skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bits of information in information theory dealing with information compression are defined by choices. So it is choices you're looking for, not actions. The guy's article is not technical, though he seems to think it is; it is more of a sentiment, a way of thinking about a problem domain, an approach.

To that extent you're not "going through them one by one", but getting into the proximity, then backtracking (or advancing slowly), and only then going through one by one for a dozen or so variations until you reach your desired option (roughly). It's not as technical, or as precise as he presents it to be, but this approach of tackling UI complexity does give usable approximations of complexity, even if imprecise.

EDIT: or, what jcromartie said http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1242929
It seems to be inconsistent across all MSNB properties. I found this segment (through bing search) of show that runs on MSNB in which the wikileaks video is discussed:
http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/video-u-s-troops-shoo...
recompiling your programs on every machine is such a waste of cloud
There seem to be differing opinions on that. A bit of a Googling suggests that you wait until the cord has stopped pulsing, which might be as soon as a few minutes.

I'm not sure why the risk of infection would increase with the cord intact versus it being cut (where germs could potentially get in anyway). The baby's and mother's blood don't mix, so even if there were a "wound" on the placenta where it came unattached, that would be on the mother's side.
It probably wont be long before someone find some cool place in their home to mount the iPad too. I'm thinking something like an iPad mounted flush into a coffee table at a slight angle so you can control your home theatre, lights, read the morning newspaper and check your TV listings. Or how about mounted into the kitchen wall to stream TV or get weather updates? Along the lines of this, except with an iPad:

http://hacknmod.com/hack/ikitchen-diy-touch-screen-wall-moun...
Isn't the whole point of FOSS that the code can be redistributed without caring about issues like this?

A person who does not respect the time and energy that have been invested in the Project, and acts to punish such effort by giving others associated with the Project -- including, but not limited to, the Author -- a hard time. A Dick is nearly always selfish, but not necessarily with deliberate intent; some Dicks are merely thoughtless. The distinguishing characteristic of a Dick is that he or she places burdens upon Reasonable People, reducing their motivation to engage in open source activities. This damping effect is a significant detriment to the Project, to open source in general, to the production of new intellectual value in the world -- and, ultimately, to the Dick himself or herself.

Sound pretty subjective to me.
I don't know if Stallman was aware that he was working as a programmer in an early stage (basic research, tool building, ...) of a multi-year military project.

All the stuff was basically paid for by DARPA (and related). Symbolics sold much of their initial production to SDI projects. It was thought that the SDI systems were extremely complex and that many Expert Systems were needed to design, deploy and maintain the space-based weapons and their infrastructure. The SCP projects were more down to earth: battle management, logistics, pilot training, etc. SCP was spending one billion dollar in ten years on AI - add to that the money that was spend on the AI-related parts of SDI.

The background of SCP is told here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=eD4taFgeTUYC

'Strategic computing: DARPA and the quest for machine intelligence, 1983-1993'
I think all we know is that the search is failing to produce results.

I also tried "collateralmurder" and "collateralmurder.com" and both fail to give any web results and indicate no warning banner.

Both results do link to MSNBC's own stories which cite the links.

You may very well be correct that the cause of the result was deliberate blocking. I was simply trying to suggest that their might be some automated error prevention heuristic at work that was potentially a cause of the same effect.
Notes on brand positioning statements
I'm planning to do the same thing in my car. Good iPod integrated headunits are expensive so if you don't mind a little DYI work this would actually be cheaper and more functional. I'm going to wait for the 3G unit to get GPS. Glare is going to be a big factor though. Not sure how well these anti-glare screen covers work.
Yes, but still no. By providing liquidity you can be directly benefiting someone else but you're still not directly creating value.

Liquidity, immediacy or anything else in the financial markets don't have any intrinsic value. The only reason the financial system exists at all is to facilitate the efficient allocation of resources towards the production of things that have real value.
Ask HN: What Recommendation Algorithms Do You Use?
I am working on a recommendation engine project and was wondering if you guys had any suggestions?

I want to do a hybrid of memory and model based classification.
Ask HN: restrictive employment contracts- IP rights for side projects
I am employed at XXX large tech company. I was hired as a "manager",but as of right now, I have been given nothing to manage. I work less than 5 hours a week for a full salary.

I would like to launch a niche-market site with user-created content that I am hoping will be profitable through google ads. But, when I was hired I signed a very restrictive contract, and now I'm not sure what to do. I am afraid I would be violating the intellectual property clause of the contract. (not the non-compete)

I would really like to hear about other HNers experiences, since it seems like these kind of broadly restrictive contracts are very common in the industry. -Any specifc advice in my own case is helpful too! ;)

What do you do in both the hiring phase (refuse to sign the contract?) and also afterwards, when you've realised you've signed an over-restrictive contract?

:Also: I posted before, and was asked about the specific language of the contract, I wasn't sure I wanted to post it, but here is what i think is most relevant: (this is in the US)

I further agree that all copyright, ownership and intellectual property rights in any work of any nature carried out by me during the course of my employment with the company shall vest with and remain wiht the company, customer or vendor as the case may be. I agree that i will not be entitled to claim any right, title or interest therein, including moral rights. in the event it should be established that such work does not qualify as work made for hire, i agree to and hereby assign to company all of my right, title and interest in such work product including, but not limited to, all copyrights, patents, trademarks, and other proprietary rights. I further acknowledge and agree that the company may, in its sole discretion, assign to third parties all such intellectual property rights.
Collaborative mapping for major disasters
Considering how many people in the world are starving, ill, undereducated, and unemployed, I'd say we're doing a piss-poor job of 'efficiently allocating the world's capital'.
That may be because it isn't really news, other than the leak of the video. Reuters saw this video in 2007, and had been openly pushing for an investigation ever since.
Well, from somebody who has coded PHP for a while and wants go to back and "relearn" a lot of stuff, I want a book that's heavy on the "why" and deals more with the mental side of development and less "syntax" toys. I'm planning on "starting over" learning how to code, this time with Python, and doing it the "right" way.
Linux: How to Make Startup Suck Less (Also Reduce Memory Usage)
Or, it's his opinion. He didn't say the site was a failure, just that from his perspective, those are two things that make this site not worthy of further attention.

I waffled a bit on my opinion of this site, but the best way to categorize the site is to think of it like a design aggregator. The aggregation is a bit more focused and driven by the members, which effectively weeds out the general crap you'd find on any other free-for-all design site. By this metric, signal-to-noise is extremely high, and the site is a success.

However, the elitist vibe that this whole site creates doesn't sit well with me. I hated that crap in high school, and my feelings haven't changed much on that in the intervening 20 years. Dan and his community can keep the site private. I didn't start designing to win popularity contests. This, to me, is also a failure of the site.

Also, realize where this is being posted. Most news here concerns start-up businesses. If you have no profitability, and are a communal-invite-only image posting site, it sounds like it will be a failure. As a pet project, I'm sure it can sustain itself indefinitely.

Aside from all that, I do like the site on its technical merit alone. Somebody create a site that does the same thing, but is open to the public. 120,000 pixels, a way to screen grab easily, and a REGISTRATION PROCESS. I'll sign up.
Here's a WaPo story from 6 months ago on exactly this story:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09...

The leak of the video is newsworthy and it will inevitably get picked up, but Wikileaks didn't document an event that anybody didn't already know about. Reuters saw the video in 2007 (and was unfortunately not allowed to copy it).
As a side note, there was only a single reference to brand positioning statements on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360069

I find this surprising since they are generally regarded as being pretty valuable for understanding when you're building and who you're selling to.
"Why does the intelligent have an obligation to dedicate his or her life to the creation of maximal value for society?"

What does intelligence have to do with it? Sweeping the streets is an honorable job and makes the world a little nicer. Writing a botnet for spammers isn't and doesn't.
A few points to clarify. In USB 2.0 and earlier, there are two kinds of hubs: self-powered and bus-powered. Self-powered hubs must provide 500 ma at each downstream port. Bus-powered hubs must provide 100 ma at each downstream port.

There are also two kinds of devices: high-power and low-power devices, meaning that they consume from their upstream port more than 100 ma or 100 ma or less, respectively.

A bus-powered hub is a high-powered device, as from a port point of view, 500 ma can go down the cable to it (and devices connected to it).

The maximum number of ports that a bus-powered hub can provide is 4 as 400 ma are required for each downstream port and the hub functionality uses some power.

You cannot plug a bus-powered hub (a high power device as it can consume 500 ma from its upstream port) to a bus-powered hub. You can of course alternate between self- and bus-powered hubs.

If the iPad can operate on 100 ma, then it can be connected to a bus-powered hub. If it requires more power, then it must be connected to a self-powered hub.

Hope this helps.

On a historical note, Apple has built systems that provide more than 500 ma from the root (the ports in the system itself). I am not an expert on if they still do. I'd hazard a guess the answer is yes.
Prototype 1.7 RC Sizzles…
I agree. The value of Snopes is debunking mass emails. What I want to do is email a short citation, but it's a royal pain-in-the-ass and, as is always the case, it doesn't really stop sites that want to scrape Snopes content.
Should you pay for an outside speaker?
Farm equipment doesn't have any intrinsic value. The only reason farm equipment exists at all is to facilitate the allocation of natural resources towards the production of things that have real value.
WL supporter and small donor here. I agree 100%, the integrity of Wikileaks depends strongly on its willingness to abstain from activities beyond verification and dissemination.
I agree that the outcome is more important, but I think the difference between Sean Hannity and Ted Bundy should be acknowleged. They may both produce evil, but the one who thinks he is doing good should be handled differently.
But with Twitter, Facebook, and everything else that comes up on Growl.
Yeah liquidity is great, but only up to a point. If it takes me six months to sell my house at "market price" that really sucks. I'd welcome a little real estate speculation, and the liquidity it brings. But if bond traders shave 600 milliseconds off the time it takes to sell my bond holdings, so what? People may be willing to pay for that, but society doesn't benefit.
For what it's worth, I have had my Android phone for ~17 months and to this date Locale is _still_ its killer app. I simply refuse to own any other phone until it can do the same.

I will certainly understand if iPhone/iPad multitasking arrives with some fairly severe limitations placed on the developers of background apps. Right now there's zero ability in that area so anything, even if severely limited, will still be an infinite improvement (depending on how you like to imagine your divide by zero operations playing out. ;)
Once again, click through to the referenced Danah Boyd's talk if you haven't already:

http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html

It's a perfect dissection of the Google Buzz issue, which encapsulates this whole debate.
My guess is:
There is a list of searchterms which now looks like that:
1. Wikileaks
2. Obama
3. Sex
4. Reef
5. Oil
.
.
.
32. wikileak

There is probably a simple "ban this word" textbutton and the person in charge will naturally just ban wikileaks.
"Their contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission."

This is ridiculous. Can someone release the data so this can be tested in court? EFF?
Because while they shaved 600ms of your execution time they also lowered your spread by 50 basis points, making it cheaper for you to unload your bond holdings on the market.
FaceBook and Google are large employers in Ireland. It's a wealthy country but they certainly suffered over the past year with the financial fiasco. I'd move there for just cuz the irish are hilarious people.
Did you even look at the results page when you try the search? It in fact gives the search results. Yes, there is a spurious error message at the top, but the results are there.
Is a blender deliberately crippled if it can't microwave food? It helps Google, I guess, to be a company that releases web-based software, because then web browsers run their software, even a web browser that they release. "Our web based OS only runs web based software" is a pretty goofy definition of "crippled". Would Apple release a web-apps-only system? I doubt it, it wouldn't provide the level of interactivity and UI/UX that Apple wants to give their customers, and Apple wants to be both the the provider of the best experience and apps, and giving that ability to their developers is only secondary (even the guy who reimplemented coverflow from scratch and didn't use any secret Apple APIs was denied app inclusion initially).
Personally, I expect iPad apps to be cheaper than iPhone apps over time. I expect more iPad apps to be ad-supported, due to the larger screen size. It's not the direction I'd like things to be going in, but my experience with the web makes me think that zero tends to be the winning price if it's possible.
It says "interim" CEO. So there'll be a search.
Android's market share is infinitely larger than it was in mid '08.
I was going to mention Microsoft, but I couldn't remember the specifics and didn't have time to track them down. But yeah, there were things like improperly emulating DOS in windows so only MS-DOS would run, secret APIs that Office used (for drawing?) that gave Office increased performance. The moving target that is SMB and NT domain services that has kept samba from being on-par.
I don't think "committees are universally bad" is a widely held view. For example, almost all companies are led, ultimately, by a committee (a board). They have their uses. Maybe hiring is one of them.

False. The board has the power to fire the CEO. They do not have the power to "lead" the company.

The executive board is led by a single person (the CEO) and that one person makes all the ultimate decisions, except for those which he delegates to his or her executive team.

Committees are pretty much universally bad. Their main purpose is diffusion of responsibility and inflation of work. I'm not saying this specific committee didn't work - there are always exceptions - but most committees are disastrously bad at getting anything done.
Please define "things that have real value".
You thought wrong. But a lot of effort (PR) has gone into making you think wrong.
Interesting. I recall working a bit on Statice, which I believe Weinreb and Lamb? wrote. There was a phenomenal amount of code coming out of that lab, so it's not surprising that RMS was considered average within that group.

I was as TJ Watson then, in math sciences. I recall IBM lawyers not letting RMS come speak at the lab, when one of the guys had invited him to talk about emacs. At the time IBM was quite shy of this "free software" business.

I think the account in this article largely comes from the Sam Williams biography of Stallman.

I actually own stock in Symbolics, if the company still exists. Last time I saw a statement it was worth $0.02 I was never able to get certificates, which I was hoping to have as a momento, to go with my symbolics mousepad.

Thanks for sharing. This sheds a little more light on this piece of history.
It sure sounds nice in theory, but I'm paranoid enough about such things working that I'd end up manually turning off my ringer anyway. At least for a long time until I felt really comfortable with it... it is super sucky to be "that guy" at a wedding/funeral...
"my lawyer advised me that it had never been tested in court, and the legal costs alone of being a test case would bankrupt me."

This is a very real problem with law surrounding emerging business practices, esp here in the US.

Ultimately you can only pioneer whatever you can afford to defend in court. Facebook, or any other BigCo for that matter, can assert that you can't do X and it's up to you to fight it in court... Even if there is prior behavior such as with this case. Clearly Google does the very same job and doesn't have an agreement with Facebook to spider their site.

But if you can't afford to defend it and bring up the prior examples in a court, then Facebook - or anyone else for that matter - can stop you.
This speaks to the quality of apps in the App Store though - sadly, there is a truth in the middle ground between the two viewpoints:

- Genuinely useful apps are worth well in excess of $0.99.

- iPhone consumers have been spoiled rotten by hyper-competition and the market of $0.99-no-matter-what.

- There's a lot of utter shit on the App Store that isn't worth the $0.99 people are charging for it.

The App Store signal to noise ratio is atrocious, and consumers have responded in their attitude towards app pricing. Bad apps are so plentiful (and have the same level of exposure as the good apps) that everything over $0.99 is a risk to the consumer for getting burned. Most apps are things that you'd start once, get bored with in 5 minutes, and never touch again, and provide little to no lasting use to the consumer whatsoever - it's not a surprise that consumers are tuned to paying $1 for such things.
WiFi. More space than a Nomad. Awesome!
I think a whole lot of AI research was DARPA funded, Reagan's star wars initiative and so forth.
F5 Week in Review: March 29th – April 2nd
Please ... we all knew the money came from DARPA and that they weren't interested in improving the state of the art in plush toy design.

SDI officially started in March 1983 (although BMD had been a hot topic for decades) ... and that was about the time RMS started transitioning out of Lispm work. We were roommates in September 1983 when he officially started the GNU Project.

We certainly had debated BMD/SDI (before I started working for LMI I was the editor of the ARM-D mailing list), and I can't remember him ever saying GNU had anything to do with that sort of thing. It had to do with end user freedom, as he has explained at length, with a singular purpose of mind and consistency.

If this was a major motivator, shouldn't he have put in a "you can't use this software for evil" clauase in the GPL? His GNU EMACS and GCC work has certainly enabled much more development in weapons and the like than anything he did at the lab, and I assure you he's intelligent enough to have realized that, and at least in the '80s he had enough intellectual honesty to realize that ... we all had to ask ourselves that question (and I wouldn't let anyone weasel out of it if they tried :-).

Hmmm ... maybe he claimed this to others, but he knew it wouldn't fly with me. But surely only as a minor aspect of why he was going from proprietary Lispm work to free software.
Yep.

And the people creating farm equipment fully realize that. When they create new equipment they do so in order to help farmers create food more easily.

In finance, there is a whole lot of effort and innovation, but it's hard to say how much of it is helping people create real value.
>>bringing flash
>>I hope not

Me, too. Mobile Webkit is the key to rationalizing the web. All that information-free flash app garbage is finally starting to clear up as clients realize they're missing the most lucrative corner of the market (those who pay more for Apple).

The best argument for dynamic HTML sites and HTML 5 is iPhone compatibility. Let's keep Android and iPhone Silverlight- and Flash-free. Okay, mobile vendors?
Should read: "How to Make Firefox Startup Suck less..."

PG: Any chance we could get the source URL in the RSS headlines?
That mod is a car accident waiting to happen.
You are not getting news. CNN vs Al Jazeera at 17:20 GMT, Monday 4/5/10
I've been beaten into oblivion before for speaking out about the way I see the future shaping up re Big Corporations owning our information but I'll take my chances and use this opportunity to speak out against Facebook again. In truth, I did invoke Orwell...

I'm no Facebook hater, I actually use Facebook often but when they pull these kind of stunts it really upsets me. I would imagine it would upset most freedom lovers on this site as well. When Facebook decides to take a smattering of our data and make it "Public" how then do they decide to control that data after the fact? Since when did Facebook re-define the word "Public"? It's like your cell phone provider and ISP redefining "unlimited". This stuff has to stop. Getting back to Facebook, since when does merely browsing to a URL(I) enter you into some sort of binding contract with the publisher?
Something that greatly irritates me while using Safari is a lack of feedback when clicking a download link. The author briefly mentions this as the last 'bad' but I've more than once accidentally downloaded a file more than once because of that lack of UI feedback and feel like it's a much bigger deal than just being unable to see a progress bar.
Another round of mysterious App Store rejections?
I thought that a magnetic fridge mount (as long as it didn't mess with the internals of the device) could be good. Attach the iPad to your fridge and then use recipe apps like Jamie Oliver's.
robots.txt is good for telling robots they have no business reading a section, or will be severely disappointed if they do. There is no way one can encode the TOS of a site into the syntax of robots.txt, so there is no reason to believe it embodies the TOS.

I've never used facebook, but Section 9.2.6 of their terms says You will delete all data you received from Facebook if we disable your application or ask you to do so.

I don't see how that could be encoded in robots.txt.
Brightcove Completes New Financing Round