skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like the article would benefit from a less staged photo lede. There's something unseemly about an article about hard scientific research with a posed, strobed photograph accompanying it.
The problem is it wouldn't be difficult for Amazon to start charging based on how much storage space you're consuming, which would pull the rug from under their feet.
Most users are old people, but most users are also sheep. The shepherds are not old people. Name some great tech companies created by unaccomplished old people who just decided to flip on the entrepreneurial switch.
And, just to swirl the controversy, support for Flash is also support for H.264: http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/9/...

"Fixes and improvements in Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3, Version 9.0.115.0

Flash Player 9 Update 3 extends the performance and standards compliance advances introduced in Flash Player 9. Of key importance, this update adds H.264 video and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio codec support that opens up a broad ecosystem and selection of standards-based video — up to HD quality — that developers can leverage in their applications. The update also features hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full-screen video playback for high-resolution viewing across major operating systems and browsers."

(my emphasis)
First, there is an intrinsic problem with just using a person's age in years when talking about chess is that, with individuals reaching such heights at younger and younger ages, 20 going on 21 and just turned 19 becomes a huge difference in age. For instance, look at how the list of youngest grandmasters is now tabulated (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youngest_grandmasters#R...). Carlsen reached the world #1 something like 18 months before Kasparov - this is a large difference on these scales.

Second, rating inflation is a continuing trend. According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_for_comparing_top_chess...), "the average of the top 100 active player rose from 2644 in July 2000 to 2689 in January 2010, a 45 point increase." As such, we can presume that Carlsen's rating is also about 45 points inflated, and thus closer to a 2770 compared to Kasparov's 2853 - an enormous difference at that level of play. Moreover, there have never been several others over 2800. In fact, only 5 have ever surpassed that mark, and Kasparov was the first - followed by Kramnik about the time he beat Kasparov for the championship, followed by Anand, Topalov, and Carlsen. It is a highly elite club that few, even with inflation, will ever join.

Finally, of course the contests were close - that is the nature of chess. The position begins drawn, and only through tiny blunders on the part of one player does the position become unbalanced to the point of being won for one player or the other. I suppose what I mean, to be more precise, is that it is often the opinion of those within the chess community that Kasparov was, equivocally, the best chess player during the two decades beginning with his ascension to the Championship until his retirement from the game.
Sure. First, a big part of the point of a color scheme interface is to be able to orient and relate the colors in the scheme, but that’s only very useful in a perceptually relevant model such as Munsell’s, CIELAB, or CIECAM02.

The best analogy I’ve thought of is to the interface of a sink or shower. If you have two knobs for adjusting amounts of hot and cold water, then changing either temperature or pressure requires adjusting both. Given that there’s pretty much no situation in which you just want to make adjustments in precisely the way that one of your hot/cold knobs accomplishes, the interface ends up not being particularly intuitive (of course, since there’s feedback, you can still get where you want without too much trouble, just like in color; but the dimensions of adjustment end up being incidental rather than instrumental). Saving records of “hot 10, cold 6” or whatever are less useful than “pressure 16, temperature 5/8" would be (these numbers are made up; even better would be pressure «foo» pascals, temperature «bar» degrees).

The color dimension most important for perception of fine detail, for instance in making text readable against a background, or spatially identifying patterns in data, is “lightness”, the perception of which is pretty well modeled by Munsell value, CIELAB L*, or CIECAM02 J.

If you’re committed to making great color tools and can take some math, I recommend reading Mark Fairchild’s book Color Appearance Models; it has great material about human color vision generally, and is the best up-to-date color science textbook I know of. Especially w/r/t uses like cartography/information design, you might take a look at some of Cynthia Brewer’s work (here’s a presentation to the ASA http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ColorSch/ASApaper.html which has a nice bibliography at the end). Here’s an IBM page on roughly the same subject:http://www.research.ibm.com/people/l/lloydt/color/color.HTM . As ever, Edward Tufe’s books are wonderful. Envisioning Information has a part about color. Tufte himself recommends this book: http://books.google.com/books?id=cVy1Ms43fFYC but I don’t know anything about it beyond the title. Bruce MacEvoy’s handprint website has great explanations, but is long enough to maybe be a bit overwhelming http://www.handprint.com/LS/CVS/color.html .

For learning about the historical use of color in art, and our changing understanding of it, John Gage’s book Color and Culture is just lovely. http://books.google.com/books?id=oq_GtjmoTNgC

I spent a bunch of time recently re-writing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV which hopefully explains why these models shouldn’t be the basis of this sort of tool. :-)

----

As for my own specific interface ideas: I’ve thought a lot about it, but to really flesh them out will just require building my own tools and iterating. I’ve wanted to for quite a while; hopefully it’ll happen sometime. (Beyond color/color scheme pickers, I really want to work on tools for adjustment of color in photographs, since the ones offered by, e.g. Photoshop, do very little of what I want them to.)
I'd say the more sure-fire way is: “Create something useful” -> “Charge for it”.

Now there's always the risk that nobody wants what you made (see fendale's comment), but lets assume for a sec that that's hard either way. Here's a very dry analysis of the path to money for both:

Advertising model:

- Create something useful

- Find an audience

- Find advertisers

- Get advertisers to pay you

Product model:

- Create something useful

- Find an audience

- Get audience to pay you

That's at least one less step in the ‘product model’. You can even argue that to properly execute the advertising model you'll actually need one more step in between: “Create an ad placement strategy” (“Create” as in “design and implement” in all cases here).

Getting money from the people who experience the value of the “useful thing” sounds a lot more direct (and more efficient, which correlates to a better return) than getting the people who value the attention of the people who value the “useful thing” to pay you.

I don't have any first-hand experience with the ad-supported model, but I seriously question whether it's a/the sure-fire way of making money online.
So am I morally obliged to push my fat friend off the bridge to stop a train that will otherwise kill three people? Answer me, science!

And don't even get me started on the Repugnant Conclusion problem...
I've got more fear of Google (or the next Google) than the LessWrong guys do of paperclip loving AI's, although for approximately the same reason.
really? they can't figure out any way to get people to remove the item reliably?
Careful, of all the places where language makes it easy to trip up and misunderstand each other, this one is particularly filled with land mines.

Don't get caught up on exactly what words he used, but rather watch the whole talk and try to get his intent, which I think is well founded.

He is, I think, fairly clear in saying that science does not tell us what specifically is morally "good" or "bad," but rather that science can tell us what human activities foster and correlate with human prosperity and happiness. I'm sure most everyone here will agree that this is not an outrageous claim. Since moral questions usually deal with issues of prosperity and happiness, he concludes that we shouldn't be afraid to bring up science in such discussions.
Amazon's pricing model is even more busted when you look at the cost of puts for small objects. The simplest answer is for Amazon to revisit their pricing based on their actual costs. You can use SimpleDB to index larger objects stored in S3 and save money. I've written up a description of how I did this, but it proved too much hassle and we've moved on to HBase.

http://kdpeterson.net/blog/2009/06/pack-multiple-small-objec...

I'm skeptical of any business model too close to Amazon's core services. I'm thinking of things like Elastic MapReduce, which aren't perfect, aren't optimal compared to what you could do yourself, but aren't bad enough that I would ever choose a niche provider instead of EMR or running my own cluster.
FlashPunk - Pixel Perfect Collision Detection
Thom, you are collateral damage from a rational decision that an American with no history has something to hide. Their defaults are measurably stratospheric compared to folks with positive history. There are nondefault risks such as property damage or running a meth lab, which will cost the landlord five figures to clean if it does not raze the property. Apologies for the inconvenience.
How? Whatever does Google Search have to do with YouTube? Google Search is not affected in any way what so ever by neither Google's nor Mozilla's love or hate for h.264. Also, YouTube is fully enjoyable with Flash. No matter how I twist and turn your response, I just can't see the red line you're trying to draw here.
Fructose metabolism is affected by other factors, such as fiber intake. Notice how all of the fruits you mention tend to also be high in fiber.
They don't need a close official relationship- Google is a flagship American corporation, its decisions matter to the USFG.
Do you have security concerns besides someone guessing the id?
I always figured you just make sure you only allow authenticated users to edit/view the data they are authenticated to see.

I always figured people used GUIDs over ids to avoid the performance implications of re-pinging the database to get the new id.
I would be cautious of creating my own GUID generation though. I'd assume that the db's GUID implementation is probably WAY better than anything one can hack together within a short time-frame.

I'm an auto-increment man (if I can get away with it). :)
I think it is funny that I am visiting China right now and I cannot see the article because googleblog.blogspot.com is blocked. I'll have to bookmark it to be read when I get back home.
Tenure Tracts: Academics try to sift truth from subterfuge in the blogosphere
sure they'll have to change laws, but I haven't gotten the impression that that's an obstacle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Basic_Law_Article_23

Last time China tried to change a law here, 500,000 people marched through the central business district, the secretaries for security and finance resigned, and the law never got passed. So no.
Prostate Cancer and Sex
Make it significantly longer and bright orange. Print the word "REMOVE" in large black letters on it.

If that doesn't work, put a static-sticker right on the screen that says "REMOVE ORANGE TAG ON BACK BEFORE USING" with a little diagram.

Can I get a job as a Lonovo designer now? :)
Or it could be that AWS doesn't see S3 as a product per-se, but rather as an infrastructure piece that is a building block for other, more full-featured products. My understanding of S3 (and Dynamo) is that it/they started as tech used for running Amazon's internal systems. Someone realized they could get more revenue by offering their internal publicly and stuck a price tag on it. Services like de-duping, compression, etc. are more in the realm of Jungle Disk and tarsnap: third-party resellers that become a front end to the infrastructure provided by S3.

What S3 and other storage services sell is not space as much as reliability. No question: S3 is more expensive than a few file servers in your back room. Cloud storage services sell reliability and availability.
The interesting thing about Friendster is that it was recently bought for around $100 million. Not Facebook returns, but not bad.
On Mashape you can build the same app in 2 hours. Grab the twitter component and then the digg component (inside the mashape market) put them together with a copy and paste and build on top of it your UI.
This seems like overkill really. Rest is just fine. If i have to look for 10 minutes to figure out how to share my data with oData, why bother? It's available with REST already.
Very good points, all of them!!

You are absolutely right that you would have to get serious about data integrity. ECC is such a good example.
My concern with security stems from the eventuality of exposing that identifier to a viewer, most likely through a link - maybe to their profile page, or (for example) to a specific node or post. More commonly, that ID would turn up as a hidden form field on a comments form, a simple right-click away.

I would expect that good authentication would negate the worry about this, but I don't always see every side of things ;)
I'm wondering what the logistics of this would be. Say 1 customer is storing 100GB in a cloud storage service that does internal de-duping. A second customer uploads exactly the same 100GB of data. What is each charged? The whole 100GB*rate? Does each customer pay half? Do prices change for remaining customers when one "copy" of the data is removed? Without charging each customer for their total apparent storage use, I don't see how any customer can have any predictability as to their monthly bill.
I like the idea, but I'm not quite sure you want to name it that... http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schmeebs
Here's a crazy idea: why not just let people post notices in public places to promote their events and not bother trying to enforce a bylaw against it at all?
Ah, the scorched earth tactic.
I agree, but I'm not so sure that it has to be prominent. I think it would be perfectly acceptable to be in the footer, as long as the footer is visible at the end of a typical review. I also feel like it would make sense for some sites to have a "How do we make money?" page. Not only does it promote openness and integrity, but as a satisfied visitor to such a site I would probably try to do what I could to help that site make money. That could mean turning off adblocker for that site, buying a recommended product through an affiliate link, or even giving a direct donation. Call me crazy, but I think people who appreciate and get value from a company are willing to do what they can to help that company out.
Thomas Sowell on Writing
It can be counted as a benefit.

You will appreciate the fact that your hosting provider cannot oversell the servers. Xen also works like this.
Based on the grammar, "that playfully sing and dance" refers to pages. The grammar works fine.

But it's clumsy, and should be This is where you hire a copywriter for your website who can fill cleverly-crafted prose into pages that sing and dance.
It was probably copy pasted by the legal department from a word document. Just because they're google doesn't mean they can change how lawyers work. ;-)
We of course knew that a $1 offer would boost subscriptions but the real goal was to keep these users active beyond the trial period.

I suspect it didn't work. I just did a search and I got this e-mail back in February 2009. If the $1 idea had worked, I'd expect them to still be running it. (It'd tempt me to upgrade my account, I think. I've considered upgrading to PRO but keep putting it off as $70/mo is a lot for something I might not have the time to tinker with.. I think I need to get a better "live" feel of it to be sold on the tools.)
Ask HN: In C, why is the * operator both reference and type casting?
This is something that's been bothering me since I've learned C. Take the following code:

*(int*)pointer_param = bar;

In the above code the two * operators do two different things:

1. Converts variable type to pointer.

2. References value found at address.

What was the historical reason for using the * operator for both things? Memory? Is it easier to write a compiler for? Is there something I'm missing?

EDIT:Code, also, It seems like a lisp version would be much easier to write a compiler for and to write; i.e.

(define (address-ref (float_pointer_cast pointer_param))
bar)

Is there some reason that the C-version is easier to write a compiler for/optimize than the lisp?
<raises eyebrow>

Umm, what are you talking about? This is one of the least intelligent comments I've read on HN, and I've really tried to make sense of it.

You know what they say about Finnegan's Wake? That you can start from anywhere in the book, read to the end, start from the beginning, then read to where you initially started, and the book will make just as much sense.... Well, your comment is a little like that.

If there's a thesis in there, it's something like: "of course, old people ruin anything that has to do with technology." Which is disprovable.
I actually banned them before I knew they weren't showing me any answers.
fascinating because he makes an almost religious argument for absolute truth. he simply calls it objective fact.
PATCH Method for HTTP
Rating deflation?! I believe there have only been five players to get 2800+. Topalov, Anand, and Carlsen did this within the last few years.

Kasparov near his peak: http://ratings.fide.com/toparc.phtml?cod=1
Current top 100: http://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men

I always viewed 2700 as the super-GM mark. That used to include ~10, but it's a useless standard now.

Kasparov steamrolled the competition.
Neat. I'm pretty happy with my ultra-cheap Owon (http://www.saelig.com/PSBEB100/PSSA002.htm). For some more money you could have a Rigol, which I hear are very good (they make the low-end Agilent scopes).

Having a digital storage scope is a huge advantage in certain situations and I'm happy to have a cheap DSS rather than a higher quality used analog scope. Also, I wrote some software to do spectrum analysis on the PC, something that you couldn't do with an old analog scope.
The CustomizeGoogle FF extension lets you do this.
The actual results in the paper are a lot less clear. Copy of paper (pdf) here: http://www.mediafire.com/?jj5henyrhxx
Minor related complaint. Make it so the pin, when detached, is still tethered to the monitor base. I have a monitor with this feature, and I've moved twice since I got it (and removed, then lost the pin). The first time the box had an unnatural bulge. The second time I just said screw it, and wrapped the monitor in a blanket.
People Never Paid For News, They Paid for Distribution . . .
The video stuartjmoore already posted is the place to start. Directly addresses the question, done by someone whom nobody here is qualified to argue credentials on, goes into the biochemistry, not a pop-culture video but actually a recording of a class or seminar session at medical school, everything you could want from a video making such a claim.
Don't forget the SaaS Rails Kit at http://railskits.com/saas/ if you're writing a Rails app. :)
My biggest concern about the article is that it doesn't prove its premise. In fact, the S3 service is only arbitrageable if all the other things you need to do to build your proposed service are free, or less expensive (including opportunity cost) than the profits you generate by doing them. This is far from certain, because even with the infrastructure all built it's not clear to me that you could turn a profit when you factor in your running costs like CPU and RAM used to actually make the system function, much less the support staff.
Marginally related:

MP4 as a container, H.264 (AVC) for the video track, AAC for the audio track - this video file format is playable everywhere. Windows, Linux, Mac, PS3, PSP, iPhone... if the kitchen sink had a display, it would probably play it.

When I get a new file, if it's playable on the devices where it's supposed to be viewed, I don't do anything. Otherwise, I convert it to the format indicated above. No deliberation, I just convert it by default to MP4 AVC/AAC. Often I'll use MeGUI if I need some kind of GUI to simplify the process.

Very often, .flv files from Youtube are just AVC/AAC (I think they use x264 to encode the video track) encapsulated as Flash - a simple re-encapsulation (ffmpeg on Linux, Yamb on Windows) solves the problem and - voila - the result is an MP4 that is playable pretty much anywhere.

Blu-Ray and AVCHD disks use AVCHD (H.264 at high rez) almost always. HD camcorders use AVCHD. And so on.

So, I guess my point is - H.264 is already used by many people. It's more or less everywhere. Very likely, it's here to stay.
Unfortunately, that's going to require our government to step up and admit that they have been grotesquely and aggressively wrong about dietary issues for fifty years now.

I'm watching the murmuring about taxing soda; I'll know they're just bullshitting us about the health angle if it taxes sodas with no sugar in them, too. (I've read the health evidence about mere carbonated water; it's a non-zero risk (mostly potential lower esophagus damage caused by excessive belching spreading stomach acid around) but minimal next to the risks of obesity.)
I had a long conversation with Jason Fried about this at Startup School in October -- his talk focused a lot on restraint and avoiding releasing features, which his business clearly does quite well in their products.

But their SvN blog is the opposite: they post whatever strikes their fancy whenever they want. I prodded and he told me that there's no restraint on publishing -- any of their employees can post with no explicit pre-approval. He said that sometimes people will have him do a sanity check before posting, and he could only recall giving the thumbs-down once.

I connected the dots and posited that the blog acts as the release valve for the whole company's feature angst -- he didn't really have a response (and was tired of talking to my crazy ass), but he didn't have a rebuttal either.
If you're seriously surprised, you need to read more labels.

If you aren't seriously surprised, heck, read more labels anyhow.

I found out I had Celiac disease (wheat/gluten allergy) a couple years back and I've read a lot more labels since then (companies are actually getting better about not sticking flour in random things but you still have to watch out), and of all the surprises that resulted, the sheer prevalence of HFCS was by far the biggest. It's not just sweets... it's everything.

Everything.
I never really thought that was a hard question. Of course I'd divert the train.
City Of Green
GUIDs (UUIDs) are not necessarily good for cryptography; some implementations or versions make it easy to predict subsequent values. Originally UUIDs were created to provide uniqueness in cases when you didn't own the namespace: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4122.txt

I'm trying to figure out a solution to a similar problem this week. I'm leaning towards an AES of an auto-increment ID + random salt and my coding partner wants to create a random MD5 hex digest and store it as a second key in the database. He's probably right but I'd like to avoid creating yet another index.
>> "When you're in debt, you're in part beholden to your creditors. Ask anyone with a mortgage."

heh No I'm not (I have a mortgage). I'm using the banks money, and investing it to make a pretty handsome return. (I'm in the UK, property prices are doing pretty well).

Debt is useful to build big stuff. As far as I see it, 37signals aren't building big stuff, so they don't need debt.