skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For what it's worth, unpainted marble has a much higher degree of subsurface scattering (light diffusion within the material) than a painted surface does, which makes it a more lifelike approximation to flesh -- deemphasizing surface detail and softening the transition from light to shadow. Wax has the same property, which is one of the reasons wax figures look so realistic.

Examples of computer-generated images with and without subsurface scattering can be seen on Henrik Wann Jensen's page. In particular, see the images of the lips: http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/images/subsurf.html
I'm sure Fred worked hard enough, but I think you're being lenient and modest to compare his efforts to yours. It's unbelievable the level of technical prowess you pulled off 20 years ago, by yourself, on an ill-advised platform, working so many hours that your wife left you, for a minimum base salary and the promise of equity which was later disregarded. You know better than I do, of course, but I can't imagine Fred truly appreciated or understood just how advanced the engineering work, and sheer hacking, you were doing was.
There are so many other factors involved that the number of words barely means anything.

Culture, audience, complexity... These things all dwarf understanding when it comes to expressing an idea.
What if you don't write?
Grube
This is amazing. It is hard to believe these pics were taken 100 years ago.

It is funny how after looking at so many black and white pics of the past one starts to imagine that the past took place in black and white.
Define "illegal search."
Schmidt could have phrased it much better as "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, Don't tell anyone."
No, it shows that he looked it up and failed to understand it.
There are still businesses that require landlines, sommetimes loans. Even a job I applied to required a landline to reach me on (a summer job before I graduated from college). Granted it's getting rarer, but it still happens. Landlines are sort of a proof of address.
What exactly is this flawed argument of Rand's that you're rebutting, and where?

It sounds like you think that somewhere Rand said all hardworking, moral people would become rich and the rest are lazy or immoral.

I'm pretty sure she did not.
AppSumo Dev Talks About Getting Fired From Facebook
Incepbation

(the article, and my opinion of it, in one word)
A better point would be that home storage costs are the same for local foods as they are for shipped foods.
Regardless of how you feel about Schmidt, or to what extent his comments have been taken out of context, the guy consistently draws the wrong kind of media attention to himself and Google. "Creep Executive Officer" describes exactly the kind of image he creates, and it is damaging Google.
>You already have a universe to run your machine in.

The CPU may be physical, but software on it runs on the abstraction which is the CPU's instruction set. The underlying physical nature of the processor is irrelevant.

He was talking about having one machine emulate another - I was pointing out that that means your i7 emulating all of physics.
Choosing a netbook feels very similar. You'd think that choosing a model (T410 if you're curious) gets you there. Nope. Even with the relatively small number of configurable parameters (CPU, graphic, RAM, HD size and type) they managed to make it a confusing mess.
There are codes like NT7EUPB, NT7ETPB2C, NT7EXPB2 and no definitive source that could answer a simple(?) question: "What are the options and how much do they cost?"
As far as I can tell, there's no connection between the structure of the food supply chain and nuclear proliferation. On the other hand, locavorism consists of advocacy of a particular structure for the food supply chain, which necessarily has profound implications for all attributes of the food supply chain, including resiliency, affordability, and environmental impact. It isn't obvious to me which way those implications run, but I am claiming that those are the important aspects to investigate, not energy-efficiency or flavor.

I agree that big meat producers like Cargill (and, apparently, Niman Ranch) harm resiliency and the environment.

I think that your questions, like how much fecal contamination is in your meat, and how it tastes, are rounding errors when compared to questions like how much farmland had to be saturated with ammonium nitrate to feed it, how much methane it emitted, and how much downstream spinach was contaminated with Salmonella — from a public policy perspective, that is.

As long as a substantial number of people in the world who are starving to death, many more people are eating meals of very low overall quality and suffering serious illness as a result. This is the important issue.

You're right about Niman Ranch. Thanks for the tip. They had me fooled; I thought Niman Ranch was a ranch in Marin County, California. I didn't realize they were a nationwide marketer of grain-fed feedlot-finished beef (it explains this in the FAQ on their web site) and that Bill Niman now refuses to eat Niman Ranch products!
I agree with you on the first point. Google (and similar data hoarders) should be regulated. A set of laws should explain what they can and can't do, for how long they can keep the data or have to publish it, etc...

The problem I had was more the idea that the choice it between giving our data to the companies (without regulation) and to the government. And incidentally several government have told Google to stop certain actions, but they keep going... so clearly here there's something to solve. (I hope we agree that corporations are not above the law, no matter how big).

As for your second point, that it's exactly what democracy is about. You could say that in practice no country has a perfect democracy. In terms of political philosophy, the state is a construct where each citizen gives up a little bit of its power, to get an organism that will regulate how people should live. However those same citizens can also affect the state by using their vote. Hence why everyone who makes up a country should have a vote.

In reality, we negate the vote to people who we consider were not part of the original deal (i.e. they arrived into the country afterwards), or that we don't consider they know enough and understand enough to take their own choices.
These pics were taken from the southern parts of Russia though. Most of the colorful dresses were from the Caucuses and the various Asiatic peoples that were part of Russia at the time.

You will notice that most Russian men in there are wearing spiffy shiny uniforms. Russians loved their uniforms in the late Tsarist period. You can even see why during the revolution the Tsar's supporters were called the Whites. Notice how the top bosses in the railroads pics always wear shiny white uniforms.
I agree, but I don't think that negates the point.
Gruber loses it on the facts here. <em>On the other, the Schmidt Google that, in its efforts to serve ads as efficiently as possible, no longer seems concerned with the traditional Western concept of personal privacy.</em> For search ads, nothing matters except your query. It's just contextual -- it doesn't matter who you are, what you've searched on before or if you have a Gmail account.

Now, with Adsense and DoubleClick, Google is starting to play with using more about what it knows about you, but so far, the system only uses traditional third-party tracking cookies AND some data about what you do on YouTube. There's substantial pressure inside the company to break down this wall further (see the recent WSJ article on the leaked docusments), but right now, it's hard to see where Google is "no longer concerned with the traditional Western notion of personal privacy."

Other than that, it's a great troll on Gruber's part.
You mean abstain from any website that doesn't block google from crawling it and that might have your personal information, either directly from your participation or by aggregating your information from other sources.
Jison
Is your complaint that they taste bad because they're out of season? Maybe you could be a little clearer still; the connection you're claiming between the labeling of the bin and the flavor of the tomatoes remains obscure.
The chances of becoming a billionaire are even more slim than what the OP wrote. A number of billionaires become billionaires by inheritance or just modest growth of existing wealth. (Compared to NBA stars, who all have to prove themselves no matter their background.)

To become a billionaire from middle-class means IS remarkable.
Technically WiMAX and LTE are not 4G technologies. LTE-Advanced is to be.
Indeed. For anyone that hasn't read it yet, Taleb's Edge essay on the nature of randomness in 'Fourth Quadrant' domains is a good read:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb08/taleb08_index.html

And a more technical discussion of Mandelbrotian market models from Wilmott magazine:

http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0501292
What if your product is just not critical? Is that a terrible thing? I can't imagine every application is absolutely critical to an operation. I would argue that most B2Cs and a good percentage of B2Bs are not critical software, but many of them do just fine.
I think the Niman Ranch backlash is quite a bit overblown, but that the brand commands a premium that the product quality doesn't justify.

Your concerns about the food supply chain are valid. I just don't think it's reasonable to make one food issue ("locavorism: fate or fad?") a proxy for every food issue.
Should we raise this discussion to the level of concrete examples? Pastebin perhaps?
The UNIX-haters handbook
I am glad the LA startup scene is getting some attention. But lets put more stress on an up and coming companies not already failed ones (you know which one I am talking about).
Can you cite the context?
i know for a fact that backups were possible in 86 and that's all that would be needed to turn an accidental deletion into a non-disaster

but you're right, networking speed/bandwidth has gotten better since then, but that's irrelevant and I never claimed it hadn't. my point was that there is a simple, well-known solution/palliative for this, so no need for this kind of drama going forward.
> Excellent blog entry you have there,

Thank you, I write for the kind of people that hang out around Hacker News - please feel very free to comment, send questions, or drop me an email any time if something suits you or you agree/disagree/want to know more/etc. Multiple contact details in my profile.

> although I tend to agree more with Sakon: We should not disregard "higher principles", whatever those may be (religion, samurai code, etc.), otherwise, what good are the things that being single-minded brings us?

Indeed, that's one of the reasons Lone Wolf and Cub is so good - it doesn't show just one side, it makes intelligent arguments for both sides. Is it better to have multiple loose principles like Sakon and hold them inviolable, or hold one overarching principle sacred like Itto, even at the expense of doing littler things wrong? (Also, Itto requires full details of why he's performing an assassination, presumably because he makes some judgment call on when to do it)

> I am curious, what happens to Daigoro?

I don't know, I'm five books from finishing! It's 26 books long, a real epic sort of thing. You have to expect Itto succeeds at the end, that's how things work. But does he die at the end or live? Does Daigoro live or die? I'm not done yet, I'm really really curious to know.
The Most Isolated Man on the Planet
but at least our government answers to its citizens through elections.

Haha. I agree with him that Schmidt is out of touch but still I trust Google's discretion over that of Congress. If Google missteps everyone cries bloody-murder and it can affect their profits and future projects. Congress systematically abuses power and profits from it.

It is a matter of incentives and culture.
15 Facts About Net Neutrality [Infographic]
Watching one episode of The Annoying Orange has taught me that predicting what will be popular content is incredibly difficult.

In other words, there's no accounting for taste.
Forget a double dip: We're still in one long big dipper
I think personal experiences with shell command typo disasters and hard drive failures are probably the most common, and most effective reasons why people start using version control and backups religiously. The Unix command-line in particular is dangerous: incredibly powerful when used right, but one slight mistake and you cut off a finger.

Fortunately, they are only virtual fingers and we can grow them back on demand with adequate preparation, unlike real ones. :)
> The chances of becoming a billionaire are even more slim than what the OP wrote.

I think they're greater than he wrote - I bet there'll be over 5,000 billionaires in 20 years, and over 100,000 in 50 years. At least. Maybe more.

> To become a billionaire from middle-class means IS remarkable.

This I agree with. I'm lower middle class/upper lower class born actually, so would it be even more remarkable if I did it? But again, I have science and art and writing to do too, not to mention building a family, so billionaire isn't on my priorities list. I'm trying to have $50k in the bank at the end of this year, $300k in 3 years, $1 million in 5 years, and $10 million in the bank in ten years. I'll re-evaluate at that point, I think I could do it if I put myself to it single-mindedly, but I'm also writing books, learning about and making art, etc, etc. You give up a lot if you want to get there, but really all the stuff I've given up doesn't feel like such a loss compared to the joy of creating, producing, learning, connecting with people, serving people... I don't miss spectator sports, drinking, recreational drugs, surfing the 'net so much. Creation is joy.
Tell HN: A design collaboration tool I'm working on
Any feedback would be great.
He seems honest, just not as comforting as some would like. The problem is reality has become kinda creepy.

Google certainly swallowed a lump of creepiness when they bought doubleclick, that company the state of Texas had sued for stalking. One of the former upper figures there was hired by homeland security. Wonder what skill that was for?

It seems we must ask if Google is far less evil than others would be in the same position.

I'm kind of liking the Apple iAds thing. If done right, it could basically do away with accessing third-party sites when displaying third-party content. The user demographic could be typed simply by the kind of app the ad is in, and just being an Apple customer probably puts him in a more sought-after group of spenders.

Hmmm. I just had an odd thought. For games with ads, dumb down the ads for people with low scores. Mental bandwidth adjustment...
Off-course buying $MFE is better investment for $INTC, than Itanium or Larabee, but for this kind of money they better buying $NVDA or $ARMH

http://twitter.com/nivertech/status/21696999486
"Or, did you mean to say that you don't want any extra features beyond those?"

Let me put it this way - all else being equal, I would buy the phone with just the exact features I listed. I would also pay a little extra for the simplest interface imaginable. If I'm not going to use something, why would I willingly opt to spend time looking at it?
I'm not sure there's a lot of correlation between the two. It seems to have more to do with networks dynamics and timing than the quality of the video. Of course, those matter in any market, but YouTube seems to be particularly fickle--- hits are determined by whether you're one day early or late to a particular trend, by whether the first 5 people to see a submission to reddit voted it up or down, etc.
You can use it as a physical camera buuton.
Very interesting article. The Hard AI problem is one of the new frontiers of science.

If you're interested in this topic, I highly suggest you check out the Radiolab episode on emergence.

The episode doesn't focus on AI, per se, but it does talk a lot about how many individual things (ants, fireflies, bees) are not intelligent on their own, but do appear intelligent as a collective whole.

Here's the link: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2005/02/18
Nassim Taleb might have a word or two to say about this article.
Also key to the likelihood of an idea capturing your mind is how it emotionally engages you.

In fact, I could go farther, stating that ideas alone can't be in the tops of our minds, but rather, some idea-emotion hybrid.

"Top intuition" is the closest phrase I can think of.
I'd love to see some data showing what the most popular calls at action you're seeing are...
World's First Ban on Bottled Water (2009)
> There's a lot of room for bottom-up using the democracy/capitalism combination, provided you don't let those who have money at one particular point in time totally break the system through lobbying, rent-seeking and regulatory capture (fail).

the "provided" applies to all systems and doesn't seem solvable. The only way to avoid it is to keep such things outside the political sphere.
> but I can't imagine Fred truly appreciated or understood just how advanced the engineering work, and sheer hacking, you were doing was.

That is probably true, at the same time he knew full well to sell when I announced my departure so he must have had some idea. The interesting thing is though, in retrospect, the 'ill advised platform' brought out the best in me in many ways, and I wonder if I had learned as much as I did had the platform been more powerful. There's nothing more satisfying than taking something that any sane person would say can not be done and then doing it anyway simply because nobody told you it couldn't be done.

I think of the whole thing as a character building exercise ;)

And I have learned to have great respect for the people that make industry work, the guys behind the lathes and the mills, the 'operators' that have more knowledge in their pinky about metal and metal working than most people will acquire in a life time of book knowledge.

They taught me more about feeds and speeds and materials than I ever wanted to know. And they also taught me that I'll never be a good machinist, even though I'm safe and can make what I want I just can't spend the lifetime on gaining all that knowledge.

One nice anecdote about that. One guy was complaining about the precision, this was in a factory of gears called 'Mak aandrijvingen', the guy told me while listening to the machine (in a factory full of noise at that) that it was running about 1/100th wide close to the chuck.

I thought he was pulling my leg, brought out the micrometer, sure enough 1/100th wide. We adjusted the table a tiny bit with to reduce the offset but overcompensated, during the next trial run he told me it had gotten worse, probably around 0.05 mm. Sure enough, the exact amount was very close to that. After that I started to slowly believe that this guy was so attuned to his machine that he could hear how much material it was taking off and as a consequence knew how much was left. When he finally said it was good it really was. By then I was a firm believer :)

Incredible.
Opera 10.61 still works well with that 200 font size.

It has however one core maxed out.
Yeah, I wonder who cleans up after this. The guy who has root "just because we give it to all developers" and makes a mess and seriously breaks the production site is most likely not the person you want cleaning it up when time is of the essence.
I'm embarrassed by the LA scene. A majority of that post is Mahalo, which doesn't count, or companies who have already made it. MySpace isn't really a great item either. Let's put it this way... I wouldn't go work for any of those companies.
How is that what seems to me to be the worst content is constantly touted as "featured" content? Is this a reflection of what people are actually interested in or is there something else going on behind the scenes?
I'm a writer. I write technical manuals for a living, and prose (essays, blog entries, fiction) as an avocation. I know how to separate writing for pay and writing for the love of it.

I also write code, so I do know how intellectually intertwined coding and writing as pursuits can be; I also know that doing anything for pay can not and should not _ever_ be compared to creating a child. It's just offensive to everyone involved.

That said, here's the real takeaway from all this: I know my work (whether it's a UINavigationController or a chapter on configuring a firewall for port forwarding) is not a part of me; it's a gig.

I've known people who have quit their job because the company they worked for was dropping their manual from the documentation set. I mean, they were _so_ enamored with their work, they were willing to part ways over it. There are some I work with who refuse to write documentation for other products in other areas of their company, simply because they've "got a good thing going with that development team". I say, "who cares?"

If you can't (or won't) distance your emotions from the work you do for people, it's time to just do it all for yourself. Become a solopreneur working on solutions to problems and inefficiencies you see in the marketplace, like patio11 did in the bingo card industry. That'll be the only way you'll be truly free of self-confliction.
So, we work with these guys and I can tell you that right now this is definitely low in terms of an estimate of the money they are making.

In addition to what they make from ads, a lot of YouTubers will get paid to make videos that involve a product, etc. For some (most?) that is actually a larger source of income than the AdSense.

Also there are many many more than 10 YouTubers who are doing very well from their channel.
Anything that would embarrass your parents :)
Stealing employees - a compliment?
Actually possibly worse, since shipped foods are engineered to last longer without spoiling, and they go through a lot more quality control than what you pick up at the market, so the ones that spoil quickly often don't even make it to you.
I had high hopes on reading the title, but as noted in TFA, this only really works if none of your users ever bookmark a page or follow a link from Google or another website.

He's using a very limited definition of "all traffic", namely "all traffic to the homepage or a 404 page".
It is a little cargo cultish. The architecture looks good, though, and that's what counts, and why it continues to be influential. I'm rather more annoyed with idiotic signs on buildings which say "PVBLIC BVILDING" or "COVRT HOVSE". Just because Latin does not need to distinguish between "u" and "v" in writing (they're unambiguous in context as either a vowel or a consonant), does not justify torturing English.
But the claim wasn't that having the genome is directly useful, rather that it's a decent approximation of the upper bound on the irreducible complexity.
Cool! Thx.

Edit: It also freezes the focus when kept pressed down, nice!