skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're writing a 100,000 word novel, a single text file in a text editor isn't really the optimal solution (although yes it's probably still better than using Word).
I think we can simplify even further. Computers communicate with bytes. Sockets stream bytes. Files contain bytes. Your database stores bytes.

The problem is that humans communicate with characters, not bytes. And so you need a function to convert bytes to characters and characters to bytes, so that human conversations can happen on top of computer conversations.

Once you understand "why" you need to encode/decode, then everything else is simple.
Facebook makes a big change, people are mad (or, its a normal wednesday)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/122690/what-is-a-simple-c...
This is a little off topic, but can you elaborate on your reasons for preferring scripted installation? It's what I use too, but hearing someone else's justification would be helpful.
> That's a job skill right?

Depends on what you do with the VM.
What if you use the IP address of the user as a seed for the encryption? Then if someone else used the same key from a different IP they'd get different search terms?
That's a relief. Hopefully his removal will not undermine a solution to the oil geyser.

Nevertheless, he was not removed because of his lack of area knowledge. (One wonders why he was selected in the first place, if his work wasn't relevant.) It appears that he was removed because he was holding the 'wrong' socio-political opinions. And that's unsettling.
8 Question Survey on Phone Loss, Will Post Results
It's unfortunate his social views became a "distraction"--whatever that means. I am disappointed. He should not have been dismissed due to social pressure. He's not running for a political office.

He's a smart man who's trying to solve a very important, urgent science problem. His involvement should only be tied to his problem-solving abilities.

We need to band together--irrespective of barriers and beliefs--like in the movie Independence Day--where all the countries united to defeat the alien invaders :)
Please help us out, we're trying to get user feedback for our start up. I'll make all the data public in a post on HN.

Thanks HN,
Chris
... should NOT have been cut ... I think you meant to say. Correct ?
Design your own science fair projects
Want to design your own science fair projects for best results, then visit us online …
The phrase 'is dying' should die. It's not even used in the article itself -- why is it in the title here?
I do backups using a windows scheduled batch file that runs sqlcmd.exe (part of sql express). Slightly hackish but it gets the job done.

Anyway, I hope that articles and interviews like yours do make MS lower the price of SQL standard, but people shouldn't dismiss the MS platform based on cost when in many cases it could be almost free.
Yes, and typekit has a huge and varying library of fonts available: http://typekit.com/libraries/full
Wow, this is really well done. Everyone should go read this now!

Kalman filtering is one of these techniques that's used everywhere and yet most engineers/developers don't even know it exists (let alone the math behind it, which is fairly straightforward undergrad level stuff.)
Time to rethink U.S.-China trade relations
None of those are remotely Unixy from a user perspective.

Neither the iPhone nor WebOS ever expose a filesystem to the user. Neither Android nor WebOS expose Unix to App developers. Android doesn't even present a real Unix system to the OS developers!
Google announces web app store for Chrome
About as much chance as they'd have of building anything worth $65 million in the first place, which doesn't seem like much. These guys are just the stereotypical "startup idea people" who think "we just need to hire a programmer to implement our vision".

I know Mark Zuckerberg is the villain now, but let's be fair. Just because Facebook's default privacy settings aren't private enough for our tastes doesn't mean Zuckerberg is a psychopath or that everyone who has a grudge against him is the hero.
"The diversity movement is racist at its core," he writes. "When dealing with people we should be concerned with intellect, talent, character and accomplishment. People aren't dogs or cattle; race matters only to racists."

This might not be politically correct, however, it makes a lot of sense to me. Does advocating meritocracy mean that you are a racist in today's society?

Disclosure: I am asian
I have a very neutral opinion about Facebook and no strong attachment. While I respect their ability to solve some really interesting scalability challenges, I don't work there: I ignored them early on thinking they're "just another PHP website", their recruiters did reach out to me recently but I've already started a new position. I am not a heavy user of the site: I don't message other users, don't use any applications and update my status from Twitter. Essentially, I don't have a bias for or against Facebook.

On the other hand, I find the Winklevoss brothers revolting: "Oh hey, here's this nerd who can our build vision for us and make us rich! Let's hire and pay him pittance! Oh no, he executed on our unique idea himself?!".

As for most other developers, when approached by "business guys" my typical reaction is to polite say no. Zuckerberg did a much smarter: took their (simple and intrinsically worthless) idea and built a product and a business on it himself.

It's sad that the courts gave the brothers any money (rather than treating the lawsuit as frivolous). Nonetheless, I still hope this will be a sign to "business guy" jocks that this model won't work: it's a lot easier for a nerd to learn business than it is for you to learn programming. Want to build software? Pick up the K&R book, instead of trolling the CS lab.
Google's New Big Data APIs a Big Gift to Startups?
Oops, ignore that comment.
Google Maps Directions web service arrives
“The VP8 codec represents a vast improvement in quality-per-bit over Theora and is comparable in quality to H.264.” http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/05/firefox-youtube-and-webm/

(Little editorial comment: There will be no fight, Theora is already dead. That was already pretty clear yesterday and there can be no more doubt about it today.)
SimpleGeo's response to Google's Latitude API
About half of the questions in this survey seem to rely on prior knowledge of PhoneHalo. Is that something most people are going to have?
> SIAI is tackling the world’s most important task -- the task of shaping the Singularity. The task of averting human extinction. We aren’t the only people tackling this, but the total set is frighteningly small.

Forgive me, but this seems a little on the "self-important quackery" side. There are any number of threats to our species far more urgent and reality-based than xenocide by a weakly godlike post-singularity AI. I suppose it can't be completely ruled out any more than alien invasion or the Nemesis hypothesis (though I find it pretty far fetched given the state of AGI). But "the world's most important task"? C'mon.
Google I/O panel: 'Open is for losers'
The standard supervised-learning stuff doesn't have that high a barrier to entry these days, although offloading it as a service to the cloud is of course even easier. But on the client side, things like Weka are simple enough that plenty of CS undergrads use them in intro data-mining/AI/stats classes: http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/

Off-the-shelf recommendation systems are a bit trickier though, yeah.
He entered the project based on aptitude and left based on politics. That's why it's unsettling.
The descenders in the Droid sans headlines on Smashing are cropping for me in vista. The fonts are also aliased, but if I remember correctly, typekit also only produced aliased fonts in windows.
My VB has been Oracle branded for a while... oh wait, I was running a prerelease. Never mind me.
Qwotebook: Sooo Quoted
> You get people who do things like PUT ALL THEIR CHANGES IN RED BOLD UPPERCASE SO THEY STAND OUT.

If you get someone who doesn't know how to use Word, teach them. Say, "Can you please turn on Track Changes and redo your changes, without the red bold uppercase?"

> Typesetting should be one of the last steps of document preparation, and the majority of writers shouldn't even be involved in that process.

You get a better product when the writer is aware and competent at that. Maybe you're saying that that's too much to ask from the majority of writers, or maybe that extra increment of quality isn't worth it for the majority of books.
I've been bullshitting with getting this idea out of my mind and into production -- over thinking how I should build it, getting stuck in design mode, wondering if it will scale -- a bunch of self-imposed barriers. Now Reddit has provided a solid blueprint. I am amazed and very thankful. I hope to help with some of their issues one day.

Thanks reddit
Yeah! I hate deadlines too !!

Learning to say NO to unrealistic customers is the first step. Took me ages to perfect, but now I'm so much less stressed. For me an internal project has no deadline. And for a one week (estimated) project I quote the client a month.
I basically live in Word, both at work and at home, and have done so since elementary school (well, word processors, at least) -- as a result, I probably know how to use Word better (or I should say, more powerfully) than 98% of users, if not more. That means I do know all the obscure features and formatting, how to fix and manipulate them, and most importantly, I have a good sense of when something's possible within Word and when it's not. I've also grown up with Word as an integral part of my writing process, and it's influenced how I compose documents and communicate in general, so I'm totally at home within it.

I'll admit most people aren't like this -- yet. I had a good teacher (my dad, not my school), and I grew up with the software, rather than having to learn it after my thinking and writing processes were already formed. But going forward, more and more people will be like me. There is a lot of room for improvement in Word, yes -- it could be more transparent, more flexible, with more overt features -- but several of the things he was complaining about have never been a problem for me, and I could probably figure out solutions to them in a few minutes. (For example, why was he creating section breaks to reorder a novel? Section breaks are more for style/formatting than for content. Why not go for the easy solution and just copy and paste, either within the current doc or putting it together in a new one? It may not be as flashy but it would get the job done easily.)

If he has to use Word as much as he says he does, and he's not suggesting any alternatives, it might be worth it to learn the program better.
What if I'm running Ubuntu on a MBP. Can I run OS X as a VB guest?
Mockup of EasyInstaller - an "App Store for Excel"
Awesome! This is the first real confirmation that Google is going to ship Native Client to end users as a supported technology. They'd intentionally kept it off the agenda when introducing ChromeOS before, so it wasn't clear to me that they were going through with it.

I need a VNC/RDP client and an terminal emulator with SSH as NaCL apps. I'd prefer if they were implemented in Go as wrappers around standard C libraries, exposing JS APIs to the DOM where at least the UI chrome would be implemented, and with the settings/data saved in HTML5 LocalStorage.

It's been on my to-do list for a while, but maybe now that Google is promoting it someone else will fill the hole so I don't have to :)
You are absolutely right, and I am sorry. I guess this was one of those cases where, if you see something enough, you subconsciously embrace it.

I apologize for the hyperbolic and sensationalistic headline.
Yahoo does this as well for the same cookie reason. Lots of stuff is hosted on yahoo.net that's considered potentially unsafe.
I dunno, it depends on the circumstances I suppose. If you accept a hired job from someone and then take the idea private instead of doing it for the person who hired you, that seems like it legitimately should be illegal. Like if an Intel manager comes up with an idea and asks an engineer to work up a prototype, surely it'd be illegal for the engineer to quit and work up that same prototype for a new chip-design startup instead?
They could always do a Wine thing or just have a commercial(ly supported) version.
You're right in that the origins of the case are pretty stupid. And yet what the big Z did was pretty flagrantly illegal, which is how they got the 65m to begin with. And then he (apparently) did more illegal stuff.

So you're right, one lesson to be learned is 'don't hire some schmoe to build your revolutionary product'.

The other lesson to be learned is 'doing flagrantly illegal things with revolutionary products will get you sued for millions of dollars or worse'.
Aussie demo coder here. I've just rejoined the scene after 10 years away, and we are creating our first PC release for Syntax 2010 (Melbourne) in November. I went to Syntax 09 to immerse myself in the scene culture after a decade away. It was a really fun evening. I met a bunch of geeks, drank beer and talked/toyed technology.

When I was young, it was all about the technology.. then I met beer and girls... now I'm married with kids and it's all about the technology.

See you at Syntax 2010.

Voltage/Defame
Looks nice on Mac. According to the screenshots, they're antialiased in Ubuntu also.
Something tells me that microprocessor specifications (at the level that an Intel engineer would be dealing with) are actually valuable intellectual property, not just some sort of vague idea about a unified online Harvard facebook that Zuckerberg changed several times as Facebook developed.
"Taygeta Scientific Incorporated, has acquired the rights to republish the report." http://www.taygeta.com/kalman_book.html

Has anyone bought a copy? I assume it is typeset rather than being a very difficult to read fifth generation photocopy scanned to PDF.
As for most other developers, when approached by "business guys" my typical reaction is to polite say no.

I have a reputation on campus as the guy to goto when you have ideas. For the past six months, I have rarely gone a week where someone hasn't "pitched" me an idea that they were looking for a programmer(me!) to code. These guys that come up with the ideas are ridiculous. They don't understand folks that do this are thinking of ideas 24x7 and that their idea which they think is awesome and just needs execution is not so awesome and never will be until you iterate like hell.

Luckily a lot of people try to make me promise that I will not copy their idea. I tell them upfront "WAIT! Please DON'T share your idea with me because chances are I have probably already had it in the past and may very well work on it in the future."
Gears was the alpha implementation of the work that went on in WHATWG. All the Gears APIs (except for WorkerPool) were refactored significantly and integrated into the spec that became HTML5.
I also like my Emacs in fullscreen. But I just use XMonad for that purpose. I also get rid of the scroll-bar and the menu-bar.
"There are any number of threats to our species far more urgent and reality-based than xenocide by a weakly godlike post-singularity AI."

We work on preventing those too. Some of the risks we work to prevent:

- Deliberate misuse of nanotechnology

- Nuclear holocaust

- We’re living in a simulation and it gets shut down

- Genetically engineered biological agent

- Accidental misuse of nanotechnology (“gray goo”)

- Physics disasters

- Misguided world government or another static social equilibrium stops technological progress

- “Dysgenic” pressures

- Take-over by a transcending upload

- Repressive totalitarian global regime

- Our potential or even our core values are eroded by evolutionary development

For more information, see http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html.
Here's a good summary of the team Steven Chu, himself a Nobelist, appointed:

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/05/mission_im...

Note that Katz is called the "What am I doing here" person. And note, the above summary piece was posted in advance of those writings coming out.

I think the real issue is, why did Chu ask Katz to join the team in the first place? He's really not got the same track record as the others on the team. Not even close.
Patrick,

Reading over your response again it seems like you're saying that you're not doing anything to ensure HIPAA compliance and possibly that the HIPAA compliant premium option is only there to contrast with the other account types.

Is that right? If that's the case, why not just cover this in the TOS or with an on-page note like "NB: AppointmentReminder is not currently appropriate for HIPAA sensitive information." (Or some rephrasing of that that makes more sense.)

I'm confused why you're listing an account type you're not really willing to sell, or if you're intending to sell it, I'm curious what you intend to do to ensure compliance.

Of course, if you're not comfortable disclosing your plans here, or if you haven't yet figured them out, by all means disregard this question. I don't have any skin in this, I'm just curious.
Admob does some awesome things with some special code in your app: adding it will track conversions from Admob ads into downloads.

Other than that there's no good way I know of to track download conversions.
Perhaps it's a German site?
Useful link for HelpSpot (or other self hosted help desk software) vs Zendesk http://www.helpspot.com/helpspot-vs-zendesk/
Information-augmented Narrative
Here are some arguments for why AI is different that I find convincing:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/rk/optimization_and_the_singularity/
If you're writing a 100 000-page novel, it doesn't matter what you do, you're not going to succeed. :)

I'm guessing you mean 100 000 words? What do you think is the optimal solution? I'd think a text file in Emacs outline-mode would be about right, although of course Word seems to work pretty well too.
You can use e.g. LaTeX and its `include' or `input' commands to organize your document into different files.
Yeah, it was probably a bad example. But my impression is that you'd be hammered for even taking something vague out of a place like Intel or Apple. If Jobs gives you a high-level idea about the next Apple product, and you quit and do something vaguely like it on your own, even if you change it a bunch, you'll definitely be in court if your idea is even remotely like the one you got paid to work on.
You're talking about apples and oranges. Hardware and web apps are very different. Hardware still has lots of genuine inventions. Web apps--especially in the social space--all have the same kinda features at the end of the day.

So if you are a client and you come to me with an idea about a social network for plumbers that has an inbox feature, the max I might agree to is that I won't launch a similar product for his market...but I would be hesitant to even make that promise. I would never give away my right to have an inbox feature on a future venture, lol. Of course, you can totally make me agree that I will not reuse any code or specific modules I program for you will be yours.
We are. (I am working on XenServer.)

I did not get confused by the headline.
I play the piano in general, and have played some Bach in particular, and I'm a bit confused by your reaction.

Are you referring to the two tracks on the bottom of the first page? If so, I don't see text that claims that they are Bach-like. The paragraph that follows those two tracks mentions Bach-like compositions, but the click-to-play boxes corresponding to that text are on the second page.

In particular, the two click-to-play tracks on the second page called "Fugue" are the two supposedly Bach-like tracks.

If, instead, you were referring to those two tracks, I'm wondering: do you have much experience with Bach's fugues in particular? When you strip away the interpretation that a live performer brings to Bach fugues, what is left is indeed very mechanistic, because the construction of the composition is largely based on starting with a theme, transforming it under various rules, and playing those transformations against each other. With interpretation they can be sublime. Rendering a satisfying interpretation of Contrapunctus I is among the most joyful experiences I've ever had at the keyboard.

But not all of Bach's fugues reach such great heights. There are 24 of them in each of Well-Tempered Clavier Books I & II — and there are some more mundane fugues within that are closer to the two fugues on page 2 in terms of compositional brilliance.
More than that - most are too stylized to be used for body copy. You'd be amazed at how many times art directors or clients have forced me to use images for large chunks of copy.

For the most part I agree with you and feel that font-size, letter-spacing and line-height applied to standard fonts is enough for good typography.
What good do you think it accomplishes to post this comment? Of course people assume terrible things about Zuckerberg now that Facebook has passed into the backlash stage of the hype cycle, but having a vivid imagination about the crimes someone hasn't actually committed is a reflection on you, not on him.
Sergey Brin: 'We screwed up' on Street View Wi-Fi grab
The GPL and AGPL do not try to take away your competitive advantages. They are just intended to make code free as in speech.
> Very forward thinking, I'm glad dev-in-VM is moving forward.

Perhaps Smalltalk-like images will make a comeback?
Jon Rubenstein was an Apple VP and the head of iPod until 2006. In 2007 he went to Palm and spearheaded their smartphone development. You don't think he had a "high-level idea" about the iPhone before he left? I don't see him in court, and given Apple's (and Jobs') penchant for intellectual property litigation that says a lot.
The dock at the bottom of my OS X screen very rarely gets used, typing the name of an app in quicksilver seems much faster.
Super stuff. I've invested in a Dutch start-up that had this vision about 3 years ago, but got stranded along the way and pivoted in to being a website building company because they found they could make more money in the short term that way (mistake...).

Anyway, I have some appreciation for the difficulties you must have encountered, and it doesn't please me but it will please you to know that at least from them you won't be having much competition.

Is it ok to start using your service? (not from an industrial espionage point of view but because it is useful!)
I'm just glad you haven't gotten any downvotes yet ;)
I can only say that as a provocative statement to start a conversation going and get to the meat, its pretty awesome.

Is there a video available of this exchange?
> Of course the whole point of cutting material is that you don't want the world to see your unfinished work...

Not always. You might just want to cut something out to enhance the flow of your argument. In movies they often cut scenes out, but put them on the DVD as bonus material.
I'll tell you why I'd like to get there. It makes updating the master image easier. If you need a new package, you just update on the server side, and then all the new images get that new package. No rebundling required.

It also helps when you want to upgrade your OS. As long as the packages are mostly the same, you can just run your update script from the new OS and make a few changes.

The way I have to do it now, I have to build a whole new master image from scratch, because I can't upgrade Ubuntu in place on EC2 due to the way they handle the kernel and kernel modules.