skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes these are generally useless, sure we can make a forum in 1kb but why? I can appreciate an elegant piece of code that shows a much better way to preform a task but lets make something really simple and see how small we can do it is pointless.
Motorola bypasses Google, picks Skyhook for Android location data
Netbooks are still a great deal
Lack of Sleep Increases Weight
Top technology mistakes
It's trivial if and only if you ignore fraud, which contributes a huge amount of technical and legal complexity.

Read the Paypal interview in Founders at Work. It wasn't market or technical reasons which killed their competitors, it was their inability to deal with fraud.
I'm still surprised that much of the talk around future "intelligence" is geared more towards creating it from scratch (difficult) rather than enhancing or augmenting what already exists (less difficult). Regardless of this, if creating intelligence out of silicon is where the research is heading, we would have to first prove that silicon is at least an equivalently suitable substrate for hosting a model of our carbon based brain as opposed to merely assuming that whatever brain model we create can exist on any substrate.

I think more progress will be made in the meantime towards enhancing existing intelligence as it will be more immediately accessible in many cases.
The playlist manager does need some enhancement (as well as having a listening history that spans sessions). But there are some cool features in here. I'm definitely keen on the local libraries and the starred tracks.
Definitely uncheck that button :)
I had some jpop tracks in my library that turned automatically into this http://twitpic.com/1iuk5k.
An undo/redo library for your app
Very nice update, but local files don't work on linux/under wine: http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/spotify_under_wine... That's a bit of a letdown, especially since it's intentional.
What's wrong with cheap food
The "control group of hamsters" being five couples is very reassuring. They can't possibly be wrong, with a sample of such epic proportions!

The original article goes on to say that "hair grew in the mouth of animals", and so on, all to 'suggest' a big government-sponsored research programme. These guys may need jobs badly, but this is just sad. Russia currently is living through a wave of blatantly bad science, on the scale of U.S. religious superstition wave. (look up one "Петрик")
Senators' letter to Facebook - The Actual Letter Regarding Privacy & FTC
There are studies that show that lacking either a male or female parental figure can have bad long term effects. Which I would say is a good reason to prefer a male-female paring as adoptive parents.

However, with the number of children in care rather than with adoptive parents being quite massive I imagine the damage done by missing one gender of parent is significantly less than the damage done by living in such an institution.
You're right - evolution by natural selection does not have the luxury of foresight.

Regarding wheels, i seem to recall the bacterial flagellum is the one organism that has in fact evolved a wheel.
Mothball your startup (i.e. don't just kill it completely), and find another job.

I'd be very wary of a company that is that shortsighted.
Trapped by a metaphor... a mind is like a computer, but a mind is not a computer. If you build a fast computer model of a mind, then you have - wait for it! - a fast computer model of a mind!

Sentience is more than just a matter of modelling, surely?

Note, I did not say that a sentient, non-human thinking being is an impossibility, but I am not sure that it would happen by building big fast models.
Am I correct in thinking that you were told this was OK before you were hired, but they changed the rules after you signed the contract?

That's dreadful. It's a shame you can't quit.

(Bootstrapping while contracting is best when you own the consultancy company.)
I'm a little disappointed there aren't more Amazon AWS features supported. It claims to support Cloudfront yet when I look at my S3 buckets, my CloudFront private repositories aren't showing up at all. It's sad that the best AWS/S3 client is Windows only (CloudBerry S3 Explorer)
This sounds very counterproductive on their part, if they promised you one thing and then reneged on that promise once you'd made a commitment to move abroad to work for them, they've cost themselves whatever loyalty they might have expected from you and stifled one of the outlets that would make you more productive at your job. I take it this is a big company?
Misguided Attack on Derivatives; warning that asset bubble will burst (WSJ OPED)
From the link you provided, it's a bug with WINE's MP3 decoder. How is that intentional?
And some days I can't even find my keys :)
This article is fluff, yes, but the subject matter is not.

1) Understanding brain function is, of course, not strictly a hardware problem, but right now hardware is the bottleneck to progress.

2) Of course the brain is complex, but it is not incomprehensibly so. The neural structure has hierarchy: cells wire into microcircuits, which combine into mini-columns, which combine into columns. These neocortical columns are more or less repeated across the surface of the cortex. The brain is not just a jumble of cells.

It's Markram's hypothesis that this is a tractable problem: understand each of the bits (ion channels, dendritic arbors, gene expression, etc.), understand how they're put together, run it through a massive supercomputer, and you've simulated a brain. Moreover, if you've done it right, that simulation should behave similarly to a biological brain. I think he's optimistic on the time scale, but I think he's within an order of magnitude and I agree his approach is sound.

3) Pretty much everything about the brain is an emergent property. As an example, the Blue Brain Project's neocortical column simulation shows alpha wave-like oscillations (private corresponence; but I believe Markram mentioned this in his TED lecture). Nowhere is there a cell ticking at 8-12Hz to create the waves. The oscillations emerge because the cells spontaneously synchronize at that frequency.

4) We can't define consciousness because it's an ill-posed question. Common definitions rest on the everyday experience of the 'ghost in the machine', when in reality that experience is an illusion of coherency created by our brains to help make sense of itself and the world. If there's one thing cognitive and neural science has shown over the past several decades, it's how small the domain of the unknowable consciousness is.

Take the work of Gazzaniga, 1998, on split brain patients, as described in the book Brain fiction (page 154, starting from the top):

http://books.google.ca/books?id=_rkKxbevFZEC&lpg=PP1&...

Et cetera.
I think the primary interactors with this data will be the browsers themselves, and browsers tend to have XML parsers handy.

It'd be no sweat for the browser to JSONify this data for the DOM, anyway.
Admitting that the problem is hard is important but not very helpful for actually solving the problem. Are you trying to discourage people from trying to solve it? Why, when the benefits should they succeed are astronomical? I agree that a lot of people have rosy-eyed views of an AI future, even ignoring the entire problem of Friendly AI, but why are you attacking them by just stating the difficulty of the problem instead of trying to suggest solutions? Hell, you could even donate some money to the people who do pay attention to the problems: http://www.singinst.org/

I don't know how accurate all of your "we" statements are, I'd bet at least one of them is wrong or will be wrong in the near future, considering there's about 7 billion of us and I doubt you've polled us all.
กิฟฟารีนออนไลน์(Giffarine Online)
How to get people of opposite political persuasions to read each other
Matteo, sorry to hear that and thanks for sharing your experience.

Can you not get another day job, which has nothing to do with software but is enough to pay the bills? That way you wouldn't have to worry about weird contracts and could work hard on your startup in your spare time?
Does RIM Want Palm?
It's not really a jet pack. It's more a thing you strap yourself onto than something you could carry on your back.

Would an A380 qualify as a jetpack if I managed to strap myself to its underbelly?
We're fumbling in the dark here, but that doesn't mean that we can't be close to a major breakthrough.

> We can't expect this stuff [sentience/consciousness] to magically appear from a large neural network

I actually expect those things to magically appear. If you have a functioning brain in a jar it should "come to life" automatically, because it's a reasoning machine. It reasons, therefore it becomes conscious. Just as byproduct of its complexity.
You are correct. It was just a little exchange. It went like this:

"Do you want to keep your startup after you join us?"
"Yes, I'd really like to."
"Ok."

Maybe I was too ingenuous and share part of the fault, I really don't know. There were no written rules anywhere, just this verbal agreement. The person was the same one that then told me I have to stop, the head of software development of the company.
As Fake Steve Jobs quipped, this would be like the the number two and number three sprinters trying to beat number one by strapping their legs together and running three-legged.
A few months into my first job (20+ years ago) had me going out to a customer site to fix a problem at about 11pm, getting home again at about 3am. Next morning I got a bollocking from the same guy who had asked me to go onsite about coming in 5 minutes late!

I managed about 7 months in that job before getting a research job. However, I did learn a lot about the politics of workplaces in that time.
If it's not scary, it's not cutting edge.

When did we start to assume that strapping yourself to an engine-and-propellers (or ducted fans) gadget and flying around would be anything close to safe?
Grab the fasciscle (sp?) 1 of Volume 4; the bitmanipulation stuff reads like poetry.
Could we use this to search HN?
Technology Review: What's in a Tweet?
My problem with the Dragon Book is more fundamental: having once made a real effort to read it, almost cover to cover, I came away with a few hours less of my life remaining and some ideas about lexers and parsers and the like, but I still had absolutely no idea how to sit down and write a compiler. I don't understand why anyone thinks this is a good book.

There are introductory texts that might not cover the same amount of theory, but at least get you from nowhere to being able to write a basic compiler from start to finish. If you do want some serious theory, particularly on optimizations, then Muchnick blows the Dragon Book away. If you want to work with different kinds of programming language, notably functional programming with a lambda calculus foundation, then these ideas barely appear in the Dragon Book and again there are specialised texts that would serve you much better. What is the target audience for the Dragon Book actually meant to be?
Two words: Facebook app
Your fault? If that is what happened, you can only be blamed for believing your new boss was honourable.

Obviously it would have been better to get it in writing, but even then, it still could be ignored and it's not like it's worth fighting.
Until it is. In 2006 we had Ubuntu on all computers at the company I worked for, because most of the people were either 1) developers and used it anwyway or 2) didn't really need more than a browser and openoffice anyway, and were thus perfectly content with it.
That sort of stuff is illegal/unenforcible in many countries. It's not clear where you're located, but it's probably worth checking.
At least with GM food you know what's in it ;-)
$500 online in less than 2 weeks? Method #1
For the metric headed readers like me:

Dry weight: 113 kg (250 lbs)
Pilot weight: 64 - 109 kg (140 - 240 lbs)

Measures: 152 cm high x 167 cm wide x 152 cm long (5 ft high x 5.5 ft wide x 5 ft long)

Rotor size: 52 cm (1.7 ft)
Maximum thrust: 272 kg (600 lbs)

Fuel capacity: 19 liters (5 gallons)
Fuel burn: 38 lph (10 gph)

Can reach: 2500 m (8000 ft)
Range: 51 km at max speed of 101 kph (31.5 miles at 63 mph)
All comments are welcome and strongly desired :)
When I managed a team of people who had "unusual" working hours I made a point of trying to subtly communicate to people who might get upset what was going on in the team:

"Thanks to Bob working to 3am this morning we are all set to give the demo to XYZ"

Do that before Bob comes in at lunchtime an he get treated like a hero rather than being resented. If Bob is always working funny hours then after a while people accept it and assume that he has always been doing something heroic when he comes in at lunchtime.

Of course, being the manager of such folks you actually do have to be able to know that all this is actually worth it from a business perspective.
> “It turns out we were searching around a position miles from the rover,” said Murphy.

This guy should make a law about improbable things happening ;)
Common Lisp Packages
(on typography) I find the little hash signs (#) at the paragprahs' ends to be disturbing when reading: I always think for a split second I missed a starting quotation mark somewhere.
If i ate soybeans for 2 weeks, never mind 2 years, i would probably not only lose my reproductive ability but also my lust for life.
Website looks ... interesting in my chrome on OSX. All the text in the main panel with the flashing dots is displayed as a mirror image.
A lot of it isn't food, but is instead a food-like substance containing some macronutrients.
Your comment illustrates a problem with the original submission: It's idiosyncratic. It says more about the writer than the subject.

The various books are really different, people's reading strategies are different, people's tastes are different. People who have been in the field longer tend to have read more books. Also, whether or not you have "finished" a book tends to be irrelevant in nonfiction. If you can't get through Code Complete in one sitting, try reading it in bits and pieces - it shows signs of having been designed for that. If you haven't "finished" TAoCP... you and Knuth have something in common.

(For the record, I have read all of Code Complete at none time or another, but I've barely touched TAoCP. Which is not a problem. It is good to have things to look forward to. As someone once said: What's the point of having a collection of nothing but things you have already read?)
> But when I got here I discovered that I'm not allowed to do any development out of the company, for myself or for anyone else, in any form (paid or free, open source or not)

That's bullshit if they've told you that. Threaten to challenge them legally over that (a simile might be if you worked in a garage and your contract "stopped" you from fixing your neighbors car as a favor at the weekend).

If it is not explicitly in the contract it is not legal for them to say this to you.

It annoys me how software companies think they can get away with things like this.

I would go do whatever software you like (as long as it is not competing, obviously) and let them try to a) find out and b) stop you.
This is an old post, and I've never quite agreed with it.

For one thing, I don't know how you can lump things like Head First Design Patterns or whatever the TDD one is in with things like Code Complete or Programming Pearls.

For another thing, I have read at least parts of all of the books that apparently programmers don't really read, and judging from the books on colleagues' desks (not the bookshelves) so have a lot of other people I've worked with. The same is certainly not true of the "books programmers do read" list.
First you say

I received my contract...

Then you say

But when I got here I discovered that I'm not allowed...

Did you sign the contract? What did you agree to in writing? Do they have other constraints not specified in the contract? If so, are you legally required to be subject to those constraints? You may have rights you are not currently aware of.

Sounds like you're beyond the point of soliciting personal and business advice and now your should seek legal advice.

Find a competent attorney and have him review your contract. Have him help you understand your options. This probably should have been your first step. But it's still not too late to do this. Do it now.

Understanding what your alternatives really are is the first step in a proper plan of action.
The "affordable tech" thing is a double-edged sword. I would not be surprised at bad news on the 'neat' UAV front ...

Some nuggets on this cruise missile news also at Slashdot:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/04/27/0228225/New-Russian-...
I tried the Facebook App, and didn't like it much. I'm not a hardcore facebook user or anything. I mostly use it to share photos with my family. But I never liked the App. The website was generally a better experience.

Couple this with the fact that I still haven't upgraded to the 3.0 version of the iPhone OS (Why? Because none of the features they were/are promoting are anything I'd use), and it makes a lot of the current breed of apps not usable.
It seems like quite a lot of tracks has disappeared in this update as well. :/
This is the picture you really want to see:
"How much do music artists make online"
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...
Infographic: 100 years of tax brackets.
And it's also not a jet, but a fan. A fan-strap?

Nomenclature aside, it's still cool though.
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Your startup is mentioned in your HN profile. Would your employer be upset if they googled its name and found this?

(Being paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you, etc.)
Wine's mp3 decoder doesn't work in some cases, including some mp3 files by Spotify's partners[1]. Because the decoder didn't work for some mp3 files, they are actively blocking wine's mp3 decoder for all mp3 files.

[1] I agree this is a pretty solid business reason to block it, but it's still intentional.
What about putting an ad on Craigslist asking a freelancer to set up Wordpress and install the plugins to integrate it to Twitter and Facebook? That can be done in literally a day (longer for a custom theme), and for about $500-$1000.
Probably, but until then, there's http://searchyc.com/
Find another job, really. The company is being unreasonable demanding you work for them 24-hours a day but not paying for those hours. If they want you to stop working on your idea after work, tell them to compensate for your "work" after workhour. If they can't do it, give them the finger and find another company.
In what country can an employer dictate what you do in your own time? Just because an employer puts somethings in a contract doesn't make it legal.
The points are kind of silly. I'm not defending the iPad, only challenging the neglect on the writer's part to fully "adopt" what he has purchased or is reviewing and use it correctly. It's just a bit misleading to someone who may not own an iPad or iPhone or iPod Touch or something with a similar experience. His points are like saying, "I bought a new Canon Rebel, but my Nikon lenses don't work." It reads like he is a shill (especially with a snide comment or so and references to XP, Microsoft, etc). I will pick out 5 points below:

1. "The iPad doesn't remember my Facebook password, so when I want to check Facebook I must reach for the netbook. A small thing you say -- but operating systems are collections of hundreds of small things, and new operating systems like the one in the iPad don't have them and old ones like XP do."

A: Use the Facebook app...

2. "I had pictures in my camera the other day. No way to get them up to Flickr through the iPad. If I had had the netbook with me, no problem. (I used my Droid instead.)"

A: Use a wifi sd card? Or, buy the adapter if you must use "USB"

3. "The netbook has a real keyboard. I'm writing this blog post on it. It's taken a couple of minutes so far. I'd still be on paragraph 2 if I had used the iPad. And I'd be entering it on one of my WordPress blogs because my customized content tools don't and will never run on Apple's new platform. (Unless they change their mind.)"

A: While I cannot stand the iPad's virtual keyboard, if you are going to do this task get the keyboard attachment. It's not what it was really meant for, but if you want to use it more like a netbook or laptop or desktop, get the keyboard. And, with the real estate of the iPad and the external keyboard, it is not adding that much more bulk to your travel bag if necessary.

4. "I hate the font they chose for Safari. How do I change it? There does not appear to be a way to do that. That was a new feature in Windows in 1995. Or was it 1994?"

A: This is where it starts to sound ridiculous. I understand his point, but what was the point in the third sentence? While totally ignoring how to use this properly, he then moves on to a point and opinion with a jab like this that make him seem somewhat of a shill.

5. "Apple has a long way to go before the iPad is a useful tool. Lots of little things to fix and tweak, and a philosophy that's going to keep the really innovative stuff flowing elsewhere (where -- not determined yet)."

A: Maybe he has a long way to go before writing a proper and useful review?
I kinda wish I could get in my time machine and use that instead. I would have been much less painful on my nose and far fewer broken pairs of glasses.

Somehow, I never thought of doing that at the time.
wordpress.com? (or tumblr.com or...)
CSS3 Action Framework
A month or two during the daily 20 minute commute on the train will do it
Lusty-explorer-mod.vim
Sell Ubuntu (and other apps like OOo, Gimp, etc) for a nominal $9.95

Give two options in the download area of your software, one green button with a $9.95 download and one blue button for a free download. Both pointing to the same package.

If you want to contribute to open source, click the green one.

Also sell it on best buy and walmart for $9.95 to reach the non-tech-savvy audience.

Even if they drop it on the trash can when they get home. At least some money goes to the pockets of the open sourcerers, which is better than none.
Great looking update. I'm very excited to try Spotify once it comes to the US (hopefully sometime this year?).
Sample Research Papers Reviewing Can Learn Independent Research Strategies
Writing scientific papers is impossible without carrying out any researches. The student, who is engaged in scientific work, takes responsibility of choosing a topic for research
What go has isn't just, "locks or just do it in another process." Either that, or Erlang just has "locks or just do it in another process."

What Rob Pike has put into Go, he used in a previous language he developed called Newsqueak, which enabled him to write an entire GUI windowing system in one afternoon. That combination of shared-nothing concurrency and message passing is pretty darned powerful. In such a system, locks are there under the covers and are invisible to the programmer.
Side Effects of Drugs in the Elderly People - Health and Financial Freedom
I have such a clause in my contract too. I think this is only becoming a problem at all when they want to get rid of you. As long as they want you, it would be very stupid to enforce this since your productivity could go way down when they tell you what to do in your free time.
Finding meaning in Random Sequences
I've always wondered why metric users call measurements in grams "weight" when it's really mass and measurements in Newtons is weight. Sorry, I'm an American befuddled by perfectly sensible decimal based measurement systems.