skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to stem from the whole "A good sermon is like a skirt: long enough to cover the essentials, but short enough to maintain interest" (paraphrased). Not the same meaning, but it appears that the phrasing came from there.
Bayesian logic in hardware? Sweet!
Facebook launching DAILY DEAL feature tomorrow? [Break down inside]
I agree generally, but I don't think an anecdote means enough to warrant a TechCrunch post. Support is hard.
"Still, we do have a hard time finding experienced managers here in Silicon Valley. Most of our managers are homegrown, and we’ve had to teach them to be managers."

Is this such a bad thing? Is it not generally better to have your managers come up through the ranks and create the corporate culture from the inside rather than bring in outsiders to impose one?
About one year ago the country of Sweden began digging down the country's entire electrical infrastructure underground, completely ridding the country of the archaic terrestrial power pylon model. The country was done with digging down all urban cabling more than 40 years ago, and free-hanging power cabling has since only been seen outside urban areas across rural stretches, connecting smaller communities to the grid. What called for the decision was the problem of power outtages caused by storms wreaking havoc on the pylons and the wires, causing civil dismay in the affected areas, as well as the tremendous civilian and commercial costs that follow up. However cool that humanoid design is, I think Iceland should've gone with Sweden's model instead of reinventing the pylon :)
Once upon a time browsers couldn't render images either.
How to Hide from Friends You Don't Like
You're welcome to host gaming videos at http://vive.ly.

Try it out using invite code: hd4yc

Encode and publish your own HD video site on your own custom domain or embed individual videos using your choice of player stack. (We transcode, store, and stream H.264, Ogg, and WebM.)
Site Explorer going away is going to make people sad too. I wonder how many non-pc users are going to be frustrated by the Bing webmaster tools requiring silverlight.
I don't know about anyone else, but I generally need the web to find my videos. Same with my peer to peer downloads (assuming thats BitTorrent). If the web literally died, it would take everything else in that graph with it.
The data set is not even manipulated. The graph in itself is not worthless, not wrong, not even uninteresting, it’s all the stuff around it (the interpretation) that’s bullshit.

You should probably never use such a skewed graph alone, though, without showing growth or decline. Relative shifts are genuinely easier to see with a graph like that (but internet traffic is probably not the right measure if you want to know something about cultural changes, time spent would probably be better; to wit, reading 1 MB is a heck of a task, listening to 1 MB won’t keep you busy for very long and blink and you will just have missed your 1 MB video).
Ask HN: Restrictive covenants for software developers?
I am wondering whether any HNers have any experience with restrictive covenants / restraints of trade for software development in the UK?

Situation 1: what's a reasonable time (if any) for an employer to block an employee developer from going off to work for someone else and help them develop a similar/the same product which may either a) compete with employers product or b) compete with employer's client's product

Situation 2: what kind of restriction can a client place on a software consultancy who's been hired to develop product X for them from then going off and developing the same product for another client?
1) An estimate of complexity is what it is - an estimate of complexity. It's not a claim that the way to achieve AI is to figure out the details of the particular encoding that nature ended up using, so the precise nature of those rules is not something we care about.

2) While it's true that those runtime rules (which we can kind of consider as the "interpreter" for our DNA) are extremely complex, this has almost zero bearing on the informational content in our DNA that is put towards creating the "intelligence algorithm", whatever that is. Sure, there's probably a bit of extra compression based on the fact that the physics allows some actions to be "built in", but unless you believe that DNA is physically optimized to make intelligent computer construction very concise, the logical content of these computations is probably explicitly "written" in.

And it's hard to believe that DNA is somehow specifically optimized for intelligence, because it was first used in completely unintelligent creatures and appears in exactly the same form now.

Now, it may be the case that DNA's physics are tailor-made to efficiently code for useful physical structures. But intelligence is a level of abstraction above that, and we're all but guaranteed that very little compressibility exists in the "language" for such higher level constructs.

What would an argument be without a strained analogy: if you're writing a complex web application, the size of your application is roughly independent (within an order of magnitude, for sure) of the architecture that it will ultimately run on (where by "size of application" I mean the size of everything that it takes to run it, interpreters, frameworks, etc.). Sure, the binary size might be slightly different depending on whether you're writing it for ARM, PPC, x86, etc., but not hugely different.

We would be extremely surprised if on three platforms your executable weighed in at 10 mb and on a fourth (which had a few different machine level instructions) it compiled down to 10 kb - the only way we could imagine that happening is if someone somehow "cheated" and embedded large parts of your actual application logic into the processor, adding specialized Ruby on Rails instructions to the machine code, or something like that. :)

Encoding and dynamics details may make differences in compressibility, but past an order of magnitude, you're really talking about "cheating", and it's an Occam's Razor problem to assume that nature optimized in such a way for intelligence...
The Antiplanner
This is one of the things I love about HN. Someone makes a flippant comment and I get to learn something interesting cause someone else posts a response like it was a serious statement. I find myself correcting people's flippant comments often, or at least thinking about doing it, and most people just seem annoyed. I really enjoy learning something new even if it's tangential to the topic at hand.
Gabriel was the first thing I thought of when I saw this link... I would be interested to hear how this impacts him and DDG.
Just goes to show how tricky this stuff really is.

You'd have to make sure that your pre-selection has a perfect representative split over all the minorities that could come after you in order to be able to get away with it if you made it public what your criteria were.

Good luck doing that, personally I believe that such trying to outsmart the system is something that will come back to haunt you.

Just take raganwalds post here, if someone felt they were passed over for an interview it would immediately be actionable, that is, it wouldn't be thrown out of court and so it could cost a pile of money even if in the end it turned out to be without merit. That blog posting, now seen by a few thousand people and cached in any number of places would suddenly be admissible evidence, and it would take a pretty good lawyer to negate the effect of that one silly document.

Ontario is particularly weird in that respect, I've got first hand knowledge of a pretty strange employer/employee lawsuit there that dragged on for years through appeals (in that case for wrongful termination but no less bizarre).

Best to not give cause in a climate like that.
There's a word for that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paredolia
Ask HN: Is this design copyright infringement?
I'm not a designer by any means but I try my best to make my apps look good. While looking for inspiration I found some good images on stock images sites.

Since I'm really new to all this design thing, I started by transforming a comp, anchor point by anchor point, into a vector image. Then I started changing it to my needs.

Is this copyright infringement?

Links:
- Original file: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-55808422/stock-vector-illustration-of-a-cartoon-cute-character-for-use-in-presentations-etc.html
- My comp to vector transformation: http://i37.tinypic.com/2rdxo34.png
- My final design: http://i36.tinypic.com/11tlmhh.png
It also uses Bing API if I remember correctly. Which is still free and unlimited.
Ask HN: Learning Python, Looking for book or class on software construction.
I want to learn python and become a relatively decent programmer. I feel as though the following classes (first three) and the last item (a book) will help get me there. However, I am missing the class that involves actually building software. I found one on MIT open courseware that is called "Elements of Software Construction." It uses Java, which isn't the worst thing, but I'd rather find one that uses python. So my question is too fold: 1. Is there a book or preferably a class that teaches Elements of Software Construction in python? 2. Is there anything I need to add to the list below that would be beneficial?

Introduction to Computer Science and Programming -- MIT Open CourseWare
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming -- MIT Open CourseWare
Computation Structures -- MIT Open CourseWare
Introduction to Algos -- MIT Open CourseWare
Data Structures and Algorithms With Object Oriented Design Patterns -- Book
Killer 2010 Movie News
The suspense thriller film titled “Killer” is being produced by Kiran under the banner of Sri Srinivasa Creations and directed by Nagesh Naradasi. The film is co-produced by Prasada Raju and Yadagiri Raju.
It's going to be epic! We have Dave McClure AND Ron Conway! WOOT!
probably downvoted because of the off-the-cuff attitude rather than 'serious thought provoking commentary and insight' that HN prefers.

OP does have a point, but could probably do with qualifying it with some discussion rather than just leaving it as a comic one-liner.
Video became part of the web experience long time ago. It can't be placed in a separate class unless it's IPTV or something that does not use a browser.

I don't understard why DNS was ever proportionally bigger than e-mail or Telnet.

In addition, if they wanted to say that more non-HTTP applications are on the net, they should point an increase in the "Other" class in the graph.

I guess they've choosen the wrong graph to support their article.
Arrington assumes that just because nobody told him about Buxfer's shutting down (which is probably all that really happened here), their investors don't know it either.

So then he speculates that the founders are scamming or making fools of their investors.

If he keeps posting like this, it is his own reputation which will suffer.
Music Blogs: Taste or Waste?
JetBlue - All You Can Jet (Back by popular demand)
JQuery Mobile, Hummingbird, Mongoose
Doubtful; more likely analog circuits, in my opinion. Memristors just haven't been used to build anything substantial in reality yet, and I'd imagine the first people to do so will be at HP or similar rather than a startup.
I don't think there was anymore than this. I remember the first post with a big lead up to the 30 day trip - but I don't remember many other posts other than the one you linked to.
Well, it'll pump out slightly more greenhouse gases when it has to support the marginal weight of one additional passenger. But the marginal energy expenditure for one passenger is most likely pretty thin.
Translate to multiple languages
From the FAQ:

How do you get your results?
From many sources, including DuckDuckBot, crowd-sourced sites, BOSS & Bing.
Getting rid of terrenting is what net neutrality is about for a lot of players: it's a significant part of backbone traffic that can be eliminated (de-prioritized to the point of being useless) overnight, given the right legal setting. Frankly, the interests looking to get rid of peer-to-peer bandwidth are so powerful and around invested long-term, I don't think there's much anyone can do.
Ask HN: Is .com address absolutely necessary to launch your company?
When all the good .com names are taken, is it OK to go for .net or .info etc.? Thoughts? Experiences?
My problem with the graphic, beyond the proportional vs. accurate argument, is that it's misleading even in the context they show it. Outside of things like Skype, P2P is not an active-use process. Streaming video is clearly something that people largely watch on the Web.

When I saw that article today, I just thought it was complete crap. It's simply alarmist, the magazine form of using scary headlines to try to sell newspapers.
i think they get too caught up in their own ideas and lose touch with the market. the eventual reality check is what they fear. so they avoid it by becoming more immersed in their ideas, hence compounding the problem.
Everyone has their own version of 'rich'. In my experience the ones that are the richest are the most driven and don't consider themselves rich no matter how much they have. Like my grandparents who had a net worth into the $tens of millions and yet I watched my grandma spend a half hour looking for the cheapest can of food on an aisle at the grocery store - anything to save one or two cents.

I think people become wealthy by being somewhat obsessed with saving money, starting businesses, or cutting costs in all aspects of their lives. Once they've achieved a certain amount of money, no matter how much it is, their brain is hardwired to save, so they will probably never spend it in their lifetime.

I also get a kick out of people responding that they are rich with a net worth of $100K, and also have mortgages, car loans, etc, that they don't count against their savings. This is ridiculous- they brag that they can afford a nice car so they must be rich- no, I'm sorry, you're a poor wage slave who has more debt than savings; you are not rich.

My definition of rich is pretty simple - if you can stop working tomorrow and maintain your present lifestyle - I consider that wealthy. You have the freedom to do what you want with your life. For some people this might be a few million, for some this might be much more.
HashBackup: local & offsite Unix backup
I'm looking for tire kickers and feedback for HashBackup, a Unix backup program. HB makes compressed and encrypted backups that can be sent over rscyn, ssh, ftp, or imap to one or more remote storage areas you own, or it can send backups to your Amazon S3 account. It has block dedup, does incremental backups (always), the backup can be FUSE mounted, and it works well on VM images.

http://sites.google.com/site/hashbackup

I need a web designer too, so referrals are welcome (prirun at gmail.com). Thanks!
You're also implicitly selecting against gender when you require a CS degree, and that certainly isn't illegal.
I would say no, it's not copyright infringement because stock images are sold as license free, meaning you can do what you want with it once you have it. I think you're fine.
I think you've already nailed it, the 'better service' is the key element in that sentence. If the endpoint finds their services degraded to give other people better service then I think most people would balk. If it is to give them better service they'll be fine with it. Whether or not they read the privacy policy is another matter, I think I must be the only person that actually reads those things.
tl;dr Chris Anderson is like a less convincing Malcom Gladwell.
It's a pity because I usually find a needle or two of interesting ideas in Wired but having to sift through a haystack of hyperbole and poor logic is deeply unenjoyable.
>that wireless networks usually are not as fast as wired ones yet, that does not seem completely unreasonable.

But it is completely unreasonable. If they don't have enough bandwidth, they can sell me a plan with a limit - then _I_ will decide what to use that plan for (including, but not limited too, porn, terrorist activities and peer to peer filesharing).

What the providers wont admit is that they are selling a commodity, which (in the area of wireless communication) is completely fungible -- therefore they get to charge no more than commodity prices, while everybody else gets to get rich of their services.
If there were really a high demand for this, you'd see women setting up their profiles this way on all the ordinary dating sites (private profile, no messages). And maybe they do, but then why a special site when you can get the same experience with an existing site that has a lot more members?
85% Car Battery Cost Reduction?
"I suspect majority of the people who are technically "rich" as you put it have either inherited wealth or opportunity in life"

If you listen to "The millionaire next door" you will find +80% of the rich in America got their money working hard, are on their fifties, savers, and don't look rich(don't need to spend too much for living).

I could confirm that on Spain. I have known many rich people here, their children... that is another history, dad and mom use to not want their children to work as hard as they did.This is universal.(I have seen parents who had very little money spend on their children enormous quantities of money).

I agree big companies are getting too big, the excuse was the synergies. I don't like it(I consider the government the biggest company of all). They become mammoths that are to sustain at the expense of everyone else(too big to fail).Look at GM, they declare profit of 1,5B$ from the 50B$ they got, GM does money in the financial market with your money, not making cars!!
ivankirigin,

If buxfer is indeed shutting down without saying something to their users, it warrants a Techcrunch post. I would have wanted TC though to have gotten the side of the founders before publishing the story.
I think that's more the exception than the rule. You won't even have good SERP rankings early on if you don't do any marketing. The awesomeness of a product generally cannot flow through the tubes and into a writer's brain — he needs to know about it.
What goes on in my packets is nobodies business but me and my 'peer', whether it's a web server, a phone, an internet connected appliance, an ftp site or a torrent server.

De-prioritizing (what a word anyway) is not what it is all about it is about limiting. Prioritizing all the traffic is like selecting a volunteer by having someone step backwards.

ISPs sell bandwidth, so bandwidth is what they should deliver. They don't sell quality of service, at least, I've yet to see an ISP that offered me 250K down for torrents, 32K for voice and 128K for web traffic as a single package. They'll sell me 1, 4, 8, 10 or even 20 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up for X credits per time unit. So that's what I expect to receive.

And once they start doing deep packet inspection where does it end? Some websites have a deal with the ISP to prioritize their traffic at the expense of others?
Gabriel will be on TWiT tonight, hopefully this topic is brought up.

"I will be live on @twit at ~5PM ET with @ambermac talking about DuckDuckGo. Thx @AndyCrofford for the intro. http://live.twit.tv " -@yegg
I haven't tried this: bookmooch.com
You want a risk greater than the reward? That seems like a losing strategy to me.

What you want is a reward greater than the risk. Of course, everyone wants that. The way to find it is to have some insight into how to make the market more efficient (ex: a new product that solves a pain point), or to find an under-valued asset (ex: a business that is losing money because it is mismanaged).

Of course, municipal bonds also have a reward greater than the risk, but no one gets rich off municipal bonds. So you do want as much risk as you can tolerate, but you want the potential reward to be worth it.

The risk greater than reward scenario is no different than playing the lottery. You may get rich by chance, but on average, you lose.
I think everyone simply assumes you have a dot com address.

One of the current YC batch decided to change their name from .me to a .com. You can find their reasoning at:
http://blog.imoveyou.com/announcing-our-new-name-getupandmov...

If most of your users are going to find you by putting the company/brand name in google, perhaps good SEO might be enough? I've come across quite a few companies with a .ly domain (can't say how they're doing though).

As a user I probably wouldn't take a .info domain very seriously but .net would be ok.

my 2cents
Isn't the last part of the Cuckoo hashing paper the part that documents it as slight less good compared to existing algorithms? I mean it never comes out and says it, but if you look at the pictures… I think Cuckoo's best point was the provability of its bounds, but it has been a while since I read that paper.

I like the example of Parsing Expression Grammars. The idea of memoized top down parsing drifted past back in the 60's and early 70's when the folks like Aho and Ullman were busy slaying wild streams of symbols with ever more clever algorithms but was dismissed because of its memory footprint. Then in 2002 or so Bryan Ford said "Oi! What do you mean too much memory? My PC has an L2 cache bigger than that."[1] Now PEGs are widely used and I must say (having built dynamic grammar LR systems back when my time shared vax had a main memory the size of the L2 cache in my iMac) especially useful for dynamic grammars.

[1] Being an entirely fabricated quote, there is no applicable reference for this quotation.
I agree on the guy carrying the umbrella, not sure what the "ThinkFreak" comment has to do with anything.

More to the point, it seems like you're making fun of ThinkGeek for something that was not their fault.

Really, I think I'm just easily annoyed by clever nicknames and catch phrases which distort the issues at hand (blame "ground zero mosque" for that one I guess).
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I agree that you are only rich if you are not a slave to someone elses clock.
Do you want FU-Money? if so, what are you doing to get it?
Are you trying to get FU money? if so, what are you doing to get it? how do you evaluate your chances to ever achieve this , as a goal?
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

Non sequitur.

Solution to unified field theory. That's about 32 bytes of information, uncompressed. There, since that statement is so low in information content, it must be easy to find. We have a loose estimate of it's complexity with my statement, right?
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This whole logic train is pretty much made of awesome.

I was laughing pretty hard by the "elephants are nearly extinct" comment.
Isn't it weird? Two people talking in a library can be more distracting than a crowd.
That was StavrosK's whole point, he's obviously aware of it or he wouldn't have picked that particular example.

Give the guy some credit.
New look for PHB
I didn't know this was happening today! Thanks!
North Korea using Twitter/Youtube to spread propaganda