skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sigh, once again:

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/FAQ.aspx

Q: Are all AVC essential patents included?

A: No assurance is or can be made that the License includes every essential patent. The purpose of the License is to offer a convenient licensing alternative to everyone on the same terms and to include as much essential intellectual property as possible for their convenience. Participation in the License is voluntary on the part of essential patent holders, however.

Short version: There is no guarantee there will be no troll. No, they won't fight for you, it is your problem.
The reason that it shouldn't be that way is that it's not always appropriate or useful.

Why not? I hate dealing with companies that aren't personal and friendly. I am not a robot.
I could understand such system for new downloads... but this just seems insane. They had to implement a new system, change the old one, retrain the phone monkeys and then waste time of both the support guys and their managers, because the issue is not easy to resolve. They might potentially gain some new annoyed support customers, but the rest will not be likely to go for Sun hardware in the future if they have a choice.

Is alienating customers ever a good choice? Apple's new rules, Facebook privacy, now Oracle... who's next?
Patio furniture an attraction of the IT office
Well, of course, the richest people will all come from the high-risk high-reward pool. But the expected value of doing a startup could easily be lower than working in an investment bank.

If one startup in five "succeeds" and the average return is 5M after 5 years of work, then the expected annual "salary" is 200K. Not a completely unreasonable figure for investment banking (I have no clue what the real numbers are. Plus, not everyone can work in wall street or do a startup)

If that's the case, then a startup would be similar to a lottery ticket. Do it for the thrill, do it for the experience, but don't do it for the money.
I think they should include the prediction that the Large Hadron Collidor would open a black hole.
Models and Bottles. I'm dead serious. A couple of friends of mine became bankers because of that and I can't say that I haven't been jealous at times.
I could be totally wrong here, but I get the sense that despite that being the intent of wall street, that basic concept has been very much abstracted away into a complicated game of mutual insurance and risk management.

All I'm saying is that perhaps society would be better off if the resources were allocated a little less efficiently, but those "best minds" were applied to some other field.
Display a Google-O-Meter Chart with the Google Chart API
Sachin Tendulkar Joins Twitter
i thinks this is exactly why an application like Instapaper is so successful.
AdBlock makes that site look so much better. In fact, their ad blocked layout is part of why I liked it -- now that I see what they meant it to look like, I'm less than impressed.
لمسات ايطاليه ساحره.......... - شركة الصباحي
The examples he gives are "fun" and "human" but the point he makes can be broadened out. Much business writing is simply lazy and cliched. This is compounded by the fact often a company won't want to describe its products in simple, accessible terms because the products need to be made to sound complex, mysterious, worth a lot of you money. So you tend to get terminology inflation.
It seems like the easiest way to make money in the post-opensource era - pay a small sum for your each move. =)
Hcl once again
I agree. Steve Jobs never said that Flash can't run on the iPhone/iPad. I'm sure he even tried prototypes for it himself. 30 seconds videos doesn't make a solid product.
If you look at the video, I try to give some intuition about this.

The following explanation is an oversimplification to give you intuition into what is going on: The difficulty in training a deep architecture is that, if you use standard backprop, the gradient signal doesn't flow back to the lowest layers. Instead, the few supervised output units pass back a small gradient signal, and at each layer the gradient signal has increasing noise as it gets passed backwards. So the top layers overfit, and the lower layers don't get tuned effectively. The lower layers essentially fire random noise, and the top layers overfit.

For this reason, before 2006, no one knew how to train a deep architecture (besides Yann LeCun, with his convolutional architectures, but those were not as general purpose).

The breakthrough in 2006 came when Hinton came up with the original DBN algorithm. Bengio et al (http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~lisa/publications/index.php?pag...) followed up by teasing apart the important steps in training a deep architecture. They were:
greedy layerwise training, i.e. construct one layer, then the next layer, then the next layer, etc.
unsupervised pretraining
When you train a single layer using an unsupervised criterion, the gradient signal is passed backwards through only one hidden layer (the layer you are constructing). And the output layer for an unsupervised criterion has as many units as the input. So the output layer passes back a strong gradient signal, and it doesn't have to travel very far.

By doing this unsupervised pretraining in a layer-by-layer manner, the deep network receives a good initialization of its parameters. Then, when finetuning against the supervised criterion using backprop, you can find a better local minimum.

The work of Erhan et al show that the effect of unsupervised pretraining is not only regularization, but also improved optimization. Take a look at there work for a great empirical study with large scale experiments and pretty graphs: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/proceedings/papers/v9/erhan10a/erh...

p.s. feel free to send me an email to followup.
Kids have $80/month to spend on an inferior product? If they have that kind of money, they should just get an Android phone.
Code Contracts: Hiding ContractException
What would you pay a month to have access to SM?
Slicehost's network connection to Europe broken for more than 24 hours
Anything that confirms our self-centered views and illusions. (sorry, cannot resist =)
The best way to predict the future is to prevent it
Beautiful emotions and relationships!

http://welcome-to-croatia.com/holida...nik-apartments
I don't know what makes us happy, but I'm happy to have a job that I get paid to do when I would probably do it for free and for fun. (Developer)
But they're only going act out of their own self-interest. If society is structured as such that solving practical physics problems that could improve society through solving engineering problems and raising our standard of living is less valued than only using one's intelligence to game the system to take money from the less intelligent, then this is society's failing, not theirs.

Disclaimer: I'm of the opinion that it's better for society's best and brightest to use their skills to improve society for themselves and everyone else in the most universally helpful manner.
Billboard Music App Awards: Submissions Open
China is doing exactly the same. According to the latest law from the News Regulation Bureau, it requires everyone to register their real life identity to get online to protect Internet security.
As lame as this concept sounds, I'm sure there are Apple fans out there who are looking to share their lives with someone who won't be sickened by Apple mentionitis.
"Their content is incredible" is true for the one article they pay someone to write, versus the 10 or so lists they publish alongside it.
It think anywhere from 4$ to 7$ a month with deals on yearly subs.

With expectations of less link bait style articles and more hands on content.
Hair soaks up oil spills [video]
Great example, I actually subscribe to Net Tuts+ and think that Collis and Vahid really hit the niche of how-to type website spot on by building the Envato networks.
I see from your responses why I couldn't find that-- you're all talking about search engines! I wasn't thinking of HN or bi-lingual dictionaries as search engines and I never even considered managing search engine options rather than just adding a keyword to a bookmark (which Chrome won't let you do).

It's definitely a weird interface and a lot of menus to go through, but once it's set up, it's pretty much the same as FF's search bookmarks. Thanks.
Why do people think Wall St took their savings? It's your own decision what you do with your money, and if someone invests in something they don't understand then it's their own fault if they get burned! The stock market has rebounded astonishingly. The people who lost their life savings panicked and that's their own decision. In 2008 I had about 2k which was invested in two stocks (my entire portfolio, everything else was going to tuition). I sold out at the bottom of the market for a 40% loss. If I held them today I would have about a 45% _gain_, not bad for 2 years! Even if the market had not rebounded that is the risk you take for investing in stocks instead of something else. Remember, Wall St is a lot more than consumer investments anyway.

Also, I didn't say there wasn't value in entertainment, I said that it probably doesn't provide more utility than Wall Street's activities although really it's comparing apples to bowling balls.
Out of my circle of friends, I undoubtedly left college with the lowest grades. Some of my friends were straight-A students (and we were at an academically challenging college). But 10+ years out it's arguable that I've achieved more in my career than any of them and there is a very weak correlation between career success and high grades in that group of friends.

And yes, while we were still close, I had to deal with a lot of resentment along the way. I heard all kinds of nasty things about how I 'magically' became successful after years of lackluster academic performance.

It's silly to say people who do well in school are flawed or are wasting their energy. I think there are many compelling reasons to do well in school. But in my experience there is a sense of entitlement that develops along the way that often leads to a lot of friction and disappointment down the road.

Also, after years of hiring and training people, I firmly believe that grades do not predict ability in any meaningful way.
There were special effect cameras capable of at least 300fps in use in Hollywood long before then. Insanely fast cameras were used to analyze early nuclear bomb experiments.

Here's the best reference I could find on old cameras (search for fps):
http://www.xs4all.nl/~wichm/cinelisc.html

See also: http://www.damninteresting.com/rapatronic-nuclear-photograph...
I am not so much against the adds on SM as I am against the content they use to create page views for those ads.

SM started out really nice and it's articles where actually interesting to begin with.

Now they are just diversifying out posts to cover anything of the slightest interest to webdesigners in order to get more advertising doh.

Nothing against that business model but I can find better ways to spend my time than to read about "10 trends/ways/free font/icons/to/ improve/help/make X"

Most of that is so simplistic and misleading it's not even funny.
Good point. They aren't responsible for billions of dollars going poof, though (especially the bus driver).

A lot of people put the value of a life at around the expected work society gets from it - and then try to argue that that's not what they really think, obviously, because doing so would be immoral.
Atlas (and Cappuccino) is going to make developing quality RIAs very quick, very easy. While a RIA isn't something that is necessary for everything on the web, these types of frameworks are going to support true killer apps that will replace desktop equivalents.
Link baiting is the worse kind of traffic generation technique I know. Even though in short term it is effective and might drive people to your site, over time most likely the title/content will be irrelevant dilute the brands identity.
I agree SM isn`t what it use to be, however I do still find good articles to keep myself up to date on current trends etc. and I don`t expect anything else from it really.
The only problem I'm having so far with the Android app (on 2.1/Nexus One) is that whenever you view a picture in the Dropbox app it gets added to your Android gallery. The other way around would be OK, but this way just clutters up the phone gallery.
I could try this but I can't distribute my free app through Android Market. They only allow apps that use Google Checkout for any form of payment processing. But I can just exhaust all possible channels to distribute my free apps and have a site where they register and pay via PayPal (PayPal is the simplest and easiest way for me to receive international payments right now). Thanks for this idea!
The ecological Cost of human Inequality
If they force me to pay for the JRE, I will switch to Python subito.
great story.. long, but worth the read.
Yeah, I want to know why they're there too.
"There’s a report from the early 1950s (in this PDF) of a one-ton spill of the stuff. It burned its way through a foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I'm sure no one involved ever forgot. That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products: it’s bad enough when your reagent ignites wet sand, but the clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid are your special door prize if you’re foolhardy enough to hang around and watch the fireworks."

From http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa.... Brilliant.
YouTube Movies
Certainly I've found that college level text books by and for the the US market tend to be a good three times as long (and twice as expensive) as books by and for the European market, yet still basically cover the same material. I'm not really sure if that says more about the authors or the publishers though
I couldn't agree more. I've seen countless pieces with flimsier statistics than this claiming that women are in some way more intelligent, more rational, or more ethical than men.

If a study finds that more parts of a man's brain activate when he does X task, the headline reads that women can process it more efficiently and only need to use a small portion of their brains.

If a study finds that more parts of a woman's brain activate when she does X task, the headline reads that women are able to recruit more of their brains and do the task holistically.

This piece was a breath of fresh air.
I was expecting some mention of CSS text shadows.
i'd love to hear more about your experiences. blog? reddit AMA?
That might be true, but this is funnier ....

CIMM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Immaturity_Model
Actually there are 100 apps written with Adobe's Flash compiler on the App Store, and no one has complained.

That is, they seem similar to all the other apps on the App Store: simple, quickly written, drain battery life, crash often. Just like native Objective C apps :)
Once Python becomes fast with unladen-swallow then I don't think I would bother with Java :)
No that's why I quit !
Oracle removed public downloads of pretty much everything except the initial releases of some products. Patches for Solaris, Sun Studio, etc., all require paid support ("entitlement" in Oracle speak). So if you had a Solaris installation and hit some bugs, your only choice is to re-install using the latest release, provided it is available. For Sun Studio the situation is even more insane: traditionally the initial releases of their C/C++ compiler were always so buggy that it required immediate patching to make them usable. And since Sun historically does not release updates for their compilers (unlike Solaris), this makes Sun Studio pretty much useless unless you have paid for support.

The firmware story is hilarious. You should go read some comments on Sun's website. People bought Sun hardware and when they went to download drivers to make that hardware work with their OS, they were told they needed to pay for "software support" to get them. What they got with hardware was apparently "hardware support" and it doesn't cover drivers/firmware. One word: insane.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics
I would simply use hyphen '-' as well as the underscore '_'.

Another almost as trivial solution would be to have a string with two blanks and permute away !
I can't see how they could provide any value above anyone else in the market. The moment one site is willing to fund themselves purely on adverts is the moment that subs based sites all start to crumble.

As a developer I use sites like SM every so often when it's quicker for me to look something up than to figure it out myself (when time or cost are more important than my pride). I'd never ever consider paying directly for that info (time and cost then swing back under pride) unless someone smarter than me was available to live answer questions, which will never happen.
It's kind of sad that it goes from 'struggling to comprehend superstring theory' to being an unknown speck at <random company>.
I don't think it would require censorship, but it would require some highly talented social re-engineering to alter the incentives enough that CNN doesn't benefit from low-brow, addictive, live coverage of tragedy.
New Empire Satin White Wedding Dress WD-0647, Bridal Gowns
BlackBerry Tablet
Yeah but I am starting to realize that keeping myself up to date is less about following hugely popular sites like SM and more about finding obscure but in depth peeps into the future.

If it's on SM it's normally past the trend phase IMHO.
Talk about select perception. This article stinks of Communism and select perception.
If Mario Was Designed in 2010
Thanks at the blind Apple Fanboys downvoting me because i hurt their feelings and expressed my opinions, even tried to find prove with the link. Go ahead, downvote here too, please, because i am apparently an evil person in your twisted reality!

(fyi, i wish that flash video dies, too, as much as everyone)
Clients don't measure the business effectiveness of their websites as such, they measure lead-generation and conversion.

Most of the sites in that SM article don't have business objectives other than to showcase great design.
I think the sum will have to be fairly substantial. The cost of involving support, or any kind of human contact, in the chain between needing a download and getting it is likely tens of thousands times more expensive than maintaining a self-service system.

It's the enterprise sales model, where software contracts are measured in megabucks, because to do anything cheaper would be more expensive than the cost of sales. I think relying on anything from Sun that Oracle can likely find a way to charge for would be foolish, unless you're big enough to afford those kinds of costs.
I also went to college in the late 90's. Where I went to school was not in the northeast, but had a significant overlap with Harvard applicants (or so I'm told). Interestingly, I never heard of anyone talking about going into investment banking/finance. A ton of people did go into "consulting" at McKinsey and (at the time) Anderson, etc, but most of the people I hung out out with in physics/engineering went on to actual engineering jobs or grad school.

When I later heard about this supposed pipeline of Ivy League people going into finance, I always wondered what the deal was. I assume it's primarily a geographical thing. Firms like McKinsey are all over the place, whereas finance is centered on Wall St., so they go for more local recruiting.

Of course some of my college friends did eventually end up going into Wall St. stuff. One after being a physics prof at MIT, another after doing a physics post doc and not finding any other physics jobs, and another left McKinsey and got a PhD in finance. Stochastic calculus FTW!
This is one of my... frustrations with the online design community. I wish there was a site devoted to the Mailchimps of the world: applications that do things for people and look great doing it.
awesome read. very funny in parts.

a couple of gems:

'I was talking, nodding absent-mindedly to myself, engaged in a pretend conversation with my pants'

and

'Nothing had prepared me for a meeting. Therefore I decided on the smartest possible thing to do - ignore it like that lump on my balls.'
There seem to be at least two more cases that I've experienced that aren't on your list:

1. You're learning something new. It will take you X hours of practice to learn it, so if you want to get to the good part and be able to start building cool things with it, might as well get X out of the way.

2. You've got this burning idea for how to do something cool, and if you rest it'll leak out of your brain. Better get it done fast before the inspiration dries up.

There was a period a couple months back where I was pulling 12 hour days and working weekends for about 3 weeks. I had something that needed to be finished, and it was complicated enough that I feared that if I set it aside for anything, I wouldn't be able to load the problem back into my head. So I just did it, spending whatever time it took to get it done.

And then I spent a week or two working 6-7 hour days. I don't keep score, and I don't think my boss does either. From his POV, the project got done, and that's a win for him. From my POV, I didn't have much planned that month anyway, and my employer has been remarkably flexible when I need to take long periods of time off work, or need to leave early and work a shortened day, or just want to come in at 1 and leave at 10.

I won't sacrifice things that are important to me for my job - if an old friend is coming into town and I've got dinner plans with them, I'm not willing to be tied down to my desk. But if it's just a matter of writing some more code or blowing a few more hours on Reddit/HackerNews, I don't really mind writing the code so much.
The bradley_outline.png background image on this page is 617KB in size. About ten times bigger than it needs to be. I wonder how much web bandwidth is wasted by poorly optimised images. Maybe there is a business opportunity in an automated tool to detect these ... just musing to myself.
I can vouch for the accuracy of this. I'm an expert voucher, so you can trust me.
I second pclark's request.

What I don't understand about Windows Mobile is how they squandered such a huge lead. I used to absolutely love my Windows Mobile 5 HTC phone back in 2005, there was nothing even close in terms of functionality, apps, hardware. In the 5 years since, while Apple and Google built entire new systems from the ground up, all Microsoft could come up with were some minor updates. What have they been doing all this time? Were they resting on their laurels thinking they had won the market?
He forgot the store where you can buy stuff at that all games are required to have now. And how come you can't send mushrooms to your friends to help them out?
My only friend who became a lawyer who didn't "sell out" is the one who never planned to become a lawyer. He was an electrical engineer who was hired as a technical expert at a big IP law firm. They eventually offered to pay for him to go to law school. Everyone else I know wanted to save the world and now works for The Man. What the blog author writes is very true in that regard.
I hate to say this, but this for Hacker News? Really?
Entertaining...I'm pretty sure it's fictional though.
Change directory forwards or backwards though time.
New LBackup screencast online :

The 'lcd' command (a component of LBackup) allows you to change your working directory forwards and backwards though time within your backup set.

An introduction to the 'lcd' command, screencast was just released :
http://www.lbackup.org/screencasts

The screen cast focuses on Mac OS X within a BASH shell.