skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that fuzzy logic is crap, in the sense that it just involves adding a once-trendy buzzword to ad-hoc approaches.

However, it should be noted that statistical inference is not a necessarily an effective learning approach given that it was created to deal with random variables and the world we are trying to understand has many non-random, orderly aspects.

Humans aren't good at doing the things that statistics is good at but statistics isn't good at doing the things humans are good at. Just as an example, a person can indeed act effectively in uncertain but somewhat ordered environment but virtually no human being can tell you anything like the probability distribution of the events which they deal with in daily life.

So basically, we do indeed need new approach different from both the probabilistic and the pure-logical approaches. But problem is that melding these various existing approaches into something coherent and usable is far more easily said than done. One clear problem with any such system is that the complexity explodes for a formal specification which involves both probability and logical process.

I suggest people call their approach "a general theory" after they do something impressive with it. We're waiting.

Perhaps the intended title of article was "There Ought to Be A General Theory Of AI". That I'd agree with...
I'm not glad that it takes having Apple's money in order to legally defend a product.
I still don't get this Web TV thing. I see Boxee just got some more funding a few months ago. But I don't know who uses their service or why. Would appreciate any enlightenment on this issue. I must be old fashioned because I like my internet on my computer and my tv on my tv.
It's not that we don't have furniture, it's that the space is much bigger than the furniture we have...

Adrian @ EveryBlock
Ugh, as soon as a galaxy gets cool, all these posters and hangers-on start to orbit.
I love the scroll wheel function, but scanning the article titles is easier if I don't have to scroll. Scrolling requires additional work to refind your place in the scrolled view. If I can avoid scrolling I can keep my mouse over the More link and scan multiple pages more quickly.
A great article on how the Naymen-Pearson Hypothesis Testing is not particularly useful as a method of inference (e.g. the way most people tend to think of statistics with p-values and 5% significance doesn't say much). Some of what he is saying is a little shoddy, since Fisher actually came up with a much more robust, but less used, method of inference called Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), which currently stands with The Bayesian Theory as the competing (yet partially complimentary) theories of statistical inference. Strict, but arbitrary, distinction between the null H0 and alternative H1 hypotheses, which is what p-values suggest, is as careless as the article points out.
Not a big fan of the graphic design on the front page. It's usable, and fairly attractive, but if I squint my eyes and don't read anything I could be looking at a middleware consulting company.
Running Large Graph Algorithms
Hopefully they do something about the performance next. Flash performs much worse in Chrome than Safari (OS X 10.6).
Oh, yeah, the 5% thing is only a small part of the article. I've just read four or five "OMG 80% of science is wrong!" articles this month, and think it's kinda tired.
Everyone tells me that spidermonkey is actually an independent library. They could be wrong, though :P
edit: pointless knee-jerk reaction deleted.
Indeed.

The underling effect of volatile is that the compiler turns off certain optimisations to do with instruction reordering and aggressive caching in registers without stores.

However in most places that a typical non-firmware, non-driver programmer would use volatile they really should be using a memory fence (acquire, release or atomic store).
Yes, search seems to be broken. My search for "hot young slutty babes seeking broke, alcoholic, out-of-shape, over-the-hill, married programmers" is turning up nothing. Must be a bug.
I like the Apple Macbook in the promotional video.
I would make a similar comment to you as I made above to MrFoof. Maybe because it fits with what feels right for me, but I like your 6-month-rule and your question for every object.

In many ways I think when we get too much stuff the same thing happens that happens to kids when they have too many toys. They seem to lose interest in all of them. So we put most of them away in drawers and pull them out a few at a time. It's as if without all the clutter of lots of toys around our daughter enjoys herself, and the few toys, much more.

I would also repeat my comment to MrFoof that if you're interested in contributing to my documentary, I'd love to see some visuals of your de-cluttered lifestyle.
Ah, that is why you really want Guile, which will allow your users to choose their extension language!

Heh, OK, Guile is not quite there yet. You can stop laughing now :)
Margaret Atwood on Twitter
But the potential gains surely outway the large risk?
The real losers are the smaller companies that cannot afford to play the game and the consumers. The winners are the legions of lawyers who get paid for all of this litigation nonsense.
Yeah, I like the Axosoft free variant: http://www.transferbigfiles.com/
I think it's clear from the wide differences in performance of multitouch devices that there's a lot of room for valid patents to muddy the waters.

labs.moto.com has done some good testing of smartphone screens and found the iPhone to be far more accurate than the competition. My own experience with some non-phone multitouch devices has also shown Apple to be the only one to get it truly right. Even Wacom's Bamboo tablets can barely manage to recognize two-finger gestures, whereas a MacBook Pro can handle jitouch, and recognize those complex gestures well enough for me to consider jitouch indispensable.

It's hard to believe that the differences could be due only to software or even relatively obvious improvements in Apple's hardware, so somebody deserves some patents, and it's probably Apple (unless they stole somebody else's technology). The ensuing litigation storm then is more a result of how lucrative the multitouch market is than it is a symptom of messy patent laws.

Ultimately, I think it was probably Apple that did (or bought) the research necessary to make a multitouch sensor that is better than a gimmick, and for that they deserve a period of exclusivity to recoup their costs and give them some profits to invest into the next big thing. On the other hand, 20 years is a long time for those of us with lesser budgets to wait for such a cool technology. What we should be hoping for, then, is that somebody more inclined to license their technology can or has independently developed a multitouch sensor that is as good as or better than what Apple's been shipping, and that they can prove this in court if necessary. Reducing the term of these patents might be helpful, but I don't think that there's justification to eliminate hardware patents like these.
The task queue has the same 30 second limit. Follow
either of those links above and you'll find:

the lifetime of a single task's execution is limited to 30 seconds

You still have to do more coding to chunk the work.
Posting arbitrary advice on HN is one step to healing a broken heart, I guess. (It can also work as a corollary: Build awesome tools to meet attractive members of the opposite sex! I'm sure jwz mentioned something like this on a mailing list in the early 90's and I'm unaware of it..)

Sorry for your loss, bud. Now get back to hacking and other fun things to not think about it.
OK, but a professional-quality photograph still costs money to produce, let's say a photo costs $1000. That might be the pro charging the magazine $1000 and delivering the image or it might be a thousand amateurs all "spending" $1 on their camera, their time, gas for the car, whatever and one of them giving it to the magazine for free (after we have also accounted for the photo editor sifting through a thousand submissions). I'm just not seeing where the net value-add is here.
Mocking frameworks in .Net
I'd like this better if it weren't a dating site.

Like, a place where you can find people who like the same books as you, and then talk about books.
I'm the CTO for an image archive (http://trunkarchive.com/). You could sort of consider us a boutique stock agency, but that would be sort of demeaning to the stable of photographers we rep.

Interesting article, but I doubt professional photographers have much to worry about. The amateur will fill a niche, perhaps compete with the low-end of the spectrum of professional photographers, but - ultimately - the kind of image licensing that nets the most cash, and makes the most careers, is celebrity and high end editorial.
You might want to check out http://alikewise.com/Profile/testingstagingagain !

Other than that I think the idea is excellent - if you manage to get enough people then the site will work really well. That's the problem though isn't it...

Best of luck.
> And frankly, if you don't roll it yourself, what are you going to use other than ICU?

GNU libunistring: http://www.gnu.org/software/libunistring/
"OpenMP like support for the Cell Processor"?

Where do I sign?
This story is interesting in the context of recent discussions about WikiLeaks. They'd seem a prime target for eavesdropping.
Maybe you don't have to hit all the numbers to make things work. I see Google as hitting numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, and maybe even 10. Actually, Google has APIs, so it is programmable. Just thing of the useful or playful mashups people have created with the maps API.

Amazon might not be "playful" on it's own, but comments like the first one one this item add to the fun: http://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Three-Wolf-Short-Sleeve/dp/B0...

I look at Etsy as an example of a site that tries to hit all 10. Their API isn't read/write yet, so maybe it isn't fully programmable.
C and its "undefined behavior" are behind most of the litany of security disasters and unstable apps we have all endured. It can be expedient to reuse C code, but in the long run we're better off replacing it with something more reliable.
Those do exist...check out goodreads.com and librarything.com.

We don't really think of them as competition to what we're doing, btw. Different goals.
Ha! Thanks. One of our testing accounts. :)
Forgive me my choice of words. I erred by going for an image, rather than for strict accuracy.

Look out your window. Do you see a bottling factory? Then that can of carbonated corn syrup got shipped to you, probably over some distance. That is not "green" by any stretch of the imagination.

By the way, I'm not knocking people for enjoying carbonated beverages. They just shouldn't claim they're being "green" by e.g., recycling the container, or making the container in a slightly different fashion.
I'm waiting for a Boxee Box to cancel my cable subscription. Most things I watch these days are either from Netflix, or iTunes, with a lot of the remainder appearing on Hulu. I realize I'll be losing local news (never watch that anyway) and live events (the Olympics), but I'm willing to do that at this point. And honestly, even more than saving money, it's about convenience. I have a nice stereo hooked up to my computer that I want to listen to music (last.fm, mp3, rhapsody) through. I have tv shows downloaded from itunes or ripped from DVD. It's much more convenient to access that stuff from a centralized place. This is vastly different from Web TV; I don't want to browse the web on my TV. I have a laptop.
Personally, I've found some of the advice dubious or just plain wrong (e.g. trying to map control plus number key). But some of it looks terrific.
Interesting read.

I wonder why he didn't include http://www.canalys.com/pr/2010/r2010021.html as reference for smartphone share.
Also i think, when he is trying to "guess" the real marketshare, he is underestimating symbian and also i think he is not really aware of the huge divergence of marketshare in different countries all around the world. He assumes what is in the US is true elsewhere which is absolutely not the case. Even more so when talking about featurephones.
For example, Symbian/Nokia has huge marketshares outside of the US, but RIM is much bigger in the US then anywhere else.

Unfortunately i don't find the statistics anymore, but the mobile market looks quite different on every continent.

edit:
From admob too, but look at the totally different marketshares of symbian and blackberry on the different continents! -> http://metrics.admob.com/2010/01/december-2009-mobile-metric...
[citation needed!]

As a Java developer, I'm very happy with the compromise that UTF-16 strikes. For day-to-day unicode use, UTF-16 covers all the bases. In the rare cases I need to step outside of UTF-16 to the higher planes, it would work transparently for me up to the point where I start slicing strings naively.

To be honest, I've never actually had to use anything outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane. That's not from lack of breadth in my day-to-day job either - I wrote the first implementation of our web crawler/search engine at DotSpots and had to deal with fetching and indexing pages in languages from most of the BMP (mainly English, Russian and Chinese).

Anyways, I strongly disagree with your assertion that Java was "generally considered" to have "made a mistake" by using UTF-16. It's made my life far easier and the memory costs aren't an issue on today's machines. We don't live in an ASCII world most of the time and storing strings internally as UTF-8 completely ignores this fact.

[edit]

Just so it's clear: UTF-8 only wins when you are representing pure ASCII text. For everything else, it either breaks even or loses. For most Chinese text, UTF-8 is 50% larger:

For characters <= U+0080 (ie: ABC), you win by one byte.

For characters > U+0080 but <= U+07FF (ie: Ȁɐ), you break even at two bytes.

Everything higher than U+07FF in the BMP, < U+10000 (ie: 丂且⬄☃), you lose (by one byte).

For characters >= U+10000 you break even again at four bytes.

If you really want to optimize for ASCII text in Java, there's always byte[] and you're free to wrap a CharSequence around it.
I was a long time Windows Media Center user while my husband was at Microsoft, and it was great - we used our Xbox to run it. That was even before things like Netflix on demand (and before I discovered Apple products). I think the idea is that you stil want to get the viewing experience of a big beautiful TV screen with surround sound for watching movies - and since more and more of the good content I want to watch is on the web, I need to find a way to get it to my TV.

I think people are still discovering how much good "TV" isn't actually on TV anymore.
Good suggestion - I like their higher size limit of 1Gb. I'll check this out, thanks.
Sam Israel - pretended to jump off a bridge
Markus Shrenker - pretended he'd crashed his airplane
Marc Dreier
Allen Stanford
Arthur Nadel
Nicholas Cosmo
Joseph Forte

I could probably dredge up a few more -- it seemed like there was one every two weeks from July 2008 - Feb 2009, so these are just the few who were based in the US and who have Wikipedia articles.

While the financial reform is mainly being marketed as a fix for systemic risk, there's also a fairly strong contingent of people who want it to address various consumer protection issues such as predatory lending, failure to disclose fess, etc.(Mike Konczal has been following this carefully at http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/ ). While this effort is stalling, some of their suggestions will still probably make it into the bill. Basically, the politicians want to be in a place where they can say that only "the very rich" are in danger of getting ripped off by hedge fund scams.

The challenge here is that all issuance of securities is lumped into the same category of speculative investment by regulators. This might actually be a good time to try to break off a special category for investing in startups that is separate from the normal "accredited investor" requirements, perhaps by capping the amount anyone can buy as a percent of income(10%?) or assets(5%?). Since the main argument for these things is that each individual investment is too risky on its own, adding this sort of requirement for mandatory diversification might be good enough to get a regulatory carve-out for startups.

Please note that I personally oppose nearly all restrictions of these sorts -- I'm just trying to present the arguments of the regulators and to advance some plausible things to lobby for. It's worth keeping in the back of your head that if publicly-traded common stock was invented today as a novel financial instrument, it would be judged by regulators to have such an idiosyncratic cash flow profile that only financial institutions would be allowed to invest in it.
"Ultimately, I think it was probably Apple that did (or bought) the research necessary to make a multitouch sensor that is better than a gimmick, and for that they deserve a period of exclusivity to recoup their costs and give them some profits to invest into the next big thing. "

The only area that patent exclusivity should be granted are in those technologies, processes, and methods that would not have been developed (and divulged) otherwise. If superior Multi-Touch would have happened anyways, then there is no reason to grant Apple a patent on the process.

Remember - the entire purpose of patents is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts..." - if the progress is going to happen anyways, there is no need to issue a patent.
kudos to google for being realistic and pragmatic instead of shouting with the masses.
"teacher's pet with shiny apple of misinformation", "wax your knowledge", "flip side of the same token"... I think you have exceeded your daily quota of metaphormixing.
Tweaking the Twitter homepage
>"hot young slutty babes seeking broke, alcoholic, out-of-shape, over-the-hill, married programmers"

And I was disappointed when I searched for GEB and nothing turned up.
Ask HN: How's the biotech industry in the Bay Area?
My wife and I are looking at options for where to make our next move and the Bay Area is at the top of our list. It appeals to me being a tech guy, and my as well as my wife, as she is a microbiologist. The area's reputation for a strong biotech industry is backed up by a few news articles ("Biotech bonanza", "Bay Area is home to a Biotech Boom"), but there are also a few saying its in trouble ("Is Bay Area Biotech in Trouble?"). Indeed.com job search lists a lot of openings, but its not easy to interpret the results and we don't know anyone in the area to ask directly.

For those of you in the area, how is the biotech industry?
I'm surprised I haven't heard of any seed accelerator programs in the Twin Cities yet. It's a great area to live in, and MN has some of the sanest governance to be found in the U.S.
Mailchimp is awesome. Don't know how it compares to Campaign Monitor. If you're a belt & suspenders type, use a Wufoo form and send that to MailChimp, then you can easily switch later.
Not necessarily. If they installed a newer Office or Microsoft Word Viewer or other stuff, they will have the C* fonts also.

later edit:

Found this survey, Calibri has a 57% penetration on Windows http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-CombinedRes...
Neuroscientists Influence People’s Moral Judgments by Disrupting Brain Region
I hope the ClickToFlash chrome plugin still works. My mac runs a lot better since I have installed it: lower processor usage thus way more battery time.
Good luck Elan?

Last time I checked, Apple had bought Fingerworks which had a patent portfolio that I'm told was "fairly large" and had been developing since before the 2000's. I'm pretty sure that what's going to happen is that Apple's going to pull out a trump patent and get Elan's patent invalidated due to prior art (which was itself approved by the patent office).

Why do we even engage in the polite fiction that patents are meaningful anymore? They're just government-sponsored lawsuit cards now. Do they do ANYONE any good in our modern legal system?
Shocking that "Your Definitive Neighborhood Guide to Northcenter, Lincoln Square and Ravenswood Manor" would miss the distinction between a web programming framework and the language it's implemented in, isn't it?
I have a few photos, though the place is still VERY sparse. There are still huge chunks of empty space (we're talking 60 to 100 square feet per chunk). The place has 4 closets and an alcove -- I only use 1 1/2 now. The others are completely empty.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30258487&l=cf3ff03...
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30632001&l=aeeaed7...

Right now I'm trying to make the mundane pleasing. You know, arrange pots and pans, or bath towels, so it looks nice. Hard to beat $0 interior design ideas.

I guess it stems from growing up as the son of a garbage man with a stay-at-home mom, and despite that, they always seemed to be buying things. When I was 20, I found myself having to send home an awful amount of money to save them from their debt when his job situation took a serious turn for the worse. Everything had seemed fine, until one thing happened - then it unraveled into hell.

I thought about it. We were always out buying something. Sometimes the same thing... again, after a year or two. Before I helped them out I demanded to know their financial situation, and found out how they were sort of skating buy and passing off that things were grand. It never was. We went from a family of clipping coupons and picking change off the ground, to grousing circulars. When I had to help them out again at 25 I told them it was the last time. I also was determined I never suffered the same fate and became trapped by my stuff. "You don't own your things, they end up owning you."

-----

I wanted to live in the city with lots of natural light (Boston, currently). Without a lot of stuff, it was completely reasonable. I then got a job in the city. My commute is trivial. I could also move to NYC in a week if I needed to - packing would only take an afternoon, and a 400sqft apartment would fit everything very comfortably.

Everyone buys cars larger than they need "just in case". I have my two-seat roadster. I couldn't spend car money on an object that brings me no pleasure. I commute on foot now, so I guess I'll keep the car until the chassis needs re-freshening -- another 18 years I figure.

I didn't want debt. I have none. I do use a credit card, but just to abuse the reward points program and spend that on boring stuff like trash bags and detergent.

I hate cleaning. With few things, the place can be obsessively spotless in under 30 minutes a week. No real cleaning + no real commute = a lot more free time. Compared to coworkers, we're talking 10 to 12 hours a week.

I want to plan for the worst. I save 35-40% of my gross pay a year, though that's increasing as non-food/shelter expenses have basically dropped to 0. My salary could be cut in half and I my lifestyle doesn't have to change. I have a hell of a "screw you" fund, or a lot of money I can burn trying to turn an idea into reality.
Perhaps if he's actually worth it, but I'd really want to see "proof" of that if it were my employer!
In your example, you would need to be an accredited investor to invest in Me-VC.
Why does this show how patents necessarily harm innovation? It would seem to show that our particular implementation can be harmful. There's a lot of literature that discusses many of the benefits to innovation from patents throughout their history, and it doesn't seem to follow from "lots of people are suing each other over patents [as currently implemented]" that "patents harm, rather than help innovation."

I wouldn't disagree that there need to be major revisions in our practice (patents shouldn't take years to be granted, obvious patents need to be curtailed, etc. etc.).
Recruiting in Down Economies
Anticipating hiring or are you making a roller rink?