skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree with the thrust of Kurzweil's criticism, there are a couple of things he missed.

First, I too was disappointed by the simple, anti-corporate picture it painted. But it wasn't 100% black-and-white. There was a short scene in which Ribisi's character is reluctant to attack, and the army guy bullies him into it. I think the story would have benefited greatly just by expanding and amplifying that scene (although it was already a rather long movie).

Kurzweil criticizes that the technology a century hence ought to be more advanced. He says the only revolutionary thing shown in the movie is the avatar tech itself. First, he misses the obvious fact of star travel and the hibernation that it relied on.

But more significantly, I think he misses that while things advance, the form they take tends to ape what we're used to. Thus, our automobiles are very much "horseless carriages". Tablet computers are named that for their resemblance to zillion-year-old stone tablets. Since the tech in the movie was largely part of the scenery and not really highlighted, I think it's entirely to be expected that we wouldn't recognize how advanced it is.
How to strengthen willpower
guys (of airbnb) .... notice how anyone who writes about you uses AirBnB, rather than airbnb? I've mentioned before, no one understands airbnb. Its illegible / unreadable, and has no meaning.

Time to grow up and have a corp. identity?
I'm not musical to any extent and I don't even own an iPhone (N1 here), but I'd love to play with this app after watching this tutorial. I will be recommending the app to a few of my musical friends.
Who needs record labels?
What is wrong with people here? They lack any sense of humor. Besides, this guy is making money selling ads. I'm surprised there wasn't a solicitation for a book. Oh wait.
It's awesome! - except if you also happen to use gmail keyboard shortcuts :(
I agree that a person identifying himself was admirable. But I'd rather he identified himself, and then went on to say how he really felt about it (I'm assuming here they were more disappointed to close it then he let on).

This is professional - but it also lacked much backbone.
How to Improve Your Online Business or Blog
I lost respect for Derren Brown when he did the show where he guessed the lottery numbers. The video was clearly edited.
Node.js WebWorker API Implementation
Ask HN:  Ideas for monetizing a website I am developing?
Hi all-

I posted this before, but only got one (insightful nonetheless) comment. So I figured I'd give it one more shot.

I currently am working on a site that is similar to one techcrunch posted a few days back. I have a super duper early demo if you want to take look available here:

onedatedaily.heroku.com

The concept is this: Each day (eventually each hour) a new dater of each sex will be featured on the front page. People will then be able to get some basic information, and if they like the featured dater, they can send them an email through our site. This will likely be form based and require certain elements to reduce spam and stalkers (also we don't reveal the dater's email to avoid stalkers and weirdos). If the dater likes what the person has to say, they can email them back.

The question is how to monetize. I have a couple ideas and was wondering what you all thought:

1) Force anyone who wishes to email the dater to pay 1$ per email (some of this could be used to "pay" the dater for listing themselves. A kind of incentive to get more daters)

2) Graduated scale emailing. The first 50 free, then 1 dollar for the next 50, then 3$ for the next 50 etc.

3) Force the featured dater to pay per email from vetted emailers. .10 an email or whatever

4) Freemium model -- Get more information and more tools by signing up with us. Email of the day etc.

Thanks for looking guys, all suggestions welcome for both monetization and user experience stuff. The UI is pretty suck, but I'm working on it. I think the idea is decent, I'm just sorry I got beat to the punch by that one tech crunch had which looked, tbh, also sucky.
Right; these assets are "toxic" not so much because they are of low or perceived as having no value but because it's difficult to impossible to correctly price them.

If you hold them to maturity, you might make out pretty well.
My 'home page' is gmail. Perhaps this is why people are confused? I suggest 'back to our front page'.

'The' implies some mutually understood single object; eg we could take the bus [route] or the car (that we own) or get a taxi (which one? doesn't matter).
is it really even possible to do something like that?
'He presides looking “vaguely bored,” his detachment “striking but not entirely unusual.” '

Is it ad feminam to remark the Ms. Noonan came to public notice writing speeches for Ronald Reagan who was noted for "detachment"?
Still, it’s safe to say that the majority of orders placed through the Apple Online Store are for the iPad.

Yeah, I don't really follow the logic there.
This video contains content from Channel 4, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.

What.. my country, the UK? The country where I have to pay an extortionate TV tax/license every year, part of which goes to fund Channel 4? How comes I can view this through a US-based VPN yet not directly in the UK when the content is from a British TV station I'm paying for?
Maybe you and Willie_Dynamite can start a blog about how you retired at Day One.
What is hard to understand about a school counselor?

They are a point of contact for advice about which classes to take at what time, how to find internships & scholarships, what to put on a resume, etc. It seems like a straight forward and useful job.
or else something much more subtle is going on.

It's driven me bonkers for the last year but there's a technical term for this (when a combination of external stimuli lead different people to come to similar conclusions and have similar ideas at the same time). I read an interesting Wikipedia article on it a few years back.. yet a good 10 minutes of Googling has failed to bring it back to me.

Update — I tried again and about 20 searches in found what it might have been: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery .. specifically:

A recombinant-DNA-inspired "paradigm of paradigms" has been posited, that describes a mechanism of "recombinant conceptualization." This paradigm predicates that a new concept arises through the crossing of pre-existing concepts and facts
I'm waiting for the sequel "How I sucked in a whole bunch of HN readers by submitting a corny, too-good-to-be-true headline"
majority is anything >50% . there is a big difference between 51% and lets say 85%. We need to stop ignoring these analysts that make up retarded facts or act as if they have an army of people leaking them rumors.
Read some Scalia decisions to see how your second paragraph is pretty naive and inaccurate... Hunt up a book by Richard Posner (7th circuit judge and blogger) called How Judges Think for interesting insights as well.
google is a word, not an acronym like Air Bed aNd Breakfast. Which took me weeks to correlate to Airbnb.
Explains why he wears shades even indoors?

Christopher Hitchens wrote an interesting piece on NK recently http://www.slate.com/id/2243112/pagenum/all/
"for folks who just want to their feet wet, oreilly's programming collective intelligence is a good start."

No, it is not a good start.
How? In school?
It doesn't matter what coke tastes like right now.

It's all about marketing and feeding people the stories that make them fuzzy and warm inside, knowing every time they drink a coke they are that much closer to the gates of heaven.

The taste of the actual beverage may have been a factor in the early days, not now. not with mass acceptance and a giant marketing push that has been engraved into the product/company.

For every Coca-Cola, there has to be a Pepsi to supplement the non-believers. Same is true in every business, and in case of Gowalla and Foursquare.

There is room for both of the companies to be thriving side by side.
I think what he's describing in the article is more of an art than a science.

Also the standard color for democrats is blue (blue state, etc..) so making their part of the chart red wouldn't make sense when comparing them to republicans (traditionally red)
Searching on Twitter yields quite a bit of results for "ipad pre-ordered" May be someone can use the API to get an exact number.
That's an extremely superficial comparison.
The proximity of toolbars in OSX can be a problem in relation to the window controls. In Safari for example the back button is extremely close to the close button in the top left of the window. Unless we want to waste a ton of screen space on isolating window controls I'm not sure there are any better options out there. You can't assume the top right of the window will be devoid of other UI controls so it's not totally safe either. Somewhere in the past I remember reading about the idea of making UI controls "sticky" by slowing or snapping the cursor to a control when you got near it along with using some haptic feedback built into the mouse. I think these are both better ideas than trying to shuffle around pixels to solve the problem. No matter where you put it there will always be a chance of a miscommunication between your eyes and clicking finger.

Someone mentioned multiple monitors/high resolution -- personally I think none of the major desktop operating systems have scaled to handle multiple monitors or high resolution displays very well. We're still stuck with this idea everything useful has to be on the edges of the screen.
Sorry, I completely retract any statements I made lauding the intelligence of people loudly complaining about the default theme change. They are definitely _not_ smart enough to change the theme (note confusion in comments surrounding this issue). It's Gnome, people.
moral blindness may be a reason why people aren't looking as hard in this direction

Working for a medical instrument manufacturer, I think a more likely reason is that a stand-alone machine that processes large volumes of human body fluids with no/little daily maintenance while maintaining precision is either going to be so difficult or expensive that the profitability disappears.

It's a great idea, but would probably have to cost more than about $20/test to be viable largely due to its having to be maintenance free. But if it could be made cheap enough I think you're right. It would be like what the VCR did to the pr0n industry.

If you're in the Twin Cities area and ever decide to do a startup in this area get back to me :-)
I'm not quite sure I understand the chart. It appears to be charting whether justices were appointed by a Republican or Democratic president, but the Republican party wasn't founded until 1854.
Great, now I have the words "This is a bright bunny" stuck in my head.

I completely sympathize with him, though :) We didn't have quite that many takes, but it felt like it.
The Coming Entrepreneurial Tidal Wave: University Entrepreneurship 2.0 
As I sometimes like to say- if the licensing side of the university tech transfer business is 29 years old by now, the practice of spinning-out companies based on university intellectual property is still really a teenager. The field is still young enough such that no one has written the definitive book on its application and in the meantime the field simply continues to evolve and grow at a stunning pace. And, like any teenager worth his or her salt, this form of university entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly boisterous, ambitious, somewhat unruly at times and yet is displaying enormous creativity, energy and imagination. As I approach the beginning of my fifth year in this field and with the benefit of having spun-out almost 50 university startups during this period, I have taken a moment to reflect on what I have seen and am seeing occur.
There's lots of ongoing work on the topic, new conferences, etc. One of the keywords is "privacy preserving data mining".
Have a life outside of the startup. You really shouldn't talk business 24x7.

Some investors are assholes about women. Some investors have scar tissue from other couples. That is largely an incorrect view - when founders that are just friends break up a company, there is no reason to hate friends who are founders.

My rubric for picking a wife was more rigorous than picking a cofounder could possibly be. I have no idea how people find cofounders beyond long-term friends.
but they do: 2,240,000 to be exact
"Having leisure at one's disposal does not improve the quality of life unless one knows how to use it effectively, and it is by no means something one learns automatically"

-Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi "Finding Flow"
Ask HN: IP, employment contracts and side projects
I'm employed at xxx big IT consulting company. I was hired out of college as an "associate project manager" last year, but have never been given any projects. I work less than 5 hours a week for a full-time salary. I would like to start a niche website on the side, which will produce revenue from google ads. This site will not be in any way related to my employer's buisiness, or any project I've been associated with through my day job.

What should I be considering given that I signed a fairly restrictive contract when I started this job? How standard for the industry is the contract I signed? Does my employer really own all the IP I produce while on salary? Will I have to quit my job to start this website? Is this a cut and dry legal issue or does it also have to do w/ my company's history of litigation on past similar issues?

And is there a differentiation between my for-profit idea, and any other side projects I do which are free and open source?

Thats a lot of questions.... thanks in advance.
can you explain why not?
I often think about how I would explain Atlas Shrugged to someone 'in a nutshell' and coincidentally, the 'converse of Marxism' explanation is what I thought up a few days ago. That's just a starting position, what matters is the logic behind the arguments, and the framework behind the logic (Marxism and Objectivism describe individuals in fundamentally different ways). The 'emotional appeal' of the arguments is just a footnote.
This looks like something that is too good to be true. Unfortunately most of the times, that means it isn't true. I'll wait with buying this untill I read some reviews. But if it works like the site makes me believe, I'll certainly buy one.

p.s. I couldn't find that it is a resistive screen on the site, only in this title.
Denial of Service via Algorithmic Complexity Attacks
I set my alarm and pre-ordered mine at 5:30 this morning.

I rationalized it by convincing myself that I need a second iPhone OS device for testing a game that I'm writing, one that has a compass and accelerometers. GPS would be nice, but for now I can just hard-code a static location across town for Player 2.

That leaves a choice between an entry-level iPad at $500 or buying a second 3GS for $800, so it was an easy decision.
Source is more useful: http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/03/12/apple...

Key points:

> His estimate — which is adjusted for the roughly 15,000 online orders that come in a typical day — jibes with a 20,000-per-hour figure published earlier by Silicon Alley Insider.

Alley Insider made two orders 30 minutes apart to come up with the 20k number, no mention of if they too accounted for the 15k "typical" daily orders (no clue when/where that 15k number comes from, what season, what point in a launch cycle, etc).

> 4:21 p.m. "We're at about 91k in six hours. Have your readers keep the order numbers coming in to ipadsales10@gmail.com."

and

> If you want to contribute your information to the spreadsheet, you can e-mail it to ipadsales10@gmail.com

All in all it doesn't sound like very meaningful information, just fun headline material.
Collection of old/classic anti-piracy ads
If you're looking for some more insight into this country, watch this video set over the weekend:

http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-...

A real eye opener.
The rules are different for purely financial transactions. It doesn't make sense for someone to pay an 8% sales tax on buying a 90-day T-bill with a .14% yield.
Pictures or it didn't happen.
Kurzweil probably has no room to criticize given that he has never attempted to make a film like that and probably couldn't do better himself - but I agree with his general point that the movie was anti-technology and anti-corporation. This is a disturbing and misinformed viewpoint held by many people in Hollywood for some reason.
Comparing Amazon's official communication with customers to Netflix I think Amazon wins.

Looking at Netflix's blog they have 3 posts for the entire year.

Looking at Amazon's discussion forums, there are a swath of official announcements, including one that informs customers how to access 2 million free books outside of Amazon.

Sure, having a name in front of the post is nice I guess, but in terms of consistent and valuable customer communication I think Amazon wins. Also here's an example of an apology from Bezos himself

http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_ef_tft_tp?_...
Msybe they are taking offence that you are implying they have so little to do that they could take up your hobby as well.
Do you find your time spent committed to learning conflicting with your time spend doing product development for Flightcaster?
Is there anything in this that has not been mentioned about Avatar by a hundred other commentators? I'm seeing: derivative plot, suspiciously human aliens, big plot hole surrounding the ending. Is there anything new here? I'm genuinely asking; I may have missed it.
I just can't understand how there isn't fraud involved here. If someone claims that they have a mortgage back security that was worth $2.7 million, and is now worth $36,000, that is 1.3c on the dollar. I just can't believe that these things are backed by real houses. I don't understand how any house, no matter how overinflated, could be worth so little. Even houses purchased in the worst bubble market, foreclosed on, where the previous owners punched holes in the sheet rock on the way out, and sold at auction, shouldn on average be worth only $36,000 now. There must have been fraud about what is actually backing these securities.
This makes one wonder how much influence major websites are having on designers in general. If a designer is using facebook 10 times a day, will they submliminally add facebook style typography or layout on their next client site?
"Work for someone who produces actual content and then happen to be married to them so you can claim all that money is yours."
Not sure I would trust the numbers unless Apple released the figures.

"Cracking the order numbers" does not count as accurate.
The majority of iPad buyers are going to twitter about their purchase?
On the Shortness of Life - Seneca (50 AD)
Would they have any other significant assets? I would expect land to be pretty worthless without people to work it (and in other countries, "land" meant "land, plus peasants who must farm on it"). So from their perspective, they were settling disputes through a DIY tort system. Sucks for the slaves, except that if they're worth something, they're worth keeping alive. In places where they're worth less, there's less of a reason to keep them alive.
This should be a very simple iPad app...
Rackspace passwords are visible to customer service
Where's the controversy? The article does a great job of pointing out that Mark's rant missed the point entirely. Was there actually anything said that turned this mantra upside down?
Me too!

http://homoiconic.com
And what happens if your little piece acts totally different than the rest of the market?
Yeah... _clearly_ is was faked. It was so obvious, I'm sure you spotted it before you read the detailed analysis of how it was done, right?
IMO, AI is logically quite different from Machine Learning / Statistical Learning.

The stuff mentioned on this page is largely about methods to learn from structured or unstructured data, and this is a field that has become highly relevant of late due to the data deluge. Research in these areas has progressed immensely as well, and we now have methods to mine many different types and volumes of data. If you have a good grip of statistical techniques and some basic ML ideas, you will be able to single out and pick the right technique that fits your problem, given your data type, SNR ratio, structured-ness, volume, your resource constraints, etc. Knowing a little more about ML will also allow you to change/invent new methods to suit your own problems better (e.g., a new way to compress your feature space).
there was some talk of selling toxic stuff from TARP participants to private investors. IIRC Blackrock and/or PIMCO were even supposed to construe ETFs that pretty much anyone in the world could buy. Unfortunately banks realized pretty soon that they themselves can make a lot of money by cherry picking and selling those assets, so financial lobby killed this effort quickly. That's my understanding anyway.
wmeredith removed the word "could".

You are implying there is no market for toxic assets right now. Demonstrably false.

And in any case that's a poor way of making an argument.
What bunk. He tries to say that riding the backs of the birds is a rip of Harry Potter. Does the guy know nothing of Greek Mythology? Did he not see Clash of the Titans with Persius riding the back of Pegasus; which clearly predates Potter.
SecondMarket is one of those.
I also learned that willpower was a limited resource. The article also states this fact.

However, the article suggests training WP by using it all up. I don't see the point of an article which could have been summed up easily in a paragraph.
You're confusing worth with price. $36,000 is what someone was willing to sell it to them for. The main buyer obviously thinks it's worth more, although maybe not a whole lot, he was searching for something particularly distressed so that the NPR people could with only $1000 buy a non-minuscule fraction. What it's worth when it's held to maturity is another thing, something the NPR crew will be finding out in due course.

Don't insist on malice when incompetence is a possibility. There were honest and/or stupid mistakes made. The biggest was assuming that the general upward march of residential real estate prices would continue, which wasn't entirely insane on its face.
This is pure awesomeness.
When the singularity comes, I hope we can get a new designer for him.
I thought the "networked tree" thing was actually quite clever. Think of it this way: Suppose you were living in Kurzweil's post-Singularity future, where you have absolute command over biological and nanotechnological mechanics, and you wanted to set up a world-wide communications platform that will last forever. You wouldn't mine precious metals and sling fragile fibers as we have done. Instead, you'd engineer it into the fauna: self-repairing, self-sustaining, global.

"The spirits of your ancestors living in the trees" sounds mystical and backward, but "copying your brain to the internet to be saved forever" sounds wonderfully Kurzweillian. Cameron bridges the two, but the technology was too advanced for Kurzweil to identify it as such. :)

One thing I thought was neat about the original Avatar script that got left out of the movie was a closing threat from the Na'vi to the humans: Our giant biological computer has analyzed you and engineered a virus that will destroy you, should you return to Pandora.
Will it become harder to pirate Windows Seven