skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have long felt that anti-gouging laws are misguided fix to a problem. The best example I have heard is a story of three college kids who lived outside the strike-zone of a tornado. They rented a refrigerator truck, and some chainsaws then filled the truck with bags of ice. Because the roads were in such bad shape, and they had to keep cutting down trees that were in their way it took the group the better part of a day to make it into the town center. However once they got there they started selling the bags of ice for about double what ice would normally cost.

As more and more people heard about the ice a long line formed in front of the truck. As the story was described to me most people would get to the front of the line and when they heard the price the people would complain that the students were gouging but still ask for 3-4 bags of ice. Eventually the town's police came, locked the truck and arrested the students for price-gouging.

All this did was prevent the people who were waiting for the ice to not be able to get any at all. Additionally since people, even people who complained about the high price, still bought multiple bags it was obviously worth buying to them at that price, and as more people outside realized they could make money they would be more likely to bring in even more ice, reducing the shortage. Contrarily if the students knew that they would only be able to charge the normal price for a bag of ice they would never have bought any and the shortage would have been worse. If your mother needed ice for her Diabetes meds wouldn't you rather pay $8 for a bag of ice than not be able to get any at any price?

Incidentally this story came from an episode of Russ Robert's Podcast EconTalk www.econtalk.org that was released about a year and one half ago. If anyone wants to know more specifically I can check just ask, but regardless if economics interests you I highly recommend the podcast.

TL;DR: "price gouging" is actually an effective way to help alleviate shortages, especially in disaster zones where there is little or none of a necessity such as ice, available.
That's true, except the bit where there's plenty of evidence to support the theory that people are willing to pay more than a dollar and change for a game.
Better yet, try out Theano, which allows you to write numpy-like math equations that get automatically compiled and optimized and then target the GPU:

http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/
Ask HN: How does a foreign company get a Federal Tax ID?
I am trying to setup a bank account and such, in the US, but my company is registered in Jamaica. How do I get a federal tax ID, EIN or SSN (or any combination of the above) ? Do I have to register the company in the US to be able to get those or can I do it some other way?
I don't quite see your point. How many early-stage US startups offer dental? Surely it's cheaper and easier to buy just dental coverage in CA than medical+dental in US.
4. You own shares in an exciting young company. You own your overtime, not the other way around.
I thought everything Zuckerberg ever built was based on scraping other peoples' data. Even now, didn't they pull info from Wikipedia for their pages about your interests?
Somewhat off-topic, but I for one hope that all this buzz around e-books and such makes reading more popular than it is right now.
you should have put 'fast' in quotes.

for those who haven't watched it, it's a video about how awful the HTML5 experience is on the iPad so far, not only because of speed but because developers haven't developed for the touch events.
But you don't know if these people would or not. Also, I've payed $50 for a game in the past, but I'm not sure that I would any more.
It's worth reading the Abstract Heresies' entry that turned my attention to this paper: http://funcall.blogspot.com/2010/05/c-vs-lisp.html (After giving it a thought I posted this entry to HN too, as I probably should have done in the first place... :))

The date is interesting, 1992 - it would still take years for Java to implement it...wrong.
Chrome should really steal the heuristics that Quicksilver (http://github.com/tiennou/blacktree-alchemy) uses for its auto-completion. After just a few weeks of use, I reached the point where Quicksilver seemed to read my mind. If I type in the three or four most significant characters of what I'm looking for, it'll just show up.
Over time the penalties are likely to rise, precisely to make this sort of behavior economically disadvantageous.
It's a one time bit of mental bandwidth.

Actually in my experience it's been more like once per year, since health insurance companies tend to change their plans that often.

The amount of bandwidth is less important than the disincentive for starting a company/going it alone.

Yes, I couldn't agree more.
FWIW I have OpenBSD running a similar setup on a T41 and have been quite happy with it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - living in Massachusetts made it considerably easier to start a company (for context, the national HCR plan that just passed is a slightly modified, scaled-up version of what MA has had for a few years).
The mbp is almost certainly dual core.
> Facebook claims that Power's tool violates criminal law because Facebook's terms of service ban users from accessing their information through "automatic means."

So what is the point of the Open Graph then? Doesn't that allow me to access my information through automatic means or am I misunderstanding something?
So if you get hit by a car or your appendix ruptures, you're going to hold off going to the hospital for a few weeks until you can enroll in insurance? And how does the address the points raised in this post -- that people will avoid going to the doctor and allow a slow problem to become a big one? Not exactly a perfect solution.
Yeah, that will work. International SIP DIDs can also be had for around $4/month or less.
The Underdog
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsS...

"For (b) (1) where an end user pays directly for video services on a title-by-title basis (e.g.,
where viewer determines titles to be viewed or number of viewable titles are otherwise
limited), royalties for video greater than 12 minutes (there is no royalty for a title 12
minutes or less) ..."

This probably explains the maximal duration of most videos on youtube.
Call a broker. They can tell you the best choice for insurance given your circumstances and preferences. It's their job to know the ins and outs of various plans; it's a lot of work to figure all this stuff out.

The added bonus is that they'll be up to speed with all of their plans all the time, and if your company takes off they can help you with group policies as well.

Using a broker won't cost you anything more than going directly to the carrier, and as an added bonus you have someone to call if things go wrong.
> On a sidenote, I could make a pretty good link finder and make it send complaints automatically, there must be some good money in offering such a service to copyright owners

Anybody here probably could, and I'm sure the plaintiffs are aware of that possibility.

Already DMCA takedown requests are generated in an automatic way, but that doesn't change much because another upload is minutes away.

It's a real problem for the copyright fat cats, which is why I don't doubt they'll appeal this to the German national high court.

If they call it quits now I predict a serious increase in German hosting capacity in the near future.
This was posted a while back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=992293

A very neat tool but I'm a little bummed out to see no new functionality in the 4 months since I looked at it last. I'll stick to my dot graph compiler for now :).
Hello, Chair (YC S07) seeks senior web frameworks developer
Hello, Chair's Appsaurus applies cutting edge machine learning to solve the problems of App Store discoverability. With our 1.0 iPhone app launched to rave reviews, we're now building a comprehensive web front-end to the Appsaurus ecosystem and we need your help.

We're backed by an all-star team of angels and advisors, with some huge names we can't quite announce yet recently joining our already amazing team of David Parker (formerly of Viaweb), Chris Sacca, Y-Combinator and Alexis Ohanian. You'll find us in the heart of SF's Mission.

We value creativity and creation over pedigree. Come help us change the way the next great platform is navigated.

This is a senior position, and full-time.

Requirements:

Mastery of Web Frameworks (Python or Ruby)

A burning passion for design, fun, and user experience

A love of web standards (HTML/JS/CSS/Canvas/etc.)

SQLAlchemy experience a plus

Git experience helpful

Please send resumes and portfolios to:
jobs@appsaurus.com
Just to summarize:

"Deep learning" is the new big trend in Machine Learning. It promises general, powerful, and fast machine learning, moving us one step closer to AI.

An algorithm is deep if the input is passed through several non-linearities before being output. Most modern learning algorithms (including decision trees and SVMs and naive bayes) are "shallow".

For intuition, imagine if I told you that your main routine can call subroutines, and your subroutines could call subsubroutines, but you couldn't have any more abstraction than that. You can't have subsubsubroutines in your "shallow" program. You could compute whatever you wanted in a "shallow" program, but your code would involve a lot of duplicated code and would not be as compact as it should be. Similarly, a shallow machine learning architecture would involve a lot of duplication of effort to express things that a deep architecture could more compactly. The point being, a deep architecture can more gracefully reuse previous computations.

Deep learning is motivated by intuition, theoretical arguments from circuit theory, empirical results, and current knowledge of neuroscience. Here is a video where I give a high-level talk on deep learning, and describe this intuition:
http://bilconference.com/videos/deep-learning-artificial-int...

Here is more detailed information about deep learning: http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/

Deep learning techniques can typically be expressed as dense matrix operations, making them suitable to being sped up using GPUs. Which makes deep learning even more powerful.
According to this site, http://www.merchantaccountblog.com/1027/a-comparison-of-3-al... , which was linked from the original article, the Google and Amazon payment systems have the same fees as PayPal.
Having just seen this in some boilerplate terms of use, the phrasing almost always includes the phrase "without our express written consent." Which (assuming they have this clause) they can selectively enforce it.
There's no reason for someone to spend a lot of time trying to figure this out. Go to google and search for "health insurance broker". Find someone near you and call them. Let them do the hard work.

They have the incentive to find a plan for you that you'll keep for a long time since they get paid commission only for the months that you keep insurance. They'd much rather you get a plan you're happy with than try to screw you over by getting you to buy a plan that's too large.
Mature Age Entrepreneurs Rule
Would the impact of such a list really outweigh the risk of aiding and abetting identity theft?

There's probably way to accomplish the same effect without making the aggregated data public. Maybe sharing the results with some news outlet?
What a stunningly perfect example of a red herring.
There are five comments on this thread right now, and all of them are personal attacks on the author. What the hell, people?
I'd stick with this advice (in addition to the post):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144905
Let's take a small step back here; just like the anti-Google sentiment that was about a few months back it seems is Facebooks turn to face the fire (mostly their fault).

A lot of what they are doing is, at best, ethically unsound or, at worst, privacy invading. In this case I'd say (from initial reading) it sits on the scale slap bang in the middle of "a douchebag thing to do".

But. It doesn't feel hypocritical because their argument is that their ToS attempt to deny users the right to access their accounts this way. The Email services, as far as I am aware, that FB scrape either explicitly allow or do not disallow such action. It seems "axe grinding" to bring that into the discussion.

Notably this article does not appear to discuss or link to articles about the suit Facebook has filed [meta point: I hate that, it feels sneaky]. It appears (from research) that it is an long running dispute between Power and Facebook. They have also filed Trademark infringements and other stuff against them at the same time (no comment on the general legitimacy of such claims for the moment).

I haven't fully digested all the information to have a complete opinion on this but... I think that this is part of Facebook trying to win the wider battle with Power.com, I'm not sure it reflects a deliberate move by them to try and turn ToS violations into criminal violations. However I am definitely in agreement with the EFF that if a potential side effect of any eventual ruling will bring in such criminal elements then it is a bad thing and should be fought. Hopefully when I can actually open all the PDF filings the picture will be clearer :)

References (I believe this is the suit being referred to):

http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2009/01/facebook-vs-power-v...

http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/9th-circuit/facebook-inc-...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Venture....

EDIT: amusingly TechCrunch seems to have the best summary of things from last year... http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/09/powercom-countersues-facebo...
Why Do Computers Suck at Math?
I don't know what xobni's advertising was like in other cities, but I was very surprised with the amount of advertising they had here in Seattle. Just a few weeks ago, when Microsoft released Office 2010, Xobni had this gigantic advertising campaign. I don't think I've ever seen so much advertising for a simple app.

Advertising I saw:
Tons of teens dancing with Xobni signs around the edges of the Microsoft campus.
Planes circling Seattle, with signs trailing behind them.
Radio ads.
Bus ads.
TV commercials.
Tons of shit plastering Bellevue.

It was impressive to say the least. I'm probably one of the most difficult consumers to advertise to, and I nearly wanted to try the product after seeing that advertisement campaign.

Anyways, nothing for me to say about the product, just the advertising.
3D Vision Impressions
Sure, you can totally do compile-time metaprogramming without language support, but the barrier to entry is much higher. That means that, at the margin, you're less likely to try it, especially for small projects. And most projects start small.

I totally agree that good development shops do lots of compile-time metaprogramming. The issue is whether they do enough when dealing with problems (that start out as) too small to justify writing a full blown parser/compiler, and if they don't, how much of the shortage is attributable to a lack of language support in C++/Java.
Apparently not. There are no suspicious patterns in the voting on those stories.
The greatest part is that the court thinks distributing illegal content isn't the main part of thier operation therefor they are allowed to continue the service in general. I seriously doubt that more than even 1% of the traffic is legit.
They'd probably get a 3X speedup (at least) just by moving to a compiled language.

False. The bottleneck is matrix multiplication.

numpy uses a BLAS library to do matrix multiplication, and most BLAS libraries are written in a compiled language.

Hence, you can improve speed by improving your matrix multiplication. Either use a faster BLAS implementation, like goto BLAS (http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/resources/software/), or do your matrix multiplication on a faster processor, like a GPU.
Does Software Culture Reward Failure?
How would it be more effective? I can only see it being more annoying for the people you spam.
MRI Memory Allocation, A Primer For Developers
It's also the easiest, and after I refuse to play their game, what do I care?

Well, actually, as Lauren Weinstein pointed out, the political reaction to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's attitude towards privacy and the usual likely overreaction might hurt all Web 2.0 players, good and bad:

"He appears to be unapologetically reveling in taking advantage of many Facebook users' naivete about privacy risks, and shows no signs of backing down."

http://www.nnsquad.org/archives/nnsquad/msg03450.html

So I do have a greater stake in this, but there's not a whole lot that I see that I can do. That won't be true for others of course.
Trust me, creepy is not the word.
Ditto. Thanks to the RethinkDB guys for doing these all those years ago...
Incidentally, I just tried the latest "fastest ever" Google Chrome with this. The frame rate DROPPED on my machine from 48fps to 18fps. I'm getting the feeling that pushing the performance limits of compiled JavaScript is not an effective endeavor right now.
Color Theory at ColorJack
These people maybe not... but how does that matter? The 6,000 people that bought the pack are just a tiny portion of the gaming market.
Same problem in the US -- small group and individual insurance just doesn't cover dental work. But dental work isn't really that expensive, at least not compared to medical work.

Budget $300/yr for your two checkups, and you will be fine. (Even a root canal is not that expensive. I think it was $1200 for a specialist to do it.)
Blackbird Pie – Twitter Media
It reminds me of a discussion thread we had a few days ago, when people were lamenting that it took so many billions and trillions of CPU operations to do relatively simple things today - that we're not really getting the real value of Moore's Law.

It's heartening to see modern computing power like this :)
Odd post for Atwood - I have to imagine that 90% of his readers didn't come away with any new knowledge.
I could use this copy over static media to my CDN. Cron + rsync is annoying.
My thought exactly. Whatever you think of ESR's writing, it's less predictable and repetitive than most of the comments people post on forums whenever he writes something new.

If you disagree with a post, do the work of explaining why.
Wow, that's some pretty bad animation :)
It appears they want Open Graph to be used in response to user actions that are explicit and specific to Facebook, rather than behind-the-scenes aggregation or polling of any sort that keeps your data in sync with other services. Quite a fine line.
I find it amusing how many people work super long hours without thinking about the consequences.

For one you are telling your employer how much less valuable you are, assuming you are on salary. Working 80 hours a week for the same amount of money effectively dilutes your hourly earnings, factoring in overtime, to 40% of its original value. If your boss called you into his office and told you he was switching you to hourly and giving you a 60% pay cut you would probably be pretty pissed, even though effectively it meant you made the same amount of money given your hours.

For another, studies show that for software development people don't actually get more total work done working past about 50ish hours a week. All that other in-office time gets wasted by inefficiencies caused from over-work, lack of sleep, lack of concentration, and being forced to do tasks and errands at work that would normally be done at home (eating meals, relaxing, paying bills, etc.)
I'd rather pay a fixed price and never have to worry about medical care again. And I do this, and it's great. $300/month and everything is covered - doctor's visits, medication, surgery (if necessary), etc.
Move to Massachusetts. I'm serious. MA has a regulated health insurance exchange. You can compare plans on the exchange website; plans as well as premium increases have to be approved by the exchange administrator. So if an insurance company decides to raise premiums by 80%, they'll be kicked off the exchange. Plus, in MA it is illegal to refuse coverage for pre-existing conditions. They can't even vary the price based on factors other than age/gender/location and maybe smoking. Check out https://www.mahealthconnector.org/portal/site/connector/menu... to see for yourself.

On the down side, you have to have insurance or pay a big fine every year. And healthcare, just like everything else in MA is expensive. But probably cheaper than CA.
Using a virtual machine for software development
I'm curious now ... how many people reading this haven't had some form of health insurance or regular health care for an appreciable period of time? (A year or more.)

I've been without for -- hmm, wow, around 10 years now. :-/
> would not let users download books at all; rather, they would only be available exclusively on a Web browser

well that's just pants. There's a load of places I'd take an ebook reader that don't have web access.
... this is the truth that many programmers wouldn't admit ...
It happens. Facebook have made a few idiotic decisions recently and it's their turn for the [legitimate] disgruntlement (remember Google were getting it much the same).

There will be a plenty of both sensible and silly articles targeting Facebook.
That's not against Wikipedia's ToS.
Wikileaks?
Storage and the Interstate
I know the guy who built this, he has a douchebag boss who makes him work long hours so he might not have had much time to devote recently...
I didn't have a good experience with a broker. They were typical sleazy salesmen type. They pushed way too many options on me, instead of really trying to figure out the best plan for us.

Ultimately what it boiled down to is there were so many plans, with so many options, that I did ultimately have to understand it thoroughly to make a good decision.
European law may have a different attitude to "who own the person's data".
Indeed. I actually use this technique in my own code, and I feel like I'm laying down pipe all over the place to make sure the captured variable gets routed to the function object correctly. Once you do it a few times, it is obviously boiler-plate code and obviously a hindrance to momentum.
Agreement between private parties != legislation.

Why is this simple notion mentioned nowhere in the EFF letter?
Could have, assuming that the people who paid $7 would have still payed $20. This just isn't the case.
Found a good website that sells all these new tablets/UMPCs/MIDs coming out of China:
http://www.merimobiles.com/Computer_products_s/176.htm

There are 6 devices with wifi and touchscreens for less than $200.

This website has videos and ifnormation on a lot of new devices: http://www.shanzai.com/
You make a good point—I was assuming, though, that the product was in a market where speed and ease-of-use were the only possible dimensions by which to evaluate the product. This happens a lot—tax preparation companies, for instance, aren't going to say they're the "most powerful" or "most eco-friendly" way to do your taxes; they're going to say they get you out of the building as quickly as possible and back to your day. They're all going to say that. And so, in those cases, it's meaningless. Many segments of the web application market that those around here like to target have the same problem.
I also remember Gabocorp. In the hands of a truly talented person anything is possible.
For sequence diagrams I much prefer http://www.websequencediagrams.com/

Diagrammr could use some nicer looking styles. The different layouts and ability to reorder steps is quite nice though.
What I saw:
http://ipadtest.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/something-like-earl...

And I have someone claiming it does not work on the iPad. And someone I trust says it did work on his Droid. Weird.

Update: I now have a screensnap there showing it not working on an iPad.
I'm reading the news collaboratively with all of you, right now. It's working out great.