skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If by "fundamental, provable improvement to an important algorithm", you mean something like discovering Floyd-Warshall, then yes. I'd rather be programming Tetris in Obj-C. Floyd-Warshall, while cool, wouldn't be recognized by 99.9999% of the people out there, while iPhone Tetris would be used by millions. More to the point, if you hack up iPhone Tetris, you have a game that you can play, while if you invent Floyd-Warshall, you have a graph algorithm that you can...er, it's bound to be useful sometime. Plus it takes maybe a day or two to hack up Tetris, while it takes several years to do basic CS research.

This is why I'm not an academic.

I can respect basic CS research without wanting to do it myself. I use the fruits of it all the time. But when faced with a problem, I'd rather hack up something that's good enough to get something on the screen than spend the time necessary to cross all the Ts and dot the Is for a publishable paper. To me, the code and what you can do with it speaks for itself.
The only thing I'm annoyed about DDG is its over-reliance on Javascript. Now I'm no luddite; i enjoy the flexibility and power javascript brings.

However I think the first page of results should come with the page response. For people like me with crappy bandwidth, there is a noticeable lag before the first 10 results appear. I'm reasonably happy with the content though; it does an acceptable job of replacing google.
Because that's where I found it. Absolutely shocking images, this really rams home the scope of what is going on there.

I fear this is just the beginning though.

One thing I can't understand, and this is not an armchair oil spill cleanup attempt, why are they so trying to avoid the oil coming to the surface, isn't that the only chance you get to contain it and to deal with it? Dispersing it underwater seems to me to make it much harder to get rid of it.

Can someone with more technical insight here explain that?
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A clarifying example: Suppose the sexists are right, and women are poor programmers. They're okay students and can fight their way through an undergrad program, but give them a year or two in the workforce to come up to speed, and they never really develop an ability to attack hard problems. They just kind of flail at problems unproductively, rely on peers to bail them out, generally make a mess of the codebase, and cry if you criticize them.

Suppose the world is like that. And suppose, then, we have a woman who bucks the trend -- really can code, but is new to the industry.

Which is the better world?

(A) The talented woman can't get a job, or has to go to extreme lengths to prove herself, over and over again, throughout her career. But everyone around her is free to run their business as they choose, hence most women don't even try to go into the field.

(B) Employers are legally required to hire equally qualified candidates regardless of gender. Hence, many women in the graduating class of C.S. majors land jobs and are predictably incompetent. But the one talented woman also gets a job.

Personally, I find (A) vastly preferable. As an interesting side note, the hypothetical situation actually exists in some fields (think heavy labor), and--despite the occasional injustice--I think everyone is actually pretty happy with (A).
That didn't seem to work for cuil... and based on how he has grown the site so far I think he knows what he is doing.
it's a typical programmer mistake. So how do I avoid it ?
Hi Aaron,

Sorry to hear about the trouble. We do try to be helpful on the mailing list, and I will certainly agree that Bespin is alpha software at this point.

Docs are located here:

https://bespin.mozillalabs.com/docs/

Themes are coming in Bespin 0.8, which is probably about a week away. 0.8 is still alpha, but it's moving closer.

Multiple editors on a page will likely be supported soon. I did a promising experiment last week and we need to work through some of the details.

It could be said that IE aspires to support Bespin ;) IE9 is going to have considerably improved support for the latest standards, and there are rumors that it will support Canvas, which is how Bespin draws its text. We also use CSS3 flexible boxes to lay out the interface. Using those advanced features, Bespin supports Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Granted our "modern browsers only" policy means that Bespin isn't right for some applications. That's okay with us. The users who we think will ultimately come to love Bespin are in the 40% of web browsers that are using a modern browser.

Kevin
Bespin PM
Have you ever crossed the road, and looked the wrong way? A car's nearly on you? So what do you do? Something very silly. You freeze. Your life doesn't flash before you, 'cause you're too fuckin' scared to think - you just freeze and pull a stupid face. But the pikey didn't. Why? Because he had plans of running the car over.
Any word on how many applicants will be invited?
I think a big part of why IM has lost so much ground to SMS and social networks is that users can easily 'disconnect' without feeling guilty about it.

Until recently, I'd always have my IM status set to invisible to avoid getting sucked into unwanted conversations - there's usually only a few people I'm actually interested in talking to. I only changed this behavior after removing everyone I didn't actually talk to, since social networks now take care of loose social connections for me and I can avoid needless banter.
> By the way, I know that “parar” means “to stop” in
> Spanish, which is how I distinguish between the
> parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems.

It's a nice mnemonic, but the medical "para" comes from Greek, meaning beside or near.
That's exactly what I did -- the spectrogram is from sndfile-spectrogram, not baudline. baudline helpfully draws a line parallel to the frequency axis and shows you what point on the time axis you're at, so measuring times is easy.
I was assuming it was bytes allocated and freed; this system has 4 GB of memory, I had a few VMs plus chrome with many tabs open running at the time, and I didn't notice any thrashing.
As a Berkeley grad from SoCal, who attended Berkeley during the rise of hella, I am very much against this. I did everything in my power to stop the spread of hella, but clearly I failed.
Most people can also realize that someone can be really good at one thing (say, writing software) and really bad at another (say, understanding what Microsoft does when they've never worked there).

No, what made Scribd look stupid was that they decided to replace one flawed Adobe technology (PDF) with an even more flawed Adobe technology (Flash). At least they rectified that eventually.
I'm not a script kiddie, I'm a grad student in security. I did, however, bang out that article in one go after only partially recovering from the 50+-hour contest, so it's not the most coherent.
OK, I figured it out for myself: September 24 at 6:44PM. It also happened on March 18th at 7PM. I used "The Photographer's Ephemeris" (and some eyeballing) to determine this.
What would you ask Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff?
Rebooting is rare compared to regular use.

The box I'm writing this on has an uptime of 148 days, the last time it went down was to put a second graphic card in it. I really don't see how a 'faster boot' would be of any benefit, in fact any benefit in faster boot time would have to be balanced with how long it took you to install that drive, format it, install your OS and so on in the first time.

Use cases should center around that which happens frequently, optimizing boot time for anything other than a netbook or a laptop that you don't 'sleep' is a case of premature optimization.

For all the other use-cases you sketch main memory is much more effective than a cache in a device at the other end serial link.
Towel Day is today
I hope adobe backports whatever they did for Froyo back to linux. Whenever I run flash apps on my linux laptop, my battery tells me I only have an hour left (out of 3 hours total).
Oh word. Like paramedic.
One thesis is that using other peoples ideas increases the rate of new technology. Another is that being forced to invent your own would.

The example of the Tasmanians, who were forced to invent their own stuff not only did not progress technologically, they went backward.

So the article supports the idea that if google could just copy the iPhone and add something we would have progress. But if they just re-invent it badly we have regression.

As for Linux distos, I would argue that they have out innovated windows in many ways, such as 'apt-get', and knoppix.

There are many efforts to replace MySQL, such as CouchDB, Cassandra and MongoDB. Besides MySQL actually works pretty well, its just that SQL apologists try to pretend that other SQL database are significantly different.
the explanation some scientist gave at a hearing was that the dispersion is BP's attempt to curtail the bad PR that images of thick black globs of oil would bring
Why do they have to link back to us...
Forrst vs. Dribbble
My instant review of the LOST finale
I read the article and signed up. Here's why Hotmail still sucks:

Tried importing my 1500+ contacts from gmail and hotmail said it can only accept up to 1500.

Also, even though you can 'add people' to your hotmail/msn network using Google's oauth and contact APIs I'm ironically forced to import contacts using an Outlook CSV file. Why the inconsistency there?

WARNING: During the 'add people' wizard I almost accidentally sent out 1000+ MSN live invites to my google contact list. Maybe MSFT confused the words 'viral' and 'virus'..?

Finally, my brand new hotmail account feels utterly sluggish next to my 6 year old gmail account.
What company and what brand? This is just a spoof article. Nothing to do with Apple.
Yeah, exactly. The reason boot times are long with rotating disks is because our software is really really dumb. Smart software would make "real" boots as fast as un-hibernating. Same for app startup. (/me contemplates cryopid-ing every app that takes a long time to startup, putting the data in a file that is guaranteed to be a single read operation, and enjoying fast speed without a SSD. But I have a SSD already, so meh.)
That's cost for future R&D -- they don't pay a dividend. All that money goes in the bank.

They did say "costs for our continued investment in AdSense". Profit is the continued investment part.
Put some middleware into your web framework that will insert a "secret" into all forms, which contains an unforgeable token generated by the page. Only accept form input when that secret token matches the expected value.

Django will do this for you; presumably other frameworks have similar mechanisms.

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/csrf/
MSN-blocked.com •▷ Regarde qui te bloque
There is no way to defeat this HP feature that I have found.
Typical apples & oranges comparison. Arm chips have been optimized for an entirely different use case, the parameters are probably more closely related to stand-by power when idle and mips/watt.

To simply use the 'speed' metric when comparing a < 1W CPU with a > 30W cpu is dumb.

Arm chips will not enter the desktop market any time soon, the ARM architecture is for the moment solidly stuck in 32 bit address space and then there will be the problem of convincing a company the size of microsoft to bet on a different architecture.

This will happen in due course, but not in the next 3 to 5 years.
These Boston Globe photo essays are absolutely amazing. No matter what subject, and my level of interest, I really find myself drawn into their Big Picture expose.

This is one medium where digital really shines, I can't imagine how they represent this in the newspaper, but an single page of high quality images is just brilliant. Lets hope they don't feel the need to put this in a slide show format.
Slackware 13.1 Released
That was an awesome answer. Thanks. I did C as part of course and the rest because of interest.
VLSI is mainly software driven. I have worked with Hardware descriptive languages like Verilog.
As per the suggestions above, I have decided to take up an open source project and hone my software skills and then try for a job change.
Apple still hasn't fixed a Safari bug that's been known about for 2 years
"So the article supports the idea that if google could just copy the iPhone and add something we would have progress. But if they just re-invent it badly we have regression."

Why would we want them to re-invent it badly? I want something completely different. If they just copied the iPhone and added a few things, it might be slightly innovative, but not nearly as much as it could be.

It also wouldn't be regression because all of our existing technology wouldn't suddenly degrade.
I think individuals should make it their business of collecting the crude oil into drums and selling it back to BP or at market. This isn't an Exxon Valdez situation where the oil was contained inside a tanker, this gulf oil is spilling out of the earth. It should be anyone's oil, especially when the spill is in the process of destroying the environment and people's livelihoods. People should get out there and make some money... get congress behind you.
This seems fairly common on HN: sarcasm and subtle humour just goes over (many) peoples' heads, and people keep discussing it as if it were serious.

That stumped me for a while because people here are smart in general. I won't go into why I think that happens. My conclusion is that it's better not to post anything humourous -- unless it's obviously humourous.
I had to check because I thought Microsoft still owned Slate, but apparently they sold it to Washington Post in 2004. Still, it is a bit difficult for me to swallow an opinion piece from a previously Microsoft owned non-technical magazine.
> "That looks a little late in the process"

I made some assumptions unfortunately. Now if he makes me also have to support PHP4, I'll hang myself. (Not really.)
I'd love to hear some actual ideas about how we can improve eCommerce; just saying "it's been the same, we can do better" doesn't really help much.
Quora's been great for finding about under-the-radar startups because of the strong community of entrepreneurs and VCs

http://quora.com (invite-only right now)
If a picture paints a thousand words then the impact of these images is probably larger than any of their editorial pages on the subject. That's also a risk because by selecting the images you could make it appear more or less worse than it really is.

This selection though, does not give me the impression that they've done that, however that may be the art. Still, if this is 'all there is' the problem is of an unbelievable magnitude.

People keep comparing this to the Exxon Valdez spill, and while there are parallels I can't help but notice that that happened in a much less populated area of the world, and even this many years on there is still surface oil to be found there, and it still affects the local wildlife.
In other news, Honda portable generators really are pretty nice. They are definitely the Apple of portable generators.
Ogg and WebM technical alert: default FFmpeg Vorbis encoder is broken
There's a tiny bit and an index of other writeups now at http://scott.wolchok.org/ctf2010/
Yeah, who needs friends?
The similarities between being a junior researcher and a high-tech entrepreneur
Some of my best friends are pawns
99.999999999% durability is only their "Design Requirements", but it is not part of the SLA: http://aws.amazon.com/s3-sla/
If it were that easy to collect this oil in a usable form then I'm pretty sure that it would be done already. The problem here is that the oil is spread out and mixed in with all kinds of contaminants (or rather, there is all sorts of clean stuff mixed in with the oil, but since you're looking at extracting the oil let's name them contaminants), to do so cost effectively is likely impossible.

The best you can hope for at this stage is that BP does not go bust (down about 29% since this all started, from $60 to $43 now), and that they will be able to pay for the cleanup.
Christian Louboutin Platform Mary Jane Slingback Gold
Yes of course. But to do it with an elaborate plan, set in motion ahead of time and sprung on them unexpected, is a species of cold, reptilian logic that defies rationalization.
I don't think that's the issue....
it's just that when you have. A massive number of sumultaneous tcp sessions, lots of home routers choke up tracking all that state in their nat tables. A custom protocol could do a better job.
The author of the article mentions the ads in Hotmail's interface as a big drawback. I think the fact that every e-mail that you send has an ad tagged on at the bottom is a much bigger problem. I don't care what e-mail provider you use, but if every communication that you send comes with an ad attached, you look like a doofus.
I think writing provides the most control over your message. With the right construction, you can convey arbitrary emotions with any medium -- but with writing, you can try a few versions and pick the best. You can "un-say" things, and you can revise until your message makes sense.

I think the reason why people think written communication is ineffective, is because most people just can't write.

Personally, I think I talk like I write, which makes my oral communication less effective. As I'm talking, if I think of something else to say, I have to revise my previous statements so that the listener ends up with the same mental picture as me. This takes time and words. When writing, though, I can just delete the thing that I didn't really want to say, and replace it with the better version. This saves the reader time and makes me look better. I think.

(Maybe this also makes me odd, but I feel the "good feeling of social interaction" both after speaking with someone in person or after communicating with them via writing. Writing emails to my favorite girl du jour makes me as nervous as meeting her in real life.)
You can't just "patent an app"

If you have a patentable concept, perhaps - but even then, patents need to be surprisingly specific. For a platform vendor like Twitter that makes it pretty easy to work around their claims.

For example, if you managed to patent the idea of broadcasting advertisements on twitter, the patent claim would probably have to say the method is something like "insert advertisement using Twitter API". Twitter can work around that by inserting the advertisement by other means.

In other words - don't waste you time with this strategy.
I elided the hour or so spent trying to figure out what Power PAQ was. Google has no results for PAQ804; as the writeup says, a teammate eventually Binged it. I also elided the debugging needed to get the FFT to work (but you need to know what the decompressor is before deciding that it doesn't work!). I had commented out the line that applies a Hamming window to the FFT because I didn't understand it, but it didn't work right until I added the window. My theory is that it worked OK until the "background" (i.e., the song) got louder.
Yeah I agree. (B) is a style of playing God, and it's the use of force.

Fundamentally, it's irrational to force people who disagree with you to do things your way if they don't see why it's best -- to make them go against their best judgment (also irrational to deny they have best judgment, attribute their ideas to things other than thought, and so deny the disagreement exists at all, and forcibly override them on that basis). The only rational thing to do if you want a (B) style world is persuade people, which is not at all the same as campaigning for laws to force people.

And by the way, straight, white, Christian males go to extraordinary and ridiculous lengths to prove themselves, all the time. For example, working super hard in school for 10 years to gain credentials. That's ridiculous and only loosely correlated to actual merit. And I, as someone who chose not to do that, have to prove myself in other ways, which can be hard sometimes, but so what? In general, proving yourself and gaining a reputation is a hard problem that does take effort to solve. And a system where people don't have to prove themselves to the satisfaction of their employers/clients/customers/spouses/friends/etc would be insane.
Ask HN: Who watches The Founders, the video series that TechStars puts up?
And how do you like it? 2010 show starts tomorrow. 2009 was pretty interesting (http://www.techstars.org/thefounders2009/).

*Not affiliated with Techstars btw
were talking about NorCal, not the UK.
I've been searching for a physical/scientific basis of mindfulness. This sounds like a great read. Thanks for sharing.
Local mirror should be up at http://scott.wolchok.org/ctf2010/t500_47b7c308e6d24e14c5.bin (also now linked from the article).
jeddy jed jed (are you cool with being called that?) - it looks like you are technically right, but Google perfectly worded the sentence to make it sound like they are not making a huge profit, but instead are simply covering costs. I also strongly believe this is and was their intent.
It would be interesting to see an emacs implementation in language better suited for text manipulation like Ruby or Perl.
As others have said, you pay a LOT to get that tenured position. You also risk a lot. Imagine being 32 and just starting a tenure track position. All your friends in industry are already earning nearly 100k and have been earning decent salaries all the while you were in graduate school and post-docs for the past eight years. They already have houses, cars, and other items giving them some form of security. You are maybe in debt, and have very little if not.

Now you get to work for five years to earn your tenure. You work nights, maybe weekends. Your salary is better, but not that much better than your friends got out of university. At the end of the five years, you may be denied tenure. Are you going to give it another shot after that? Another five years?

Also, "and often times at / above industry (that's true at least in Canada anyways)", I do not see this to be true. Especially not for people of similar technical skill who work hard and long hours.

The biggest reason people do not pursue a tenure track position is a distinct lack of a safety net. The above only deals with the monetary aspect of it as well. The social cost is equally high: you never know where you will end up settling down.
The difference is how wildly profitable Adsense is. The sentence does not at all give this intent and I would assume anyone reading this post without a lot of Google-finance-knowledge would not expect their margins to be as high as they are.
"Wicked" is a Boston expression as far as I was aware.
Are you talking about the chemical dispersal contaminants more more physical containments (ie: algae, etc)?

I don't think this is necessarily a for-profit situation in terms of refinement, but I think that there is a possibility that if groups and organizations assembled themselves to simply collect the oil, that they could publicly lobby congress to purchase the oil back. Essentially it will be the taxpayers who pay for cleanup either way. At least this way is faster and is more populist (in terms of flag-waving and what it means to be an american).
Google this:

site:news.ycombinator.com "rate my" or site:news.ycombinator.com "review my"

I wish there was a better way. Might be nice to have an entirely separate category for new startup posts on HN...
Yep. Throw out the Rand and Hubbard, and the list is actually pretty good. (Although, "The Hunt for Red October?" Really? :-) )
As a Berkeley grad from NorCal, your attempts were futile. ;)

Plus, hella was not nearly as annoying as SoCal kids who complained how bad Mexican food is NorCal. All they would do is go on and on about putting french fries in their burritos.
Wow, thank god. The old, titanium one was awful. This one looks pretty solid. Good job.
Finding your 'other half'