skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
depends on who you are married to. from my own observations, this is what i can gather: if the wife is supportive of what you're doing, then it can actually make the creation of a startup easier. if she is not and always demands your time at the expense of necessary business tasks, then it's going to be a lot harder than if you were single.
Lessons at Berkeley: Genetics and Beyond
If you want to keep track of hot, fresh node-y goodness independently of the Ubuntu release cycle (as I do), then please enjoy my nodejs PPA builds.

They're built for lucid, but run fine on maverick, and like everything else in that PPA, are used in production (thus I have an incentive to maintain them well).

https://launchpad.net/~jdub/+archive/ppa

Enjoy!

(Note: I build a static version of node built against the internal copy of libraries it ships, rather than the dynamic build used by the main Debian and Ubuntu node packages. I really only do this to avoid maintaining those libraries in my PPA as well, and ryah keeps up with their updates anyway.)
How Sending Postcards to Strangers Made Me a Better Designer
Criminal defense lawyer Jacksonville
Jacksonville's Premier Criminal Defense Firm handles a variety of cases like criminal defense, drug charges as well as murder. It has the expertise and experience to deliver case altering results for clients.
Patent Office Back to Approving Pretty Much Anything
>You can't go from genome => organism without a WHOOOOOLE lot of Ceteris Paribus to fill in the gaps.

Of course not. Likewise, if all you had was the binary of a Linux distro, and you didn't have a computer or any other associated hardware, it would be very hard to get that code running.

On the other hand, if you were trying to recode the distribution from scratch, without trying to decompile anything, a good ball park estimate for the size of your source code would be the size of the original distribution.

That's Kurzweil's point: he's simply trying to measure the complexity of the system, to get a rough estimate for how complex the model will need to be.
Did Fred demand the Atari because he already had one?
Thanks for the very detailed response. My comments - and some are "devils advocate":

- Agreed that a Saas offering has lots of cost/admin benefits. But - it makes it difficult to integrate with a sites existing signed-up member-base or social network.

- What are examples of feature bloat? What are the key/core features?

- What would be the equivalent of a room on Stackoverflow? I think that SO is really just one room, with a lot of questions in that one room (ignoring tags)?

- Invite mechanism - yes.
- FB/Google login/interface - yes.
- Email notifications - yes

GetSatisfaction - can't comment. I thought this was more about feedback wrt to a website or business, as opposed to a fully fledged discussion thread, hosted say on a national newspaper (an ultimate customer here)

I've never used Quora (fb only sign-up). What's the key differences between Quara and a forum or Stackoverflow?
There was a 'swarf breaker' option, especially useful for working with plastics but also when working with stainless steel. During rough-cutting this would modulate the toolbit by pausing it just long enough that the swarf would break and would fall away from the toolbit.

If you don't do that in some materials it will build up to the point where it will form a giant mess which can cause the whole thing to stall out, cause toolbreakage or even machine damage.

Swarf control is a very tricky sub problem of the whole machining thing.

I left out the milling program that was developed in parallel, when I compare the two I'd say the mill was (in spite of being one dimension more) the easier one of the two.
1st Interview with President of RIAA Since They've Targeted ISPs
Thanks for doing this. Any idea if they'll ever make it into the official reps?

I've avoided installing much from PPA (never sure about security / stability there), but this may break my habit.
Yup, TechCrunch has three Disrupt conferences per year. The next one is slated for September 27th-29th.

URL: http://disrupt.techcrunch.com/2010-sf/
Yes. It was his home computer of choice, he was an amateur musician and the Atari was a reasonably affordable computer with midi.
Ask HN-Fastest/best Driving Directions service (Travelling Salesman?)
Hi,
Here is an idea/request for service which can do the following.<p>Give me fastest driving directions for multiple destinations. Its basically a trip planner for driving to multiple locations.<p>Scenario - I live in SO-CAL and moving to the Bay area sometime soon and currently looking for apartments.
Use case -
I have to drive from San Diego to the Bay and have about 10 properties to look at. I want to find the best possible driving directions with all these map points.<p>Additional features - Should be able to give Start time with X mins time to look at the properties.
Super cool - If it can take the historical traffic information in to consideration and plan the trip.<p>I had the same problem couple of years ago. Then I was on vacation to Colorado my wife wanted to see fall colors(First year in US - Very excited). after extensively Goolgle..ing for the best locations, best time to drive, hotels to stay... Then I was stuck with the same problem. Where should I start and end my trip. With the problem + Google+ GMaps+ Kayak we scheduled and figured a possible best route and executed it. We had to do this because of limited time.<p>Did any of you have the same problem? How did you approach it? please share. BTW I am driving tonight to SF
Hmm... Give them something that can break and requires batteries. Or, give them a book, or maybe a calling card so they can call home.

I'm not against technology, but grunts in the field have a different world view and different needs.
Hangman's most difficult word?  "JAZZ"
It's called the strategy pattern. Look it up.

If you find yourself writing a lot of boilerplate code, you're doing something wrong, whether you're using inheritance or not.
While you do have a good point, it's more than that. They don't market the details so that they do not have to live up to them.
It's just a marketing term for marketing to people who don't care about link protocols or multiplexing strategies. The problem was originally started when 1xRTT and EDGE were branded as 3G. This should have never happened, but that's what happens when marketing drives your business instead of engineering.

Honestly, even EVDO isn't really a true 3G protocol, as voice and data are completely separate protocols. UMTS phones don't drop to a voice-only technology to make a call, they use the data signaling, and IP connectivity isn't lost during phone calls. However, the fact that CDMA folks decided to go with a less ambitious, but easier to deploy megabit+ broadband technology meant they were able to beat the GSM networks to the punch. Worse is better.

That being said, WiMAX and LTE are legitimate 4G technologies. They both step up to using OFDMA instead of CDMA, which gives them a much higher theoretical bandwidth ceiling. Yes, HSPA+ networks have been pushing into WiMAX's bandwidth territory by adding MIMO and 64QAM modulation, but that's pretty much the ceiling for HSPA. The only future it has is in multi-carrier or multi-tower arrangements, which don't increase the spectral efficiency and are pointless in dense urban areas.
"The purposeful collective activity of ants and other social insects does, indeed, look intelligent on the surface. An illusion, presumably. "

No more an illusion than the individual intelligence/consciousness we humans experience.
Mark Pilgrim's HTML5 book released - 10$ deal
I've done numerous startups and marriages, and all I can really say is that if you love your idea and want it to work, you will find a way. Americans watch an average of 4 hours of tv per day, turn the tv off and spend the time sitting next to your wife while you work. We love listening to Pandora or iTunes and working on our respective businesses.
Unless you have a distinctive name, and the internet gets a lot better at remembering over the long term, there's still nothing to worry about.

Try finding anything from 10 years ago or for anyone named Smith, Jones, Taylor, or Patel. I'll bet that doesn't improve in the next ten years either.
Whether Apple can achieve greater than 30% market share is debatable, not as equally impossible as it is for Adobe to ensure the level of compatibility and legacy support for Flash, and ultimately irrelevant.

Adobe can maintain at least 60% market share - on PC's (Mac + Windows). But they cannot achieve that on mobile devices.
A lot of this discussion seems to be confusing reverse engineering with cloning. To reverse engineer something, you look at it as a black box and determine all of the capabilities and characteristics that you are interested in, and then you implement them in your own way.

You do not need to understand how every last cell of the brain was created in order to build a machine that works like the brain. To reverse engineer the flight of a bird, you don't clone the bird, you build an airplane.
For a while I had a partner with a small child; I'd get up at lunchtime, handle my email, go collect the small child from daycare, go back to programming, we'd eat together, then I'd work some more until it was small child bedtime. I did bedtime, then came back downstairs and spend an hour or so with my partner, then vanish and hack until 5am or so.

If the small child woke up in the night, I dealt with it, she got up at 7.30am or so when the small child woke up properly so I could sleep. At the weekend we'd make sure I found time to go take the kid to the playground or something so we could spend an hour or two being silly together, and every few weekends my parents would turn up and we'd go for a day trip.

Overall it worked pretty well - she and I eventually broke up but that was due to factors other than work/family balance.
This is a messy subject, tied into globalization. Yeah, it's nice having cheaper stuff at Wal-Mart, but you need a job to be able to consume. I worry we've gone past the balance point, with too many lost jobs/customers.

Things tend to be cyclical, but that doesn't mean the next few months/years will be easy.
Yes, I've read that book too. For many of the cases I deal with the strategy pattern is not appropriate, or creates additional complications. Try again.
1) There will always be non-professionals/non-quantitative people making trades that create potential profit for those who wish to arb them.

2) You can still make "good" returns even when you have the worst of the models because of 1).

3) It takes more than N>>2 firms to shrink the profit in a particular model to 0. For evidence, see the large number of high frequency funds that make great returns.

4) The market/world is always changing so the 'best' probabilistic model is always changing. As long as the professionals are moving faster than the non-professionals, they can still extract money.

Could you define what you mean by the real economy? Isn't the real economy whatever it is that solves other people's problems that they will pay you for? The fact that "the sector is shrinking" doesn't mean that its not going to grow still larger long term. I would say that we're just on the back side of a bubble. There are many many many people out there who call themselves quants that shouldn't.

You're waxing philosophic about a hyper efficient future but I don't think it matters because that future won't be here for a very long time.

See 1), 4) and the second to last setence of your allegory (Information only makes a difference if the number of people who have it is small.) for why professionals/someone will always be able to make good returns.
Of course he is expressing concern. Did you not read the second half of the essay? He's mostly talking about how people, including himself, have avoided, are avoiding or will avoid addictions.
Good companion resource to the article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization
I think 'infantilisation' is probably a better term than 'gamification' - to someone who doesn't play computer games, Epic Win and its ilk look like so many automated Primary School teachers handing out gold stars for listening quietly at story time.
Every time you register your time on a spreadsheet a little kitty sheds a tear
I hope that P2P finds more mainstream uses so that customers start demanding better upload speeds and Comcast et al are forced to oblige. The upload speeds are really a bummer in the US.
Have you tried Greenhopper? Atlassian bought them-- I couldn't bear to use JIRA without it.
> Intel suing Google over Java

* Oracle suing Google...
As Google Shutters Flix Cloud Encoding Service, Zencoder (YC W10) Gets A Boost
I can understand how you worked so many hours on this, this should have been a huge project for a bigger team with expertise in the field and knowledge of controls.

I must say I would have given up much more early, although you probably would have too knowing what you know.

Another question I had was if these machines required a large amount of manual interaction (though lubrication probably was at least provided by the machines at this time).
Ask HN: Tips for the first employee joining a tech startup
Hi, I would be the first employee joining a funded,tech startup in US , providing a service which is a web-based,consumer facing.
I don't have much experience under my belt- and I would to make sure the ramp-up process goes with as few hitches as possible.
Any tips, any previous experiences of being the first few employees (as a developer) of a tech startup, would be really helpful.

Thanks a lot in advance, for your tips!!
:-)
> The search for artificial intelligence modelled on human brains has been a dismal failure.

No, it hasn't. There have been huge strides made in artificial neural networks in the last decade. One example is the HyperNEAT algorithm [1], which uses an indirect encoding enabling it to evolve networks with millions of connections. There's an entire conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), which is considered one of the most prestigious publication venues in AI.

This article is complete garbage. Ant colony optimization has been around for decades. It's great for routing and similar tasks where you need to find the best path and be able to handle breakdowns in that path. However, there is no basis for making the leap that human brains function like ant colonies.

[1] Stanley et. al. A Hypercube-Based Encoding for Evolving Large-Scale Neural Networks. In: Artificial Life journal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/publications/2009/stanley.alife09.ht...
I actually think I could convince you to reconsider libertarianism. If you're interested, let me know and I'll write a detailed rebuttal to your post.
Actually, it sounds like a classic Nokia (like the 6310i) might be perfect for you.

Works great as a phone.
Works great for text messages.
Works great for a clock, alarm, calendar, and address book.
To be honest, your post was just OK, but it lead me to your button generator (http://www.performable.com/buttons/), which is hands down the best online button generator I've come across.

[insert lame cancel button pun here.]
There was a study that showed that a vast majority of (famous) mathematicians did most and best of their work before getting married. Not that it is indicative of how things are in 21st century, but still an interesting anecdote.
he could not only pay someone to make this problem go away, he could probably also earn more money in the time he's not researching this than it would cost to have someone else do it.

in fact i find it difficult to believe he doesn't already have a personal assistant that could handle things like this.
It's interesting what you say about flat replies. Although a "technical" person, I can't believe that users are not wanting to reply to individual posts. Perhaps it's a UI issue?
I agree with you - I believe that, in most cases, the whole industry suffers from too many cooks spoiling the broth.
Twitter enables a call to action in real time during crisis. It establishes an open,and global community, unlike facebook. On twitter you interact with people who stimulate and share common interests, and, at least, common motivation to see & learn more than what's in front of them.

Twitter succeeded when Wave did not; one, because it already established credibility and users already built a follow base they most likely didn't want to lose. Also, like Coca Cola, McDonalds, FedEx - they were the first, and established a new standard and brand loyalty.

Even William actually states that twitter began organically; he had no idea it would grow into what it is now. You can see him present here at a TED conference: Twitter Founder Evan Williams at TED 09 Video http://ow.ly/2svVE Great presentation!

Hope my 2 cents helped! :) esta
Nothing like a big release days before Node Knockout! I can't wait, either way.
I wrote an article on this subject:

http://spencerfry.com/whats-a-non-programmer-to-do

It was spawned from a HN post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779378
Goedel, Escher, Bach applies yet again....
By "everybody else", I mean "everybody else not jacquesm", sorry. I am frustrated that you seemed to be the only other commenter understanding it. I was trying to amplify, not criticize. A lot of people are making arguments (without realizing it) that equally well prove we can never compute anything about the Mandelbrot set because look at the amazing staggering complexity it has, except that A: obviously we have and B: the information content is actually quite small.
Sure thing, but I would take currently defensive patent over a patent of some litigious bastard anytime.
From a high level it's easy to look at a device or a system and say "All these options are making this really hard. This thing should do less." But less is just a direction, and it's only useful to go that way until you can't do something you need to do.

The iPad isn't a success because it just does less than everything else. It succeeds because it does what it's supposed to do incredibly well. Users have certain expectations when they pick up an iPad and the iPad generally lets the user do what they expect and is intuitive in the process.

In the case of travel websites it often seems that no one has taken the time to consider what users will actually do on the site, instead just lazily giving users every possible option. For example, if a booking site has found me a $300 nonstop ticket it's probably not necessary to show me the 3-stop, $1700 option. Yet they all do because nobody has taken the time to filter down the results to the practical options (the user could create a filter, but that's just another option to deal with). I would much rather see just the 5 flight options that I'm likely to buy instead of 30 options with 5 potential winners buried in there somewhere.

If you're building a tool, the user will have to give some input. The key is to give the user what they want with the minimum possible amount of information.
> I had was if these machines required a large amount of manual interaction

Because they were 'retrofits' rather than machines designed from the ground up things like tool exchange, zeroing, tool breakage and so on caused quite a bit of operator interaction.

If you look closely on the photo there is a little switch above the big red STOP button that we called the 'softstop', it was polled every few milliseconds in all situations except for thread cutting, and when engaged the machine will pull the tool away from the work (in all operations, including drilling, inside work, outside work and cut-off) so that you could stop the spindle.

Later versions had a tool changer driven by a third stepper motor, this was mechanically a very weak device and caused tons of trouble.

Lubrication on most manual lathes is either done by a hand pump that you operate ever so often, on more advanced machines it is timer driven, or coupled to the amount of movement on the carriage.

There also is the coolant to take care of, we had a relay box hooked up so that the various functions of the machine could be switched on or off under programmatic control.

All these mods together meant that installing the kit on an existing lathe was quite a bit of work, it wasn't unusual that more than one day went in to mating the x-y table to the machine (this is a very precise job), running tests, hooking up all the auxiliary stuff and so on.
Sending emails to the future
Fake OO
The Moon is Shrinking, Like a Wrinkled Apple
IPv4 Exhaustion Counter
Recreating the source code by itself does not, in this case, constitute a "model". In order to actually run that binary, you also need to create a virtual computer for it to inhabit.
upper bounds on the program size on machine tell you nothing about the the upper bounds on the other machine.

Not true! Worst case scenario, one machine can emulate the other machine, running that input. Therefore an upper bound on one machine can be used to derive an upper bound on the other. These upper bounds are not perfect, but they are indicative.

Indicative is good enough for the argument that Kurzweil is attempting. His argument has other flaws, but this is not one of them.

That is why, for example, when Chaitin lectures about Omega he is always mumbling "relative to some choice of turing machine" (at least initially, until it is then understood to apply throughout the talk).

Not so fast. Omega is the probability of a randomly chosen machine halting. Suppose that an upper bound on machine A predicted that for machine B within just 50 bytes of data. Then all of the programs of length n on machine A get translated on machine B to a list of programs that is 2400 times bigger, and the rest have unknown behavior. In this case Omega for machine A says very, very little about Omega for machine B.

Therefore "indicative" is very much not good enough for what Gregory Chaitin is talking about.
Racism (well, tribalism) was the ancient's way of remembering to keep safe from potentially violent rival bands.