skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suspect majority of the people who are technically "rich" as you put it have either inherited wealth or opportunity in life, and though they cloud it with epic stories of hard work, they started out ahead of the game, and with money to burn.

There are very few "rags to riches" stories these days, and little reward and interest in ideas from normal people. The prospect of gaining financial stability [through even magnificent short term gains] is decreasing daily in the US. just look at foreclosures to see that people who though their lives were successful had the success rug pulled out from under them.

We need to stop supporting mega-companies and bring development and even retail back to the mom&pop era. Your privacy is threatened BECAUSE Google has become a giant company, if small businesses ran individual development projects, they wouldn't have enough time to worry about collecting personal data on every human in the world.

We are turning into a lottery society, and the ideal of being able to be successful is as much a myth as Santa Claus, even with hard work. Net neutrality and measures that mega companies will take to suppress competition will kill the possibilities for common folk to succeed even deeper into the "unobtainable/impossible" category.

Get used to failed dreams...

Sorry to be so grim.
That's a good point and a fine line to walk.

I'm going to have to think about that for a bit, it's a tricky enough situation you sketch that there shouldn't be some kind of exception for it.

First thing to come to mind is maybe an electronic way of securing permission from the 'endpoint' of the traffic, since they benefit from not having their hardware and their connection abused as well.

The key is 'with the consent of the customer', and I think that such instances should be the exception rather than the rule.

So if there is no specific reason why a certain customers packets are inspected and it is done without their knowledge and consent it should be illegal.

Also, it may very well be possible to correlate enough transport layer data to figure out which packets are part of an attack and which are legit, but that might be computationally very expensive to do.
Here's a competing design from a different firm: http://www.dezeen.com/2009/03/30/high-voltage-transmisison-l...

At least, I assume it's for the same competition, as it's over a year old.
Going to uni takes at least an hour on the train and on a bus (not even counting the return trip) so I listen to podcasts then.
Since, going by your analogy, we're talking about how hard it is to build a machine that will draw us the Mandelbrot set, isn't that exactly the point?
I use buxfer practically every day and would be sad to see it go. I notice the odd bug but its nothing really to fret over. As long as my data stays secure I don't really need any new features and am happy for the founders if they're successfully taking the hands-off approach. Thanks for providing a great service for free!
"On average, ants monopolize 15–20% of the terrestrial animal biomass"

http://www.pnas.org/content/97/26/14028.full
Not only this, but isn't video delivered over ... the web?
Actual article: http://blog.craigslist.org/2010/08/family-friendly-ebay-clas...

IMO, who cares. This is basically Craig saying, "Stop slamming me, ebay has some niche classified site with sex ads too.

Craig, stop denying the fact that you make a shit-ton of money from sex ads. Do something about it, or don't--but if you don't quit lying about the fact that you are trying.
Only on their BetaBlue plane. If only Virgin had all-you-can-fly.
Why the downvotes? It's totally true. If the title includes "is dead" or "killed so-and-so" then it's going to be bullshit.
On the contrary. It helps show that continued efforts at victim disarmament (first no firearms; now that the bad guys use bladed weapons, we must have a crusade against those next) do not save anyone in the long run.

Or, maybe it just shows that GT are pirates whose natural enemy is the ninja.
Play Framework: Digg's Monitoring Dashboards Platform
How big is the moon compared to your town?
5 tips for running a company blog using WordPress
Thank you thank you thank you for linking to this. I also use both editors (daily), and Emacs' undo system is easily among its worst and most annoying features, while Vim's undo system is among its best. The documentation at the top of undo-tree.el spells out exactly why this is the case. This library makes it all better.
I assume that JetBlue is making this offer for the same reason that any airline offers a discount tied to an abnormal schedule: they can’t sell enough full-price (or even normal-discount-price) tickets to fill their seats during September, but they don’t want to reduce the number of flights they offer, and once they’ve committed to flying the plane then the marginal cost per passenger is trivial.

In other words, the plane is going to pump out those greenhouse gases whether it’s half full or three-quarters full, so your decision to accept this offer isn’t going to make much of a difference.
I don't think that's what's driving this. The major powers behind this are two-fold, the first google's apparent about face, the second that they seem to act against their self applied motto.

So they're being held to the standards that they themselves set in the past, hating google has nothing to do with it.

Net neutrality simply translates in to 'pipes are supposed to be dumb for regular traffic'. Anything other than that and the net is no longer neutral, and that's both what drove it to become what it is today and what will continue to drive that growth in the future. Turning it in to a series of ISP guarded walled gardens is not to anybodies benefit. Especially not the wireless portion, since that is where the future growth will be, so the current battle will draw the lines for one of the most important portions of the net in the near future.

And I think we all hoped that Google would stay on the right side in this, and feel disappointed that they didn't.

Hate doesn't enter in to it.
Is the $100 really projected to be a revenue source?

Because it's terrible.

More specifically, it's poorly implemented and too high. It's "hidden" until after you finish filling out the 'submit idea' page with a big button on the home page, and it's poorly phrased... "Also, your payment information is required to complete your submission." Oh yeah, like you almost forgot you were gonna do that. Be more up front about the fee (change the layout so it doesn't hide below 'the fold'), and make the fee smaller. You want to avoid people filling out their idea submission, getting pissed that it costs $100, and then refusing to come back.

You should charge something (rudimentary spam-filter), but $100 is too high. The tinkerer has already identified a problem, come up with a solution, drawn their idea on a napkin or even Google Sketchup, is also going to have to weigh that $100 against material costs. As an example - cream cheese that comes in bagel-shaped slices. I could gamble $100 on it at Quirky, or spend $50 in cream cheese and some shop-time to build a prototype. If I'm really convinced that my shelf-shaped cereal-bowls-so-your-cereal-doesn't-get-soggy idea is going to take over the world, I would have a rough idea of the costs involved to fully bring it to market (shapeways.com + etsy.com + reddit/digg/etc, and if it really pans out - use proceeds to pay for injection molding).

If I'm looking to spend $100 at once on an idea, well... it costs $100 for a provisional patent, and tinkerers are well aware of that.

(And that half-baked idea that I'm too lazy to implement? Not worth $100.)

How about sliding scale - pay $20 to submit your idea, but you get less of the revenue?

I hope you guys succeed, if only so I'll have somewhere to buy my dustpan-with-fingers.
Because who puts ruby in /usr/bin?
Yes this is my first essay. Just gave it a try by summarizing what I learnt from pg's essay and writing my views on about the topic.

I have to agree with you about the "Most engineers ..." part. I guess I should have used "Most engineers around me" instead.

I too felt that my sentences were too long when I read it. But I never thought it would be easily noticeable by those who read it.

Thanks you for the detailed feedback. I really appreciate that you took sometime to read the piece :) I saved your comment in for future reference with the idea that it would help to refine my essays based on it.
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Down-voted for posting a link to a privacy policy? Hmm. Ok.

My point had nothing to do with your ISP packet inspection argument (notice I didn't address it). I was providing a counter-point to the "Google is the largest advertising and user-tracking system online. I would only use those DNS servers as last resource." My comment was simply to refute your indication that Google might be associating DNS with advertising or user tracking. They don't.

Edit: Can someone explain why the down-votes? Do you just disagree?
Games Are Windows Phone 7′s Biggest Advantage against Competition
Integrated Xbox games on Windows Phone 7 are just about the only chance Microsoft has, to succeed against its competitors.
Rate my startup: Remarkbox, inline feedback for books and long articles
relevant to your comment is POSIWID!: the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does
"DNA can encode everything the brain does with N bits of information"

It doesn't directly encode the structure of the brain. Development is required.

"Involved" is a serious weasel word when it comes to the brain, especially when AI is under discussion; everything in your skull is "involved" in cognition, but that doesn't mean it's doing anything particularly important, and it definitely does not mean that every detail of the dynamics is an absolute necessity to obtain Cognition.
But I think we might be arguing different things...

We are arguing different things. My point is that you can't write a little equation for a neuron (which is an entire living cell!) and wave your hands and say "done!"

Kurzweil is way way way too hand-wavey for me.
Yeah, but only once per 10min or so, and if you've just done an update or any of a range of other activities, that password is still valid. Once the password is in, no confirmation.

And yeah, agreed, skipping the password box is just dangerous - WAY too easy to spend money there.
Well Mathematica is really ridiculously feature-rich and sophisticated software.
I don't think it's fear so much as perceiving a particular conception of simple as bland. It would be a sign of failure to demote oneself to that, and secondly it does not jive with the concept of a long and difficult journey.

Things can be outwardly simple and have a complex underbelly, or vice versa, or some other mix. Anyway, I think this article is tied up with passion because if you lose it, fail to renew it, or actively destroy it, too much resistance develops to proceed.
Bonus: Dopplr's Marko Ahtisaari previewed Nokia X3 today
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmqf_nktDag

Looks almost like one of Jonathan Ive's design talks.
The investments came in in 1/07 and 4/07 - a total of $315,000.00 - which if you break it down leaves barely ramen money for two founders and business expenses.

The fact that co-founder Pandit spent a full two years on this start-up is nothing to be ashamed of.

Lots of us here know the acute pain of a start-up that fails to get traction, and considering that he kept beating the drum even after seeing his co-founder leave is a huge testament to his character.

This is a terrible example on TechCrunch's part to illustrate a point they want to support about young entrepreneurs taking advantage of angels.

Can't blame them for trying though right?
If there is an aspiring journalist in the audience, now would be a good time to track down Mr. Essien and the various other players involved, interview them and put together a definitive account of as much as is known. It would make a decent cover article for Fast Company, or do it as a blog with raw information dumps and crowdsourcing the factchecking.
What seems strange to me is that they have paying customers who are saying on the support forum that they are getting zero response to their e-mails to the company. Fine, if you're going to shut it down then shut it down, but I wouldn't walk away from paying customers without saying something.
Oh wow, thanks! It's been a very long time since I've looked at Freenet; it looks like they've come a long way. Good to see that it's been done.
The way I heard it was that what they conceal is more important than what they reveal.
That is fantastic news. I hope Youtube is not far behind.

Vimeo has always been one of my favourite video sites. If they would allow "gaming" videos I would use them for hosting too.
Well if you define the web as 'HTTP traffic on port 80' then... yes, a lot of it is. A lot is also delivered over RTMP (ie, streamed Flash video).

edit: RTMP not RTSP (that's Windows Media, Quicktime etc).
well, I'm actually /really interested/ in what people think about this. I mean, laws aside, privacy policies[1] are pretty important to some people. But the thing is, by looking at (and sometimes mucking with) your traffic, I can provide you a better service. So it's important for me to know where the line is for different people.

[1] note: this isn't final, but it's my latest working draft: http://wiki.xen.prgmr.com/xenophilia/2010/06/please-comment-...
Meditating with Jon Kabat-Zinn
A "back to top" would be helpful.

Or, I'm not a big fan of vertical static menus, but because the page is so large, using something like:
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/omnislide/index.ht...
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/staticmenu3.htm
are you sure? I can access the website without any problem
Doesn't DuckDuckGo use YahooBOSS and/or The Search API? Will this effect development(or the business) of DDG? DDG is awesome, so I'm just curious here.

Edit: I am aware DDG uses other sources, just curious how this affects things.
I also wonder if they will be painted white, as in the illustrations. Most pylons I've seen are unpainted, presumably to minimize maintenance costs.
Seed Funding in 2010
Even worse, a HR-drone.
How to Get People Talking about Your Products
Not to get sucked into a debate about TDD stuff, but to me the following blog post said all that needs to be about at least the TDD business and "gurus" (if not the whole methodology):

http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s...
There's a lot of truth to this, but you'll soon be shouted down by the very people you describe. Successful people--however they got there--only like to attribute it to their own very hard work.
Chris Anderson and Wired manipulate facts to forward their theories with whatever new theory and bandwagon they are jumping on.

The data cited in 'The Long Tail' was not accurate[1], and actually supported the counter-argument. 'Free' was similarly vague[2] and inaccurate[3].

The entire m.o of Anderson seems to be to take a concept or theory that sounds interesting and package it in laymans terms for a gullible public. It is presented as 'research' or a 'breakthrough' and most average readers suck it up, but these theories are usually far from.

To see them doing it again with this latest theory is no surprise. Anderson really doesn't let the truth get in the way of a good story, especially when there are magazines and books to sell, and high-priced speaking gigs to book.

(see also the excellent: http://dashes.com/anil/2009/07/free-criticism-and-science-wi...)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail#Criticism

[2] http://compassioninpolitics.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/critici...

[3] http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/09070...
You are correct for consumer electronics. But commercial and scientific computing are driving increases computational power and density that do not seem to be letting up. In the 4 years I have worked in hosting the amount of server you can get in a 4u box has gone from 8 2.5GHz cores to 24 2.5GHz cores and from 32GB to 256GB. The storage requirements and compute requirements for applications are also increasing substantially.
Why put Location: Hacker Dojo, 140B

and not

Location:

Hacker Dojo
140B South Whisman Rd
Mountain View, CA 94041
(650) 898-7925

Maybe with a map: http://goo.gl/maps/td7H

Not everyone knows where your office is.
This was an insightful article posted on HN a few weeks back:

"If you build it, they won't come"

http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/if-you-build-it-...
Well, I bristled at the Geek Cred reference but your points are still cogent! Another upmod in 3.. 2.. 1..
> What wrong with that?

If you mean, "What is wrong with anonymous classes?", I have no answer. I do not mind the idea, so long as I can maintain the integrity of my data's interfaces.

If you mean, "What is wrong with implementing anonymous classes as hash maps?", then I point you towards issues of efficiency in memory and speed. Hash maps are intended to make key look-up quick for a variable set of not 100% known keys. If all you want is known key-value pairs, then you have some options that do the trick much more efficiently (examples --):

- structs (key is compiled out to be a quick pointer addition)

- classes (on top of the struct, you now have some abstraction capabilities that will help out future maintenance issues)

If you do not quite know what you want in the structure, but you have a small number of keys, an associative array with a decent accessor API is all you need. The few key comparisons will generally be faster than running them through a typical hashing algorithm.

When you provide a construct like this:

{ :foo 1 :bar 2 }

you are implying that you have a known set of keys and values. With a hash map, I would expect that someone would later add more key-value pairs, but in practice, code that starts with this initialization pattern treats it like a class rather than a hash, just modifying the values of the :foo and :bar attributes.

I have also seen instances where developers would -- because it was easy to do with these hash maps -- slap in another key-value pair in some subfunction and then suffer interface issues down the road when they assume its presence in the wrong places. Something a little stricter would have at least given them a warning.

So just make it a struct -- anonymous if you need -- at minimum. That is the most generic, all-purpose form that could benefit from this kind of {} syntax.

> which by the way manages efficiency concerns on your behalf

Can you elaborate on this? If this means that there is a magical conversion to a stricter struct underneath the hood, then I have no place to complain about {} in Clojure's case. I have not encountered this notion before (other than as faith).
If, by "draw us the Mandelbrot set" you mean the whole set, and not tiny, low-resolution approximations of the set then yes.
I like it, thanks.
It seems like it is about time Vimeo did this although right now there is no indication that they actually have. The RRW story doesn't link to anything that has the announcement from them and there is nothing on the Vimeo site about it either.
jam@jam-desktop:~$ which ruby
/usr/bin/ruby
heh, please see my reply to the post below this.
Sure, but Kurzweil's claim is merely that if DNA can encode everything the brain does with N bits of information, then regardless of how the DNA behaves, we have at least a loose estimate of the level of complexity in the brain.

The problem is that DNA is not sufficient. Organisms don't grow from naked DNA in a vacuum; the DNA is always contained within a cell which is enclosed within a more complex bio structure (egg, womb, etc) which may be contained within the parent organism in the case of mammals.

You need all of this information plus knowledge of the various interactions of the different environments to pursue Kurzweil's approach.

The universe of necessary and sufficient information is much, much larger than the 3 billion base pairs in your DNA.
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As I said, the Soviet invasion had an effect on Japanese decision making. By mid 1945 Japan was already in dire straits, the Soviet invasion and the use of nuclear weapons were just 2 more additional "really, really bad things" added to their list of woes.

What I want to know is whether it was the determining factor of their choice to surrender when they did. Would they have surrendered as quickly or at all without a Soviet invasion? Would they have surrendered as quickly or at all without the use of nuclear weapons? My reading of history is that even without the Soviet invasion they would have surrendered quickly (at most within a few weeks of when they actually did). Without the use of nuclear weapons they probably wouldn't have surrendered as quickly, though ultimately I think they would have surrendered before a land invasion of the home islands but after much greater destruction of Japan's cities and much greater loss of life of Japan's citizens.

As to the point of the Soviet amphibious invasion capability: conquering a sparsely inhabited island with few fixed fortifications hardly is not in the same league as the battle of Okinawa and D-Day. The Soviets might have been capable of taking Hokkaido, but the US and UK were capable of taking Honshu, and they had the recent experience to prove it beyond a doubt. I'm sure the latter fact weighed much more heavily on the Japanese mind at the time.
Not that I wouldn't like to be as optimistic, too, but Nature does seem to have made enough use of unreliably folding proteins to have come up with BSE, Parkinson's disease, and some others <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding#Incorrect_prote... >.

I'm a big fan of Scott Aaronson, too, btw :-) Here's a pic of him demoing the soap bubbles experiment he refers to in that paper you linked to <http://www.scottaaronson.com/soapbubble.jpg >.
Completely off-topic, but a quick google seach interestingly implies that ants hold a significant portion of animal biomas:

On average, ants monopolize 15–20% of the terrestrial animal biomass, and in tropical regions where ants are especially abundant, they monopolize 25%

http://www.pnas.org/content/97/26/14028.full

I didn't have as much luck finding a quick elephant biomass estimate. But giving a generous estimate of 1 million elephants, and the upper limit of the weigh of the larger African elephant at 26,000 pounds we can guess that elephant biomass is less than 26 billion pounds. Considering that's less than the biomass of humans in the US, I'd say ants probably actually do compare well to elephants in proportion of total biomass.

I apologize for any pedantry, but it was actually a question that piqued my curiosity.
B-School and the Missing Product
This sucks. And it's going to break a ton of yahoo pipes.

Is there any free web search API?
It's /usr/bin/ruby for the default preinstalled 1.8.7 on OS X.
Elephants are almost extinct because their proportion of mass is almost zero compared to ants!
No, it is generally complete BS. It survives on human gullibility, and the observation by stock brokers that promoting technical analysis is good for trading volume. A good book that addresses this A Random Walk Down Wall St.

That said the particular "omen" they are talking about does have some merit. Normally there is a broad correlation between different stocks, so you don't typically get both lots of highs and lows at the same time. (This correlation is why the DOW, which just tracks a small number of indicator stocks, is correlated with much broader sets of stocks.) But you can get lots of highs and lows at the same time if the market is very volatile. Volatile markets sometimes go down very sharply. Of course causation goes the other way. Fears that the market could drop cause volatility, and sometimes those fears are proven right.

That said we can and do measure market volatility directly. (For instance every options pricing model does that.) And that gives a much more fine-tuned predictor of risk than this "omen".
1975: The First Digital Camera