protocols in place for consumers that are far likely to transfer money over seas is bizarre if they're not in place for business. However, this could likely be due to different banking regulations. I know I've heard people being warned against getting US bank accounts here in Canada, they recommend getting a US-Dollar account with international transaction fees waved as you're money is, allegedly, a lot safer.
http://myip.dk/ is short and simple.
Ask HN: Good books for starting functional programming?
My girlfriend is interested in learning FP. She has written in C and Java and does not like object-oriented programming (it's awesome having a smart girlfriend). I bought her The Little Schemer and SICP. Are these good books for getting a start in functional programming?
It's a great idea in theory, the problem is that corporate designs go through ten different committees each wanting something different, so you end up with an unusable mess.
Not supporting WebKit (even for an alpha release) is pretty poor form.
Python C extension modules can release the GIL while they're running which allows for true concurrency. See this Google code search http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=python.org+lang%3Ac+Py_BE... for example usage.
The $62 million sale of a touch tech startup adds to the Tablet revolution
Very interesting.

This is from 10 years ago... has anyone else heard Karyn Ashburn lecture, seen a video, or read a book by her since then?
Wow, where are you at?

It sounds like you are hearing a lot of pro-Google sentiment, but here in Ningbo, all I get from people is anger. Curiously enough, the anger is not about Google or the censors, but it seems more about the West 'trying to push China around...' or 'trying to keep China down...'

So much so that I've learned to avoid even remotely political conversations with people here.

Maybe I should start hanging out with more English speakers, but then I wouldn't be able to learn as much of the language.

Sigh...
A Closer Look at Haiti Quake Survivor’s Use of Tech
From the article:

Here's a picture of George W Bush using the signature gesture of the Texas Longhorn football team, of which he is a supporter. The index finger and little finger represent the horns of the bull and this football gesture is recognized by most Americans.

In Italy this gesture is known as the 'Cuckold' and is used to tell a man that other men are screwing his wife. In 1985, five Americans were arrested in Rome for jubilantly dancing and using this gesture outside the Vatican following the news of a major Longhorns win in the USA.
Principal component analysis at it's best. Works awfully well on most machine learning problems. Often PCA is not just enough by itself, so you run it before you run a more sophisticated algorithm (say k-Nearest-Neighbors, or Support Vector Machines). It helps in reducing the training time and execution time of those algorithms.
I have to disagree with the age fetishization in this article. You hear the same thing about math and the creative arts, especially in popular depictions: that a mathematician or artist is "dead" by age 30.

It's not true. Creatives of all stripes (mathematicians, painters, poets, entrepreneurs) peak between 45 and 55. The ones who peak at 25 are extreme outliers.
There's still no reason to limit post size because Twitter does - title and shortened URL to the original post works fine.
They are presumably trying to set precedence. The East Texas District Court is notorious for upholding software patents, this is the area where many patent trolls have set up shop. It wouldn't surprise me if the bank thinks that it will have a good chance of being favored in the case, and because it's a federal court, a ruling could have a much wider reaching impact.
An amazing website - great design and easy to use.
Incredibly helpful.
Thanks Dynamic50!
I for one think gestures are overrated, and that includes OS X and iPhone. I can remember pinch to zoom and swipe to scroll - that's it. There is no way to even guess what else might be available. Certainly I don't want to memorize a couple of gestures just to be able to operate my TV.
I am a student in art school, but I work in a machine learning research lab. I talk to hip people half the day, and nerds the other half. I hope (at least in part) that I've managed to pick up a little of both dialects.

I think that the point about speaking the written word is an excellent one. My nerd socialization as a young adult came almost entirely in text. I became used to the way that punctuation, flow, phrase length, and formatting communicated. Particularly when writing comments or IMing, it is fantastically important to be able to convey tone. If I'm sarcastic and you can't tell, I may ruin the conversation. When I'm talking about computer science, I end up using those skills more than the usual nonverbal cues.

I'd also make a point about eye-contact: it's really hard to think while making eye contact. When a "fan" talks, they let the eyes wander so that they can think. When listening, they focus the gaze to prevent internal dialogue from getting in the way of hearing.

Or maybe we're just awkward. Hard to say.
There was a study that indicated the average age for peak scientific productivity in Nobel Prize winners was 27.

So while not dead at 30, if you haven't completed your magnum opus by then you are doomed to also-ran status, at least in the hard-intellectual fields.
When it comes to startups, products and services don't mix
Look at the headline of the article. Cringely knows it's a goof.
Nonsense. Just because the Python interpreter is written in C does not mean that you can overrun Python strings and smash the stack like you can w/ C strings.
Exactly.

I have a strong aversion to intruding on someone else's consciousness -- breaking their concentration, or interrupting a task in progress with non-critical communication. Over the phone, I have no way to see what you're doing, so I cannot determine the degree to which I am intruding in your intellectual space. Hence I view the phone as an inherently high priority medium and use it sparingly. I will only call you if I have something so important to say that I would have been willing to interrupt whatever you might be doing. And I will be brief.

This behavior is forced on me by my notions of courtesy. But I am aware that it sends all kinds of incorrect signals to my mother . . .
The meaning of Twitter followers (or lack thereof)