skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
fwiw, prowl has done the same thing (forward growl notifications to an iphone) for at least a year:

http://prowl.weks.net/

i submitted a patch to the adium guys to be able to generate events (growl notifications, and thus prowl events) only while away:

http://trac.adium.im/ticket/13278

this way as soon as i stepped away from or locked my mac, adium would go away and any instant messages received while i was away would get instantly forwarded to my phone.

now that i'm on an android phone and an openbsd laptop, i can't use this setup anymore, but i'm anxiously awaiting notifo's android client so i can write something to do this with pidgin.
Glad to see LA getting some press, as a reminder, the LA HN meetup is tomorrow:

http://groups.google.com/group/los-angeles-hners-hacker-news...
Google Maps already tells me what roads to drive on, Amazon tells me what things I should buy, and Facebook tells me who I should be friends with.

I would say I am fine with these things since I understand the nature of these algorithms, but there are some very fuzzy situations that occur.

Is there a moral dilemma for a recommendation algorithm to suggest things of political nature during an election year?
i.e. recommending "Going Rogue" or "The Audacity of Hope" during in the months leading up to a presidential election?
"It seems we must ask if Google is far less evil than others would be in the same position."

No I don't think that's the right question. I think Gruber really nailed it with this:

"Maybe the question isn't who should hold this information, but rather should anyone hold this information."
The kind of machine you are talking about is called a parametric CNC machine, not all controllers can do it, but those that can are capable of making very complex surfaces.

http://www.cncci.com/resources/parametric%20programming.htm

The work you are referring to requires 5 axis control, something that is fairly common nowadays but back then was extremely rare. The software I wrote was not capable of such complex movements because the machine itself was only a 3-Axis machine, a 5-Axis retrofit would be extremely hard to construct. Basically you'd have to rip apart the main structure of the machine and rebuild it. (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWCaQ4XvG6Y&feature=relat... from about 3:48) You could conceivably do that if you only worked on one kind of machine but retro-fits tend to be bolted on to whatever is available that still has a rotating spindle and good bearings.

The software did have some parametric tricks but not a full suite, mostly related to making different sized versions of the same part.

Most CNC machines are programmed in something called 'G-CODE', with a translator step between the CAD and the CAM part. The software that I wrote was much more tightly coupled (cad-cam all in one) so we had the full power of a regular programming language at our disposal to do complex part generation.
I think we'd be heading in that direction with or without Google. The technology exists, it will be used.
Chances are that they've got something like HAProxy running in front of their application backends, and you get a shirnkwrapped 503 page back when no backend can be reached. In that case, the application can't intelligently decide to return a json response because the application never gets the request.
Perhaps minimal number of words was implied.
I think it is telling that those are the most popular youtube channels. Hint : if you like watching people acting retarded or treating you as if you were retarded, then you probably are.
Expectations of future earnings affect share prices today. And of course if stock markets were perfectly efficient with full information, then stock prices would never change - they would be the net present value of all future earnings.

So the question isn't whether or not Google is profitable today. It's rather, is Google going to be as profitable as it could be in the future? If it keeps up with what it's doing, there's a risk it could attract unwelcome attention from regulators, especially in Europe. It doesn't take much pissing off of the public re privacy for politicians to be motivated to meddle. Google would do well to put that off as much as possible and minimize potential ramifications. And that work pays off in today's prices.
There are one-click root apps floating around for the various phones. Combine with ROM Manager or CM Updater or equivalent, and it's basically like the carrier experience.

I would recommend it to anyone who actually cares about their phone.
They've taken something from chance.
well, this isn't actually that. it's the other way around. notifications you get through Notifo are displayed through Growl on your mac (not forwarded from growl to notifo).

There are a couple of growl forwarder plugins out there for notifo that have been made by the community.

we're working on the Android client, have no fear :)
Some of the cloud stuff is from people from the "startup scene", I think: Dropbox, Heroku, etc.
This is a great story and kudos to you for building something adventurous in very adverse conditions.

As a side note, in a previous lifetime, we built some software for the Atari ST and we had quite a bit of experience with it. You are spot on about the robustness of the hardware. If the machine were to ever stop working, standard practice was to lift it off the desk about two inches, and let it drop. The theory was that it would reseat whatever chips had worked loose. It was a little bit more than a game computer, but as you say was pretty fragile.
Have you ever used stock Android?

The thing that nails Sense for me is that the calendar app requires you to spin digits around (11:01, 11:02, 11:03, ... for your 11:45 appointment), whereas the stock Android app lets you just type them in or press a button. Not as OMG AWESOME, but much easier to actually use.

Anyway, Sense only lasted a few days on my phone, so I am not experienced. I just know that the stock AOSP lock screen, dialer, calendar, and browser all work better.
And there are quite a few reporting requirements. As well as a term that states that until the final reports are in you are responsible for all the costs (that's month 6) so I take that to mean that you have to finance all the costs up to that point out of pocket, or they might claim it back if you don't report in time and in the way required.
Sadly the new dev phones won't work with ICE's 3g network,now a tico's Nexus is literally irreplaceable.
I thought so too
Sounds like Michael Jackson lol
Great work Paul and Chad
Bathroom Monologue - Kill Mommy
Related question: WILL you sell or would you hate it? Sales is definitely a skill, but a learnable one (especially if you have solid biz/people/negotiation skills and a willingness to hear the word "No" a lot. ;-) )
The odd thing about this is that I don't really think it's that bad to offer good support. On my startup (historious) I see almost every user who's emailing us be really surprised when we respond within a minute or so.

We're always at the computer and reading someone's email doesn't take that long, or break your concentration very much. I know it's different for large companies, but they have the kind of money to hire good support staff.

At those scales, though, you lose something that's even more impressive: The ability to fix small bugs by the time you've replied to a user. If someone reports a bug to us, we usually have it fixed and pushed in one or two minutes, so when the user gets a response saying "thank you for the feedback, we've fixed the bug, you can try again" within a minute of reporting, they become really loyal to the service...
Turtles could hold the secret to human immortality
Yes! Also a fantastic phone. Really, the 6xxx series were the best phones. I had a 6110, 6210, 6310, 6230, and now a 6500. They were all the best phones I've owned. I tried some of the Symbian smartphones but they were just disappointing, they took forever to do anything.
Ah, sure, that's fine (I ran Android on my iPhone once). Does it work perfectly otherwise, or are there any incompatibilities?
In Google Chrome 5.0.375.125 on OS X, your new website looks like this after a brief flash of working content: http://imgur.com/kvDye.png

If I block the TypeKit script, it works just fine. I think it looks better too.
Overture is the best example of a successful startup from LA. Acquired for $1.63 billion by Yahoo, and they invented the business model that Google improved upon and made Google what they are today.
I noticed that same thing once or twice during development but couldnt reproduce it regularly. Yeah it's typekit. I sent them a screencast of the issue but haven't heard back (this was about a week ago).

If I closed Chrome or did the icognito mode it worked just fine. Any tips on how to reproduce it would be appreciated.
Depends on what kind of pictures you are looking at. http://www.worldwaronecolorphotos.com/html/ww_i_v_0.html are clearly old, even though they are from about the same time those pictures in Russia was taken. The same is the case for the pictures from the 30 that was posted a short while ago, which I guess is because we are a lot more familiar with the way western males dressed, so we can easier pick out the things that don't look exactly right.
If my degree says "Computer Engineering" and is issued by the engineering school of my university, I'm a software engineer, I don't care what you think.
Color E-Ink displays by end of 2010
Man Legally Changes Name 2 Host Gator.com
A failed Google product is a lot like a cancelled TV show. Only a few million people liked it.
I suggest that you come back and re-read the thread tomorrow. Hopefully you'll come to a different opinion.

About the emulator, the length of the emulated program is the length of the emulator plus the length of the representation of the program. On standard machine architectures you can represent binary data directly with little overhead. (Somewhere you have to declare the length of the binary data, so there is some overhead.) If you're encoding binary data within a programming language you may have a constant factor of encoding overhead because of your need to avoid reserved characters, etc. This is typically a small constant factor. I'm aware of no practical examples where that overhead is exponential, or even super-linear.

About Omega, I understand the argument that you're trying to make. Your argument is that if Omega_A and Omega_B are to vary, then some programs from A have to go to much longer programs on B. My point is that this is not true, all that is necessary is that the programs from A have to be lost in a much larger sea of valid programs in B. Given that the number of programs of length n varies exponentially in the size of n, there are enough programs that this will happen even if all programs in A go to programs that are just a fixed number of bytes larger in B. Therefore Omega_A tells you very little about Omega_B.
Schmidt could have phrased it much better as "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, Don't tell anyone."

Great point, in hindsight. It's much harder to know these things when you spend a lot of your time in front of reporters.
Indeed, he always writes with a bias towards Apple and against competitors of Apple, which of course makes him very popular with the Apple fanboy crowd.
That is one of the reasons I never pay a lot of attention to these kind of posts.

Besides that, I may hope my iPhone does not do such thing as you say (at least not sending the information to Apple), otherwise Apple can expect a lot of legal trouble, I guess... ;-)
There's probably genes in common, so there's a biological side to it too.
just signed up and am very interested to use to generate alerts from mysql. NB Drew Crawford's new Phone Pipe command line service: http://github.com/drewcrawford/Phone-Pipe
Just as "ridiculously rich" is relative (for some people in 3rd world countries it could be having a few thousand dollars) so is "ridiculously thin" (for someone weighing 350 pounds this could be weighing 250 pounds). And I would argue that achieving this goal, in general, leads to better health. This is not to say that exceptions which lead to poor results don't exist in both cases, which makes the correlation even stronger.
This is a good point. It made me realize a third time when my mind tends to wander to its top idea/intuition: when I'm walking around listening to music. It's a bit like day-dreaming, and I'd argue that the fact it's triggered by music is indicative that there is strong emotional piece here.
Tell HN: Somebody build this (Google Answers)
Google Answers was awesome. It was a fantastic service that gave you access to high-quality researchers at a fair price.

It's not a super-high-margin business I'm guessing, and it doesn't scale well, but it would be a great lifestyle business I think.

Perhaps you contract with PhD candidates throughout the world. They're smart, they're great at research, and often they are getting paid like $15 an hour-ish (obviously this varies a TON depending on where they live in the world).

So a customer pays anywhere from $15 - $500, depending on the quality of research they want. 80% of that goes to the researcher, and the service keeps 20% to pay bills and turn a profit.

It seems like to start you'd just need to find a handful of smart people (PhD's is one idea, maybe there are other ways, perhaps even just smart people from communities like HN etc.) that were ready to take the jobs. RentAResearcher.org and .net are both available.... would love to see this built.
Well, it seems to me that without the colors one can project different expressions onto the face, and thus one can read it as more dignified. With the paint, the possible expressions are narrowed down toward what expression the painter put there.
Yes!! I've been waiting on this one for a very long time (though had some python hacks aside). But a very timely update indeed thanks!

I do hope there will be a easy_install package for *nix folks.
The original point was that transparent government ownership of information is better than corporate ownership of information, because votes in government are relatively free/equally split, while voting in a corporation isn't.
This is the first time Safari Reader has been useful.
I used iptables to block all incoming traffic. While SSHed into the server. Thankfully, Linode's out of band console works (slow and painful, but it worked).
Here's the Library of Congress project that restored the photographs, and hosts them all: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/
I like your examples.

Google Maps tells me the whole route, not just 'what to do next'. I can understand how the route was produced, and because it's shown on a map, I can see whether it matches my intentions before I follow it.

Amazon is less transparent, but they usually do show things like 'we recommended this because you bought that, and 40% of people who bought that liked this"

I'd hardly say that Facebook tells me who to I should be friends with - they mostly suggest people I might already be friends with to make it easier to connect with them. I don't know what algorithm they use, but I guess it's based on mutual friends and their scrape of my email box from ages ago. I wish they would tell me more.

Google on the other hand is completely secretive about how they generate their recommendations (i.e. the search results). How do I know the results I see are aligned with my interests?

Since Google's customers are advertisers, it wouldn't be unreasonable to guess that the search results are at least to some extent tuned to maximize advertising revenue for Google, as opposed to my needs for quality, breadth of coverage, historically significant results etc.

The algorithm may not be tuned to favor specific interests, but it clearly has a structural bias that favors certain kinds of information over other kinds.

I think that having so much of the web's information flow governed by secret algorithms is very much a cause for concern.
I'm sick and tired of the downvote barrage lately. That aside, let me try a completely different tack, maybe that sheds some light on the problem.

The complexity of a Turing machine is a function of the number of states that it can encode, in programming languages we call that 'expressiveness'. You can write a smaller program in a language that is more expressive. A Turing machine that allows more states is going to require a shorter tape (fewer cells) to do its work but will be more complex.

The argument I think that Kurzweil makes with his 50 MB figure is that once you take out all the redundancy you've taken out the expressiveness factor. Whatever emulator you use to interpret that 50 MB you'll end up with some 3D structure (if you simulate the embryology properly) that will resemble a brain.

The part where the analogy goes wrong according to me is by postulating a machine that this stuff should run on. The 'emulator' is nothing but the endless repetition of ribosomes threading RNA in order to produce more polypeptide chains which then fold up in order to become proteins.

Your 'emulator' in this case is a physics program, and not even a very complicated one, albeit with an absolutely astronomical data set for any size organism.

In order to avoid having to deal with that data set we try to achieve a higher level model of what the brain does, instead of trying to model what it is.

But that does not change the fact that the principle of the emulator (a 'mere' matter of programming) and the code that governs the construction are what gives rise to the brain and through there to intelligence.

So the upper bound of the problem in terms of complexity is the 50 M + whatever you need in terms of physics to (theoretically) run the simulation of the single fertilized ovum from start to finish, or as much as you need to verify that you have indeed succeeded in your simulation goal.

It can't get more complex than that, even if the generated structure is orders of magnitude more complex at first glance than the input data + the program. Think of it as 'output'. Thought is not the output of that program. Thought is the state changes within the produced (or simulated) brain.

The organic soup and all the proteins arising from it are the nuts and bolts the machinery is made of. That doesn't mean that we can't make similar machinery without those particular nuts and bolts.

I hope that all makes sense.
Ah, they missed out the most beautiful one!

The Monastery of St. Nilus on Stolbny Island: Just incredible:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Prokudin-...
News.YC: open links in new tab
I know this is no great feat, but just wanted to post my bookmarklet, that I use to turn all the links on news.yc into `target="_blank"` links:

<a href="javascript:function%20getScript(url,%20success)%20{var%20d%20=%20document,script%20=%20d.createElement(%27script%27),head%20=%20d.getElementsByTagName(%27head%27)[0],done%20=%20false;script.src%20=%20url;script.onload%20=%20script.onreadystatechange%20=%20function(){if(%20!done%20&&%20(!this.readyState%20||%20this.readyState%20==%20%27loaded%27%20||%20this.readyState%20==%20%27complete%27)%20)%20{done%20=%20true;success();script.onload%20=%20script.onreadystatechange%20=%20null;head.removeChild(script);}};head.appendChild(script);}getScript(%22http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js%22,%20function()%20{if(%20typeof%20jQuery%20==%20%27undefined%27%20)%20{alert(%22jQuery%20could%20not%20be%20loaded%22);}$(%22td.title%20a%22).attr(%22target%22,%20%22_blank%22);});">YC - Open in new Tab</a>
And they've given the world a lot of something it wants.

It seems to me that, almost by definition, having $50B means that you've given the world $50B worth of something more than you've taken from the world. Giving the money away is just saying "ok, I don't want to be repaid for what I've produced".
The Authoritative Guide to OAuth 1.0
In other words, it's a mature market with a few large players vying with each other, along with dozens of smaller players.

The result? A lot of different beverages, and plenty of alternatives for people afraid they'll get caught drinking the same thing the guy in front of them at the supermarket bought.
FYI: This is what CoffeeScript uses.
It's true, and I'll probably remember it now. But, since I have every single time used the -f flag, it would make a lot more sense for it to say "you asked me to compress a file that doesn't exist and ends in .tar; I bet that's what you meant the -f parameter to use" and fix it for me.
Bummer they are down

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/indinero.com
Actually, if you do your dishes in the sink, your water consumption will be four to ten times and your energy consumption up to four times higher than in a modern dishwasher, see table 2 on page 9 of http://linusov.info/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/eedal_03_manu...
The escaped our atmosphere bit is actually pretty advanced physics. Most kids would assume that the helium would form a spherical shell if they knew about gravity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
It really is. I've hit this issue with a number of clients, and I've tried to avoid saying "sort" lately, preferring "order by" or "in X order".
Congratulations!

>"Facebook is still small"

Is that an understatement?
Bummer, it's only for people that live abroad.
Have you thought about doing it yourself?
Lets see how awesome it turns out when he has a DUI or something.

"hostgator dotcom kills family of 4 in tragic drunk driving accident."
On the subject if Inception...

I injured my shoulder playing football last week, with the result that lying down in bed can be quite uncomfortable. This means that I wake up quite a few times during the night, presumably as I toss and turn during light sleep phases. An interesting side effect of this is that I get to remember all dreams that I have during the night, not just the last one (usually the only one you remember cause it's the one you wake from).

Now, one surprise was how lucid some of these other dreams were. But more fascinating was that the content of the first dream was basically 'the top idea on my mind' from that day (and every day unfortunately, but that's another story). You see I hardly ever dream about the top idea on my mind, at least I didn't think I did. The dreams I remember are usually related to some minor point of the day. Otherwise it'd be great cause you could always choose what to dream about just by thinking about it a lot... well anyway my theory is that you dream about your top idea first and then forget about. By the time you get to your last nightly dream you're onto those minor issues at the end of the stack.

Also suggests that when people wake up with solutions to problems, it wasn't the subconscious, but rather something they consciously worked out in a dream they later forgot.

I don't think it'd be possible to perform Inception on yourself waking or dreaming, but perhaps one strategy would be identifying what really IS the top idea. You may think it's money matters, leaving you helpless to free your mind until resolution arrives (which could be out of your control), but maybe it's really something else like you haven't planned what to do once the matter is settled. Take your thoughts as far as they'll go, follow up every avenue of inquiry to a reasonable end, and then they'll leave you alone.
I have played with the Nexus One and Samsung Galaxy S (Vibrant) and I have to say the Galaxy S is a much smoother experience. The tactile feel of the Galaxy S is just awesome.
I am focused on another startup idea.
Unless we presuppose that the answer to the question "is there anything that could be done to stop the mass accumulation of data in this way?" is "yes", then Gruber's question is moot. Why should we make that presupposition in the face of the march of progress in this area?
The terracota army - a tens of thousands strong army buried close to Xi'an in China is also colored brightly but the colors fade away quickly. And the scientist have decided not to continue with the excavations so that in the future when we have the technology to conserve the real colors we can dig up the rest and see it and keep it in its current beauty.