skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Into thin Air" showed how easy it can be if everything goes well. He talks about people who were out of shape making it. But if one or two things go wrong, you're dead.
Looking at today's VP8 open-sourcing
>It’s interesting that Cockcroft never actually mentions the video capabilities of HTML5, instead he talks about the
"advanced user interface features." Still, I think we all know what he means.

He means that he wants to jazz up his sites. The studios won't give them any content for DRM-free HTML5 video.
Mobile wifi/hsdpa router powered by Linux
Frequency of first-character of words in those languages.
The article above links to the page for Annapurna, one of the deadliest mountains on earth (40% fatality rate for climbers), which said this:

The second summit team, Alison Chadwick-Onyszkiewicz and Vera Watson, died during this climb. (Vera Watson was survived by her husband, the computer scientist John McCarthy.)[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna
Honestly, it looks like what he is trying to say is that even a distributed facebook is not ideal. What I get from this is he wants to "Build something entirely unlike Facebook" using an interface and medium that are not a website.
Ask HN: Does the idea of a "reduce-map" function make any sense?
Describing Google Search, I would say that it takes a formated string of words and returns a set of (links to) documents. I want do design a program that does the opposite: take an arbitrary text document (and maybe, at one time, a set of them), compute a formated string of words, and return that. This shall work by passing the text of the input document to a hierarchy of pattern matchers, looking for and extracting certain values and their relations. Next comes a function that takes these values and relations and knows how to distribute these data to the appropriate subfunctions, each of which computes and returns a substring; the parent then puts the substrings in the right order, formating them for the return.

I'm looking for a name for this concept, and wondered whether "reduce-map" would be a good one - maybe I could say that I reduce the document to a function, which returns a map (the formated string). To find out whether a "reduce-map" moniker had any currency, and if it did, in which context, I googled program "reduce-map":

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=program+%22reduce-map%22

But due to the fact that Google doesn't search for an exact string or substring even if you format it using doublequotes (which it does seem to promise; compare 'M.I.A.'s album "/\/\/\Y/\" is ungoogleable', http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1363489 ), what I got back was a slew of ordinary map-reduce tutorials. So I still don't know whether "reduce-map" would mean to other people what I want it to mean. I would be thankful for your take on that.
I'd say you can bet he did, and a lot more material about climbing.
My only knowledge of Everest is watching some programs on Discovery, but one thing I notice in everyone of them is the sheer traffic at the top. It appears to have prevented several people from summiting even though they are just a couple hundred yards away. That is one thing the masters probably didn't have to deal with.

Here is a good read that talks a bit about it:
http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/everestbeyond/diaries/g...
Interesting perspective from Mozilla's Dotzler in his linked blog comments:

you cannot compare users to usage. Browser vendors like Mozilla and Google can measure active users by seeing how many installs of Firefox or Chrome are running on any given day or month. Web stats vendors like Net Applications and StatCounter measure browser usage in terms of page views. The two are very different.

In Firefox's early days (as in Chrome's early days) most of our early adopters were "power users" who browsed a lot, dozens, maybe hundreds, or thousands of pages/sites a day. But today we have many more mainstream users than early adopter power users. Regular folks don't browse that much. A good family friend of mine, for example, spends about 20 minutes a day on the Web checking email and reading a story or two in a major online news site. It takes scores, or even hundreds of people like him to generate the _usage_ of one person like me. I spend about 14-16 hours a day on the Web and visit literally hundreds of sites and thousands of pages.
I think you're misusing the word "trivially" by putting it in front of "combinatorial or permutational recursive searches with pruning."
HP uses cow power to run data centre
Ah! That’s why. (Doesn’t matter for what I’m doing, though :)
And we still complain that these devices are up market?

Yes, there is probably a good margin, as Apple beats some of the largest companies in the world in market cap, but what does it say about American (world?) culture that we demand awesome products at affordable prices that would lead companies to do this to keep their profit margins?

Maybe, just maybe, we ask for too much sometimes. I was taking a flight to NYC from Austin last week on JetBlue. They had DirectTV satellite, and XM radio. I was ashamed that I found myself thinking, "What, no WiFi?"
Let me play the devil's advocate here: what's wrong with true opt-in DRM, particularly for streaming? Most users think of video on a streaming site as being controlled by that site. If they want their own copy (and they're not trying to cop the stream) they go to a different kind of site or are clicking the download link if there's one. From the standpoint of user expectations, it's a completely different situation from downloading MP3 files to your hard drive.

In this case, DRM is completely consensual.
You’re Just the Founder
Wow, a lot of TV shows make way more sense now!
In Judaism, a boy becomes a man at 13, and a girl a woman at 12.
Dangerous doesn't mean hard and easy doesn't mean safe. As long you are among the lucky group who don't run into problems then it's quite an easy climb (relatively speaking)
The article doesn't have any actual hard facts regarding the hellish conditions. For instance:

"According to Liu, the plant makes employees work around the clock, only pausing briefly to eat or sleep."

How long exactly is "briefly"? 3 hours or maybe 7? We aren't told.

The article also doesn't say why these 300k people don't quit. Is it that there are no better jobs available to them?
I never understood why they couldn't buy in bulk from Ebay.
We apologize for the fault in the Wifi Data Collection. Those responsible have been sacked.
Physically, he almost is, too, at 5'10" and 160 lbs!
do you have any links or resources for this? I would really like to read about this more.
I search using ixquick.com because of their good privacy measures and they searh using post.

They have a button on their website that adds it to you list of search engines in chrome (chromium in my case), so it definitely can be done.

EDIT: it turns out that ixquick switches to a different URL and uses get instead of post for this, so forget what I said.

PS: the opera urlbar inline search has post support.
weird, I was expecting Eric Meyer to have a very beautiful CSS website since I learned CSS with his books. I was disapoint.
You're correct, it's not going to benefit humanity substantially. Climbing Everest is a huge physical and mental feat and can only bring personal satisfaction or inspire others. Spending all of your time trying to do something to benefit humanity is exhausting - you must take time off for yourself and live a balanced life.

I would love to climb Everest someday and experience that euphoric moment most mountaineers do when they reach the summit. I feel like life (and happiness in general) is about experiences like this...at least mine is.

If you think repeating "wwiisoodkfhjsuuuggg" will bring you satisfaction then go for it!
Hey, thanks for the mention. I'm one of the founders of Newsley.

We're actually pivoting away from the social news aspect of financial news, however. Instead we're focusing on automated tagging and indexing of financial news articles. It's a tough problem, but it's really pretty interesting, and I think that there's a potential for a huge upside.

If you click on the "discuss" page, you can see a little bit of the automated tagging that we're doing.
And no one is complaining. Trun was pointing out that it is unlikely that Netflix is going to switch to HTML5 video at the moment because there is no DRM available for it. The content providers won't go for it, the customers won't care.
I don't use border-collapse (I don't even know what it is)

but i have those also :

body{
font-family:verdana;
font-size:0.8em;
}

p,h1,h2,h3,h4{
margin:0;
padding:0;
font-weight:normal;
}

ul{
list-style:none;
margin:0;
}
It's standard for any communication from Microsoft to never name their competitors if they can avoid it.
Safari and Apple will have to cave in. If WebM becomes a de facto standard for video on the web, then Apple would be fools to limit their browser like that. Especially since it's patent free.
Why use chrome if you seek privacy?
Russian roulette.
In Opera, when setting up search engines [which can be used directly in the address bar], you have the option of using POST instead of GET.
Could you describe that? I was unable to get it to work on the iPod touch.

On reflection though, I guess I'm running an old version of the OS on that one.
Is there some up-to-date implementation of micro-Prolog?

I find its syntax nice and lispish :)

[edit]s/it's/its/
What I want to see is a platform where native software is accessed in terms of resources, aliased locally and cached. Why should software need to be downloaded and installed? Something like apt or ports but on-the-fly and more fine-grained, for things like controls and graphics.
He's already climbed 5 of the seven summits so why is this even an issue?
Ok, so Prolog is nice. We know that already. But the story lacks any real content... It's really just: we used Prolog, it seemed to be a lot faster to code and the customer was happy.
The Eyjafjallajokull (Iceland Volcano) Hacks.
While I could agree with some of the points, here are some comments:

range() - "Perl has trained me", well lolcode taught be that I end script with KTHNXBYE, but that's not the reason to expect it in other languages :( It's just an arbitrary choice and there's no reason to discuss about it really.

Python is happy to do nothing - Meet PyLint. Perl has "use warning", python has PyLint, which will tell you that:

C: 1: Black listed name "foo"
W: 3: Statement seems to have no effect

Unicode support is a mess - I really hate how it's done, but it definitely is not a mess. It's clean and strict. It's just hard to achieve some stuff with it. I really miss a "just give me an ascii version and ignore any errors, because I really don't care in this case" option...

The rest... I can see why you might not like them, but I don't see them as design errors in any specific way.
I am just not convinced that gambling away one's life is the right approach to work-life balance :-)

There are countless other breathtaking things to do and see that are less dangerous. But I don't want to judge it - I simply can not relate.

Maybe one thing could be said for the kid, that he is "hacking" a loophole in society to finance his mountaineering ambitions, namely a fascination with records and young age. Is it a coincidence that at the moment several kids are trying to break the record for being the youngest person to sail around the world? He is now at a unique position to get financing for his project, which would not be possible at a later time of his life.

So if it really is just about seeing stunning mountain scenery and finding the money for it, maybe I can relate a little bit.

I'd rather be the youngest person ever who finds the cure for seven types of cancer or whatever...
I was under the impression Zuckerberg was never paid. There was never an agreement of payment and no one signed anything. If I'm wrong, so be it, but if someone came to me with another "Make us rich" idea and all I had to do was implement the entire site for free and they would graciously give me a cut of the profits they can kindly suck an egg.

It happens all the time to me and I'm sure to you as well. Someone suggested I implement an iphone app that scrapes the exchange web interface and gives you calendaring, email and all the other goodies because he was stuck logging into a locked down server blah blah blah. All I had to do was code it all up in a weekend and he'd split the money with me.

So lets say I actually looked at the feasibility of it. Now if I go off and implement a revolutionary email program for android and make a billion dollars do I owe him anything?
Adrian Cockcroft updated his blog post, which inspired this TechCrunch article, and clarified that he was not in fact referring to HTML5 video, as the TechCrunch article (currently) states.

"MG Siegler at TechCrunch decided that I was talking about streaming video and Silverlight, which I wasn't. I was thinking of HTML5 features that let us build very cool user interfaces with drag-and-drop, canvas transforms etc. for the web site, and for embedded TV devices specifically."

http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2010/05/netflix-in-cloud-and-htm...
> I don't use border-collapse (I don't even know what it is)

When two borders are stacked together, they will be collapsed into a single border. Only works with tables though.
I can think of a couple bands with names that give zero results on google: "!!!" and "+/-".

Though ungoogleable, I see they are "amazonable".
Reminds me of "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" Sort sorts in place. It's documented.
Its really unclear what are you trying to achieve. My wild guess would be you're trying to build a Markov chain generator (generation of random texts from sample base text).

Other than that, here are unclear parts:

"to a hierarchy of pattern matchers, looking for and extracting certain values and their relations"

What are the "certain values" and how are they "related"?

"takes these values and relations and knows how to distribute these data to the appropriate subfunctions"

What are those "appropriate subfunctions", what do they do? How do they differ for function to "know" where to send each one?

The concept of "reduce-map" doesn't seem to make any sense to me. It's like taking a word frequency (output of MapReduce) and building original text with that? You just don't have data to do that.

BTW. Google searches for doublequoted "reduce map" just fine, it's just that there's no such thing as "reduce map". You collect some data and output it piece by piece ("map"), then you aggregate it by key ("reduce"). "Map" often works as a "splitter" or a "tokenizer", it won't make sense to supply aggregated data ("reduced") to it, since aggregate data is already "tokenized".
why can't my PC/netbook/phone mount a remote drive on which software is all installed? I never have to worry about upgrades, installing anything, plus it runs locally meaning i have full OS hooks for peripheral devices etc.
I've always been a fan of the "Don't just do something! Sit there." approach to work. Not only do I sometimes find really clever ways around a problem, or weird issues that wouldn't immediately be apparent, I also save a whole bunch of potential RSI :)

Added benefit: When it is time to start coding, you can amaze your coworkers by brain dumping a decently coded solution at typing speed.
Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance in Adolescents
Hey. You. Get Off Of My Cloud
If you want to learn about Prolog, the best book IMHO is _The Art of Prolog_ by Sterling and Shapiro. The newer edition is out of print and expensive (but worth it!), the previous edition is more like $6 and will give you a good taste. _Programming in Prolog_ by Clocksin & Mellish is a pretty straightforward overview of the language, but TAoP really gets at Prolog's real potential.

I also liked _Clause and Effect_, which is somewhat like a "Little Schemer" for Prolog, with a couple fairly substantial projects at the end. "Learn Prolog Now" (http://www.learnprolognow.org/) is free online, but a bit basic.

CTM has a great chapter on relational programming and Prolog, too - Peter Van Roy worked on Aquarius Prolog (http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/Peter.thesis/Peter.thesis.htm...), and he also follows up with constraint programming. I highly recommend using a Prolog with constraint programming libraries, because it will make a big difference when Prolog's default behavior is too naive.

I would recommend learning Prolog, because it's sufficiently different from every other language that it will change the way you think, and even if you never use it in production, it's an excellent prototyping language. As a bonus, learning Prolog will help with Erlang, and vice versa. (Erlang was initially a DSL on SICStus Prolog, and many Prolog idioms came along.)
Rapid wireframe sketching in Google Docs
Regarding risk and climbing, I recently watched the video Committed, Volume II, which has a segment on the Whittaker family, who live in England. Katy and Pete, both young teens when the video was made, were cutting their teeth on the nervy, often dangerous gritstone routes in England. It's fascinating watching their parents belay them on their leads of these dangerous routes, and listening to their attitude toward being parents in these situations. Trailer for the video is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEoRyho-Kto&feature=playe...

As to the comments about the dangers on Everest--most routes are non-technical, but heading up any mountain is a gamble, given weather and snow conditions.
A successful startup implies changing the world for the better, whereas this record will provide entertainment for a couple of minutes at best.

But I don't want to judge it, it is just my personal opinion that it is a waste. I feel the same about other types of sports (ie Olympics). The one positive aspect I could see in it if sports people were experimenting with their health and others could benefit from what they learn. Ie the best diets, most efficient ways to train and so on. If they figure out how I can get by with 30 minutes of sport instead of 1 hour for the same effect on health, that is 30 minutes more that can be invested in startups and curing cancer. So I suppose it would benefit sports if drugs were legalized.

And of course the mental discipline aspect, being able to achieve whatever you set your mind on. But that seems just like "pumping up" before doing the real thing (something worthwhile). Risking one's life seems very inefficient for training up the courage to do something real.
Completely different question:

This question is posed to a large number of people who all attempt to answer is correctly. "What fraction of respondents answered the same as you? a) 25% b) 50% c) 0% d) 25%"

If you choose the answer to this question at random, what is the chance it will be correct?

What if you change it to "What fraction of respondents not including you answered the same as you"?
That ceo probably spent all the money on cars and fancy vacations. So you both had parity in the end. Sorry to hear you had a bad experience. Have you seen this happen post internet bubble?
Actually, the select box options are transformed into a list of divs with some javascript to make it look like a select and then the original select box is hidden.
Here are some screenshots from Windows 7 with ClearType enabled and "tuned."

http://static.nyquistrate.com/media/g-web-fonts-chrome-5.0.3...

http://static.nyquistrate.com/media/g-web-fonts-ff-3.63.png

http://static.nyquistrate.com/media/g-web-fonts-ie-8.png

http://static.nyquistrate.com/media/g-web-fonts-safari-4.0.4...

To my eyes, they all look the same.
As soon as the company is making money, there's no reason for the founders to stay in a starvation budget.

Bad investors expect everybody to work for free.
Making Good Decisions and Taking the Entrepreneurial Leap
Put your thoughts across as clearly as possible in your personal essays
Personal essays are written by students when they are applying to any academic organization for further studies. This essay if written well will describe your personality, why you wish to join the particular organization and your contributions. As selection will be decided on how the essay is written it is vital that you write a good essay.
Then browse through a VPN. Seriously, raising a privacy question about _this_ is just silly.
Thank you, that was a great TED talk.
s/is a Disaster/doesn't seem to work right for me at the moment/
trust me, you have nothing to worry about. Us noobs with regular bachelor degrees who use this will get into trouble because we can't understand the results and the math is all over our heads. We still need you PhD's...(gives T_S_ a hug)
I definitely see what you mean. I think I relate to it because I have a desire to break away from the monotony of the corporate world. It all depends on the circumstances you're in and what your own personal goals are.
English is very context sensitive. That's probably a good thing. If we had to come up with a distinct word for every distinct idea, our language would be even more bloated and obtuse than it already is. I'll grant that the author has a point, but if you accept the idea, then we also need to come up with new words for "freedom", "justice", and I'm sure hundreds if not thousands of others.
They have a question: Please indicate up to five programming languages that you use frequently [excluding Perl]

Followed by: Where does Perl belong in this list?

Why didn't they just ask "Please list up to 6 programming languages that you use frequently INCLUDING perl?
Delegation still works, but you'll need to run or use a server which is willing to assert your domain name.
Probably you will just blend in with the other dozen or so such sweeps they get every day. Unless it's a large bank - then maybe tens of thousands.
I once had a huge pile of Oracle PL/SQL to take care of, which was written for performance rather than ease of maintenance and used a lot of session level global data.

PL/SQL doesn't give you nice stack traces when you have an error, I just knew the entry point and the place where the error occurred.

Even knowing the data coming in to the entry point, use of the globals meant that you often couldn't know for sure what route the code would take.

I wrote a primitive PL/SQL parser (in Perl) to turn the call tree into Prolog rules, and then used Prolog to give me the possible routes between the entry point and the error location, making debugging much easier.
I can see the benefit Google gains from increased usage of plain text - but I can't see how this can be a main driver for their decision to launch this platform.

The web is progressing towards native support of @font-face. This is an intermediate step that will get us there - and, imo, it's also a way that Google could potentially experiment with selling font IP as a service. I say this largely because it would possibly dovetail with their efforts to sell IP via their recently announced app-store.

I don't think many websites display their text solely using images (without use of image replacement techniques) - though maybe I'm wrong?

Even non-decent front-end developers have an incentive to use IR; largely because Google's desire to index corresponds with most site owner's desire to be found.
The ul rules are the only ones I thought were missing from this. Its probably not semantically correct but I use those much more for layout then actual lists these days.