skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two interesting things to notice from the video:

1. In the failure trials the robot does not move its arm toward the object as it falls. This is distinctly inhuman! When we initiate a motor program we are constantly checking our prediction for the behavior of both our body and external objects against reality and then updating that program in real time. This bot apparently updates its program only after each trial.

2. The robot moves back to its standard starting position after each successful trial. This demonstrates the specificity of the motor pattern it's developed. Due to time pressure and the complexity of variations we deal with it is usually advantageous to learn a generalized pattern rather than a single pattern that works for a constrained set of starting conditions.

As a side note on the difficulty of this task, I agree with sukuriant that the paucity of the information the robot has, especially lack of fine grained touch, is a huge impediment. Secondly recall that in the human brain about 50% of the neurons live in the cerebellum which is strongly implicated in storing and updating fine grained motor patterns. (Gross patterns and intentions being initiated in the motor cortex).
I believe facebook does it as well, trying to find a video I saw from a while back to post.
attending university
Passwords that are Simple--and Safe
I don't know why it's such a bad thing to give welfare assistance to young single mothers. This should be extended to all mothers regardless of marital status or age. Parenting in America has turned into a scary, expensive headache, rather than the normal way of perpetuating the species.

Americans complain that "only stupid people are breeding" but we do almost nothing to make having kids easier for non-stupid, gainfully employed people. In contrast, places like Norway, Japan and Australia basically pay women of to have children, regardless of social status.
You don't have to actually install the full xcode IDE. You can do a minimal install of XCode from the installation CD, enough to get the required dependencies, and then install gcc from macports.
Well, the shrinking of the size of the financial sector is happening all on its own and I'm not sure we need to do anything to help that (and it's a fantastically dangerous and inherently politicized thing to do anyway, by definition "picking winners and losers").

What I'd prefer concentrating on is reducing firms that are "too big to fail" to "small enough to fail". Except that that wouldn't have prevented the 2008 financial crisis, it just would have changed its shape. People have this unfortunate pattern of group betting AKA manias that regularly produce financial bubbles and that's a system problem for which I don't see any solution.

What have we learned since the Tulip Mania, the South Seas Bubble, etc. etc. etc. other than that we don't learn from history?

As for shrinking their influence, how do you do it to the people who are handling your money? Buying your bonds (government (e.g. the Federal primary dealers) and corporate)? Etc.

As for replacing it, with what? What type of institutions or economic system?
I've always had good experiences with the MacPorts gcc and nowadays they even have clang. Download MacPorts, run "sudo port install gcc", and go get coffee. Altogether much less than 3 GB. The only caveat with MacPorts is that you should make sure that the package you're downloading is fairly recent since some maintainers neglect them.
I've started allocating a fixed amount of time for learning everyone week. This mostly consists of working my way through books like these and writing some small scripts that utilizes the material on some data I have.
> The thing hasn't even been finalized yet, and there'll be public comment periods and reviews and all sorts of other stuff providing people like an opportunity to go froth at the mouth about how this will be the end of the world or whatever.

The legislation has been "finalized". The regs aren't written, but the mandate is pretty clear, so they can't have much effect.

If you're a biz and you pay in certain ways, you will have to issue a lot more 1099s than you do now. Regs may change the number by 1-2%, but they won't affect the order of magnitude.
A number of comments have hinted at it, however, I think that the key issue with the article is that it does little to break down Wall St. as a career as opposed to Wall St. as a mis-regulated industry.

I would agree with Ben that many in the startup community focus far too much vitriol against the profession of a financier on the Street. There is significant value in facilitating financial allocation and increasing market efficiency.

However, given the financial regulatory environment that has not allowed banks to fail, I think that it is legitimate to take issue with the fact that Wall St. as an industry is far too large and riddled with players that should have been washed out by both the S&L crisis as well as the most recent financial fracas.
We're realists. Yes totally - UK investors wouldn't plough millions into twitter but IMHO that's a very good thing.

I really don't see any negativity in the UK. Whenever I spend time in the US it just gets a bit much for me. The hype and endless over enthusiasm is a little sickly after a while. And at the end of the day, why do you need that sort of thing? It's absolutely no help whatsoever to be told you're awesome and that your idea is great all the time. I'd much prefer to be told that it sucks and won't work, but perhaps that is a difference in culture.

In the UK we as a culture are built on self deprecating humour, witty put downs. Sarcasm is extremely important to us. This is how we work. Perhaps some see it as negativity, but that's not the case.

Not to get into a war here, but there are lots of things the UK does far better than the US - telco, communication, transport, as well as (IMHO, subjective) quality of life.
Life in a Day - what are you going to film?
When ProjectLocker was accused of storing passwords in plaintext, they responded by saying:

"You can't verify this for ProjectLocker or any other website without access to their backend systems."

http://superuser.com/questions/46810/should-i-be-concerned-i...

Is that incorrect?

If not, then I wonder how the author of this article can be so sure of his findings.
So you shouldn't tout your competing service because your product may be flawed or imperfect?
"2. Loop-invariant strlen()

GCC does this optimization, because strlen is a "built-in function:" one that gcc recognizes and optimizes specially. Disabling built-ins with -fno-builtin defeats this optimization."

No, it does it because strlen is declared to be a pure function, and it is smart enough to realize you are not modifying anything in s. -fno-builtin does not change the generated code, it still calls the strlen function (at least on my gcc), but it is hoisted out of the loop.
You can activate the PDF plugin by going to chrome://plugins
this conversation ends here, I am not patio11.

That's a real shame. (and I'm not being sarcastic)

I enjoy hearing about the successes and thought processes of people who are doing well.
From the Vimeo description:

> "After 50 trials, the robot learns that the first part of the task requires a stiff behavior to throw the pancake in the air, while the second part requires the hand to be compliant in order to catch the pancake without having it bounced off the pan."
It looks from the screenshots that they are integrating interface builder into XCode and possibly (I'm hoping) the simulator as well? Even in "single-window" mode, you have to switch through multiple windows/applications in order to do development. The "build window", for instance, is unnecessary as it displays a lot of redundant information. A single window for layout, coding and debugging sounds useful to me.
Here's a revenue model: Offer users with certain karma levels discounts from startups that provide services. The more karma you have, the higher discount you may be able to receive from a variety of startups/services. When a user cashes in their karma for the service, HN gets a recurring affiliate fee based on the total fees paid to said startup. And of course users with lower karma can still get some kind of discount from the services. Once those users karma reaches a new higher level, another discount kicks in.

To personalize this a bit, show a simple survey link on the main nav bar that lets users select the types of services they are intereted in. This would then be used to populate a sidebar with dinky ads or other promotions from startups/events.

Here's another one: Have events/conferences sponsor specific threads in HN...Whichever comment receives the most points get a discount or free pass. Once again, affiliate fees on other users signing up for the event kicks back to HN.

And another: create an automated newsletter that sends you a roundup of the days highest voted stories (with topic personlization if you want [ie, only send me Ask HN or 'seeking feedback' type stories]). Sell a few ads in the sidebar to startups on a budget.

If HN is averaging 60k uniques/day, that newsletter could grow pretty quickly. Sell of small banners at a decent CPM and it should make some money. And then of course layer on a taxonomy binding ad server that shows ads relevant to the topic(s) that are displayed in the newsletter based on the users preferences.
The link is now squatted but still available in archive.org :

http://web.archive.org/web/20061109232923/http://www.rfidana...
First of all, thanks for the attention, and help.

It's up and functional (predictions API and the virtual trading API).

What type of info should I add? (What would someone look for on a page)

I'll try and figure out the bullets, and will rewrite the "Its pretty advanced". I missed it.
I couldn't agree more. It pisses me off when people say "I don't have the time." What they really mean, is that they don't want to make it a priority. People need to consider their time like an investment, and maybe they'll consider watching TV can be a waste of time. I wrote about this [http://techneur.com/post/535211849/dont-have-the-time]
Interesting. It looks like we need to provide more info on our login page. What you stated is how it works. A user can choose to be emailed or texted when a friend has signaled a green or yellow. You can then join these signals within hangchillparty, which allows for the real-time evite aspect you are talking about.
Thank you, we've been so busy with things, so we'll try to get it soon.
What is up is the inflammatory submission title and linked page got people all riled up. There is not really a good reason to be linking tax codes with the end of the world. I'd downvote the submission if I could.
needs web workers for some multicore sweetness!
Or if you are handy with Expose and/or uses an external editor.
1. I used to be a graphic designer so teaching myself programming literally doubled my salary.

2. My safari.oreilly.com account, see #1. $40/m for access to almost every dev book ever written is a steal.
There is an incredible amount of rhetoric from both sides of the isle on supporting small businesses, supporting the entrepreneur, that entrepreneurs are the job creators, that innovation will lead us out of this recession. But it's all just politically correct talk.

This forum is filled with entrepreneurs and innovators. It has one of the highest density of job creators of any forum on the web. Has anyone here seen any help from the government in creating jobs? Either on the supply side (grants) or on the demand side (tax breaks)? Or by reducing our administrative workload? From either side of the isle, conservative or liberal?

Instead we have bureaucratic nightmares like this 1099 legislation that create work that has a not insignificant opportunity cost for innovation and job creation in this country. You could be coding, but instead you're issuing 1099's to walmart.

The reality is that even if this passes, we'll all do just fine and keep innovating. But the next time some politician tells you he supports job creation in this country be sure to call bullshit on him. They only say it because it sounds good and they have done nothing to help us create jobs.
Getting money out of China is pretty easy and it seems everyone with a lot of RMB does it.
odesk.com is another source
Why Do Small Businesses Need Print Labels?
Small businesses need to use print labels to promote their manufactured products and services in the market. Online label printing company offers custom labels printing to its most valuable customers worldwide.
Dreams have value as dreams, otherwise it's no longer escapism, it's work.
I remember having to upgrade VS 2005 to VS 2005 SP1. It took 2 hours to apply the changes.

And it was difficult to tell if the updating application froze or was still working. So while patching is nice, it is a huge effort to get it done cleanly.
I just use MacVim for editing and run the Xcode project window alongside.
>> they pay only when they have to

Tell that one to Steve Jobs :)

I think you're just arguing about semantics there. Some things people want (e.g. bling). Others, people need. (e.g. detergent). You can make money in both types of industries.
My best investment is telling my wife in front of other people that she's my best investment.
Couldn't agree more, this book opened my eyes (or mind). The Mingyur Rinpoche books are great too.
Aspurd, I remember those time in high school too (I'm 21). A huge part of Hcp is flipping "not doing jackshit" into "I'm down to have a good time", which means the same thing, but is less desparate. Today, I notice many of my friends are on facebook on weekend nights because online social norms have changed a ton the last few years, and I'm sure they wish they knew a few more social options. Good question, it's one we get a lot.
In my very limited experience with both, I've found oDesk.com to be a bit easier to use and seems to have better jobs.

However, be prepared to pay your dues working for up to half of what you'd like at first.

One bad thing about oDesk is they have all these dumb tests you can take and some people expect you to have passed them.

Either way on both sites a lot of people want you to work for less than 5 dollars an hour.
Link economy and journalism
I believe the article is referring to the plaintext transmission of credentials (your browser --> their server) which can be intercepted, rather than the plaintext storage of credentials (their server --> their database). Both are problematic.
Well, that's not what this is about. This is about sending the password (from the client to the sever, to log in) in plain text, and that's easy to verify by just sniffing your network traffic (which is what the author of this originally did).

It may be impossible to verify completely whether a site stores passwords in plain text without back-end access, but sites that do often send forgotten password emails in plain text too. If a site's doing that, it's a pretty good bet they're storing it in plain text. (And if they're not, they're using a pretty insecure storage scheme anyway. Websites should store salted cryptographic hashes of passwords, not the passwords themselves.)
That would be fantastic. You can't touch the DOM (or the canvas) through a webworker, so you'd have to serialize your list of exposure updates, and pass them around between the cores somehow...
It's a boring and poorly written play, of historical interest only.
They're putting the reputation of India's best engineering schools on the line, so it can't be far from $30.
No. There are exceptions, usually made to extract revenue from particular services, sometimes targeting people that don't live in that locality, like hotel taxes, but very seldom do they tax things like attorney services (wonder why...) or software development.

NYC has a weird list of services.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dof/html/business/business_tax_nys_s...
The Texas list is more comprehensive, and includes web site creation
http://www.window.state.tx.us/taxinfo/taxpubs/tx96_259.html

This is also an option that would be useful in creating a VAT, if the government has access to all of these transactions. Sadly, the states already tax most of this money and it would look bad to have Feds move in there. However, the gap in service taxes would appear to be an opportunity, especially in B2B taxes which would be invisible to most people.
You're saying there are no customers of Office Depot that make a total of $600 in purchases in a given year with means of payment other than a credit card (e.g. cash, purchase order, or check)? Seems quite unlikely.
Sorry for the confusion -- this whole thing is about how passwords are transmitted, not how they are stored.

When it comes to password storage, though, the only way to find this out is: (1) if you are able to look at the backend systems, (2) if someone hacks in, as happened with rockyou (google: rockyou passwords), or (3) if they send you your password back in the clear in a password reminder email, rather than forcing you to create a new one. Note that #2 and #3, if they happen, only indicate that passwords are stored in the clear. If they don't happen that doesn't mean they are not stored in the clear.
Ask HN: Rate my new iPhone app Locurious
My new app Locurious just got approved on the App store. It's a location-based iPhone app for finding deals and events in San Diego (more cities coming later). It's a little rough around the edges right now, but I'd love to get some feedback or ideas from you guys about the app and/or the website! http://locurious.com
Don't sweat it - that's just what friends do. In fact, friends are quite a bit worse than actual customers for getting feedback. It's much easier to get friends to "sign up", but once they do that, they almost universally log out and forget.

If your experience is anything like mine you'll get more feedback from your first one or two paying customers than all of your friends combined.

I don't even bother telling friends to sign up unless they would be interested in the product because of their work, hobbies, etc. Even then, they're not the most helpful crowd.
Turn the "Seeking feedback on my startup" into a premium service. Startups submit their site and mini-pitch/boilerplate. Users go visit the site but the site could be framed with a dinky toolbar at the top that is used for usability/feedback review. Mocking up their website, writing notes, giving feedback, etc. All that data is aggregated into a nice dashboard that the startup can review. They could even filter by a users karma to ween out the crap if someone isnt giving constructive criticism. They could also vote on who gives them the best feedback, which would add to that users karma (redeemable for prizes or services from other startups).

So, the startup pays some amount, lets say, $500 for the feedback service. HN guarantees that they will receive 100 pieces of feedback using this tool (which of course would be using node.js, closure, haskel, [insert any trending technology here]). Once the 100 pieces of feedback are received, the 'sponsored link' gets removed and another goes in its place. The startup could also request feedback only from users with certain karma levels (which would cost more money).

HN shows a maximum of 1 sponsored review link at the top of the site, or mixed in somewhere, at a time. I dont think it would be too tough to get 100 feedback notes in a single day (with 60k users that love checking out new startups).

Let's say only one is shown each day, thats $15,000 per month in revenue for that service. That'll buy a lot of ramen.
I don't know how he can be sure, but you can know a site stores passwords if, for example, they are able to send your password to you if you forget it. This would not be possible if the password were stored as a salted hash.
Imagine a dataset where the inputs are to be in a range from 1-100, but for some reason unknown to the programmers when the program was written, there is a value of 4,000.

In the real world, a human must decide what to do with that 4,000. A computer would crash or throw an error or something like that even though the data may actually be valid.
A Guide to Undefined Behavior in C and C++, Part 2
I've always felt that begs the question, by assuming that a mismatch is somehow fundamental, rather than an implementation artifact.

Just as real RDBMSes don't strictly adhere to the formal math relational model, object-oriented languages vary in their, for lack of a better word, orientation.

Looked at another way, what about a relational-object model instead? Making a useful one for MySQL doesn't seem as plausible, given its chronic feature absence.
> But in 2008 the whole system of credit was seizing up because lenders and investors, not knowing when the next pile of shit would hit the fan, were panicking.

That's true, but it doesn't imply that Wells Fargo, to pick one example, needed a bailout in 2008.

Note that much of the potential for panic came from a regulatory decision to exempt certain obligations from normal bankruptcy rules. That made an orderly shutdown of Lehmann impossible.
I think the only thing to do is buy a vintage old film camera and buy all the film you can. I switched from digital to film a few months ago and I'm enjoying the process so much more.
The best investment I've made has been quitting a well-paid, big company job to work for an early Rails software startup.

I worked many more hours and was paid less money (the investment).

I had an amazing time, learned very valuable skills, and am in a much better place in my career because of it.

This will continue paying dividends in salary and enjoying my work for the rest of my life.
You're right - I'd rather play a much longer term game - build a business that sustains itself rather than saddle myself with investment.

>> "but some people want to build billion dollar companies"

How many of the big SV startups actually make a profit though? Sure, maybe on paper they're 'worth' millions since people invested at a certain level, but I don't think that's healthy. Isn't it the least bit worrying when Reddit starts asking users to donate money? After it was sold for millions?

You can't compare Facebook + Twitter. Facebook is a destination. Their website gets a massive amount of eyeballs and is a big gaming platform. It was always obvious that they'd make good money from that. Twitter however so far is a backend message passing system, which lots of apps use. I'm really skeptical twitter will ever pull off monetization. Twitter don't get the mindshare or eyeballs. Apps that use twitter do.

At the end of the day though, I think it's a matter of taste, and what you're most comfortable. As you say, different aims. I'm very much more comfortable with the European way of building companies.
Education and friendships.
Blue Screen of Death Among Many Problems on Deepwater Horizon
I'm reminded of this story from a webpage on San Francisco running "superstars". While I think genetics is a significant factor in determining your base energy level and how far you go, I think most of us have a lot more potential to regain lost energy than we realize:

"Sister Marion Irvine did not start running until age 47. She was overweight and smoked two packs a day. Looking for a way to relax after a day as a grade school principal in San Rafael, Sister Marion took up running. ''I needed to use up some pent-up energy, so I decided to give it a go,'' said the 54-year-old Roman Catholic nun, who was soon going 70 miles a week. She started out half-running and half-walking.

In 1984, she qualified for the US Olympic Trials in the marathon by running 2:51 at the age of 54, becoming the oldest to ever qualify for the OTs."
Key point: terabyte-sized memory pools. Which is quite awesome.

I'd initially thought it referred to terabyte-sized executables. Followed by a "oh great. Now someone's going to make one, and some government's going to want one."