skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really understand where this post is supposed to be going, but I agree with Yudkowsky regarding all the "emergence" I've ever heard about:

A fun exercise is to eliminate the adjective "emergent" from any sentence in which it appears, and see if the sentence says anything different...Does not each statement convey exactly the same amount of knowledge about the phenomenon's behavior? Does not each hypothesis fit exactly the same set of outcomes?

Before: Human intelligence is an emergent product of neurons firing.

After: Human intelligence is a product of neurons firing.

Before: The behavior of the ant colony is the emergent outcome of the interactions of many individual ants.

After: The behavior of the ant colony is the outcome of the interactions of many individual ants.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/
I remember reading the Esquire article when it was first published. A little money can go a long way when timed correctly.
Apple’s Ping Social Network on iOS (Preview With Photos)
Will be interesting to see us vs.non us adoption
Umm...Can somebody get me a job at Google right..... now?
it's not unethical. It's the market economy.
Very very good list of ground rules and food for thought. Many of these I felt deep in the marrow of my own experience.And of course "Every activity worth doing has a learning curve" is true from day one.
Thanks.
I'm starting to think that much of what is considered disorderly is actually just representative of the diversity of mind within humans. Reminds me of a Robertson Davies quote from The Rebel Angels "[P]eople don’t by any means all live in what we call the present; the psychic structure of modern man lurches and yaws over a span of at least ten thousand years."
Tool marks add to the texture and thus can add to the beauty of a piece. They add interest and engage your eye and mind, drawing your eyes through and around the features of the piece, revealing the path of the tool.

A flat shiny piece is just a flat shiny piece.
I am totally down for something like this!
iAds Fill Rate & eCPM (aka: Can you make money on iAds)
I'm guessing because it makes it look that much more custom.
That seems unlikely. iOS games require you to touch things, which usually means you need to look at the touch screen rather than your TV.

I suppose the games that use a virtual d-pad style control system might work, but that hardly seems to be enough of a reason to do it.
What exactly takes place at these meetups?
Ask HN Emacs Users: What's in your .emacs file?
Are there any key bindings or modes that have been especially useful for you? If so, what are they?

Cheers.
i think what you're doing is great, so don't take my hypothesis the wrong way:

i have a dog and i live with 8 other people, so i have a bit of data on 8 different dog-human relationships. it boils dog to the dog treating everyone differently depending on who gives him food. P always give dog his sandwich crusts without asking anything in return, so when P walks in the door with a subway, dog goes grazy. in fact, P started giving more when dog wimpered, so for a little while dog whimpered until i made P not be such a sucker. A always lets dog lick his plates, so dog gets excited when A finishes eating. L requires dog to lie down in a neighboring room, so dog beg's from neighboring room when L eats. it's not love or care, it's simple causation and reward. dog constantly tries different tactics on those people who give him food. often, the amount of food escalates.

btw, dog goes crazy when the (human) dinner bell is rung.

edit: also, in restaurants, bribing before is a bit like tipping afterwards. the wait staff is constantly evaluating how much effort to expand on incoming parties (among other things) in order to maximize tips. in light of that, treatin an apparently wealthy couple well in hopes of a good tip isn't unreasonable. as for accepting bribes...depending on the place it's not that different from a tip except that it comes before not after the service (some places split tips with the whole staff, including say back waiters, etc, so then it might be immoral if the people keep the bribe for themselves. as for the immorallity of "jumping" the queue--for all i know, the wait staff does that anyway when they evaluate how much people can tip....)
Yeah, I had to restart a couple of times and it stuttered a little, but I'm very impressed because I'm running a 3G (freshly downgraded to iOS3).

I'm also impressed by the battery life. I watched the whole thing over wifi and lost about 1/3 battery.
* Oh hi! I thought I was the only one :)

I think the real danger with a PhD program is that it is so easy to wander into a program, especially once you've gotten a master's degree. It feels like the right move and the next logical step, just like the previous degrees were. It's almost painless to stick around, look into interesting topics, get paid a livable salary, do some research and attend a few conferences. It can even feel like real meaningful work, without the indignity of having to find and start a job.

There is this kind of background worry that the whole thing is getting nowhere productive, or at least not at all where it's supposed to go, but it takes a few years to build up. That ends up blossoming into the regret of three years wasted, instead of a few stressful months (if that) in job limbo.

It's not all bad though. My curious distraction from my 'real work' was learning to program. I ended up with an employable skill that I enjoy using and building on. Still, though, 3 years.
Old news. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1196421
Netflix streams some content in 720p, and most compression issues are related to bandwidth and the preference for continuity of play rather than quality of play. If I'm rate-limiting anything I download, though, I don't have problems even with HD.

http://blog.netflix.com/2010/05/now-streaming-in-hd-on-pc-an...
Doesn't work on "house brands" that use internal number schemes. For example 150480300036 is the UPC-A bar code from a Banana Republic T-shirt with a product id of 637905 but it doesn't exist in their database. Anyone know of somebody trying to deal with these kind of bar code issues?
That is excellent to hear. Startup culture is flourishing here and hopefully holds a lot of promise.
But we also have five additional levels above "senior software engineer," and there are a pretty large number of people in those higher regions. I'd say 150k is a bit above the "mid level" range, but it's certainly not above the 95%ile.
New York's Water Filled With Invisible Shrimp
Apple Special Fall Event: The Big Recap
Agreed. Alexis should come speak at Hackers and Founders Boston in October re: applying to YC :).
hmm never encountered this. What city?
Interesting. I've yet to discover said 720p content, though, and Apple seems to have it available now for all new shows.
I would, and I do. I don't use their wiki or issue tracker, though, so if they managed to lose the data, it'd take all of 30 seconds to (well, plus pushing some rather large files) to set it up again.

Our codebase is GPLed, so there are no concerns about privacy.
Making bodies like that isn't uncommon when dealing with street rods with metal bodies. They don't say, but they probably also used an English Wheel - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Wheel
Context: http://www.tmz.com/2010/09/01/hostage-situation-at-discovery...
jaw hits floor

Which of those two philosophies do you think accepts "violence and coercion as a means to mold society to a specific version"? From the context, I'm guessing that you're referring to socialism, and thereby claiming that capitalism rejects violence and coercion- my apologies if I'm misunderstanding you.

Assuming that I am interpreting your comment correctly, though, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you don't know much about the history of the twentieth-century US foreign policy, especially regarding Latin America. We have a long history of using violence and coercion, either directly or via proxies, in order to promote our capitalist philosophies. "Interestingly," we seem to choose to do so primarily in situations where we have significant financial interests... anyway, here's some reading you might find educational:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#History_in...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_U.S._regime_change_actio...

Note that I'm most definitely not saying that socialism, as a philosophy, has cleaner hands than capitalism. Speaking in terms of political ideologies, the take-home lesson of the abattoir that was the 20th century is that putting one's faith in a political ideology of any kind is asking for trouble.
You must be a recovering slashdotter, like me.
What's going right in Perl
how could universal health care ever be construed as a bad thing?

Universal healthcare construes long waits and inadequate care to me. The universal health care slogan should be: "The efficiency of the DMV, the compassion of the IRS".

The current state of health care in the US is definitely sub-optimal, but it is better than one run by the government.
Even back in ~2005, "Seattle area compensation" was ~90k for folks just out of college, if you managed to get to mid-range it was around 120k, and then around 175k at senior IC levels. And, at the mid-range the eligible bonus amount jumped to around 50% yearly, and at the higher levels to > 100% of base.

These numbers were slightly higher than Google's at the time, but GOOG was still playing the "our stock options are worth more than their stock grants" line. In any case, ~150k for mid-range is certainly believable.

That said, realize that mid-range in pure software companies making Big Stuff is a little different. Most startup-level CTOs and Fortune 100-level "Architect" types came in at the bottom of mid-range, just due to not having worked at scope.

At the time, Apple had the lowest pay for comparable grades of any of the firms we researched in our Seattle-area recruiting. Of course, those stock packages have probably made up for things -- if they didn't just flip them at vest for cash immediately, like most employees do!

Also, if you think 150k is high, you should chat with folks doing software development in the finance industry. It's honestly a bit overboard, but the companies do what they have to in order to make sure that offers from Facebook, etc. aren't at all tempting.
--- and then it collapsed =)
I have some connections to the folks that run BoomStartup, Launch Up, and the Web Startup Group and would be happy to help if needed.
Do you think bribing government officials to get preferential treatment is also OK? If not, what is the difference?
Is the iPod Classic going away?
In his keynote, Jobs said that they are releasing "all new iPods". Absent, however, was any mention of the iPod classic. The largest iPod is the Touch 64Gb. I hoped that at minimum Apple would release a 128Gb version of the Touch. At that point I could see retiring the Classic. However, right now nothing touches it's 160Gb capacity. However, it has poorly responsive controls and a hopelessly outdated UI. I was hoping some sort of rev would address this. An iPod touch w/hard drive would be amazing, but surely is not to be. Anyone care to speculate whether this niche will be filled?
The underlying assumption that being a market economy precludes a market from being unethical strikes me as overly simplistic.
The average household watches 8 hours per day (http://is.gd/ePUvJ). Assuming 50% of that time is spent on 30 minute shows, that's 12 shows, or $12/day in AppleTV rentals... $360/month for ad-free viewing. Current Cable TV folks with a DVR are paying $100/month or so $3.30 per day... So this is a 300%+ premium for the joy of not having to skip commercials with a DVR and program the shows you want to record, plus the snazzy interface. That's a shitty deal for America.

However, it might be a GREAT deal for people who don't watch a lot of TV.
This is an off-topic short rant. Vote as you like (obvious enough), but skip reading this if you want on-topic discussion.

Shoot me if this is how the web is heading. (Recent browsing suggests maybe it is...) We get not only the insufferable "bottom bar" (is there a standard name for those yet?), but also a "top bar", a hover "Click Here to Share" box and a pop-up "Learn More, Instantly" box (not to mention the general clutter and overdense design).

Man, that's foul.
I'm looking forward to the rest of the story coming out. The demo of playing a movie on the iPad and then moving it over to the TV: will this come to the iPhone and iPod Touch with iOS4.2? Will it work with music? Will Apple's AirTunes devices get AirPlay and receive similar functionality?

EDIT: Seems like other iDevices get AirPlay with iOS4.2: http://www.apple.com/appletv/#remote

Also, AppleTV still has USB: http://www.apple.com/appletv/specs.html
however, when has that stopped apple? when the ipod was released, it had no wifi and less space than a nomad. lame.
Technology + Fitness = Love
When you want an Ambassador to London you know where I am :-)

Having Alexis on board is great. He was great when the whole Digg/Reddit recursion thing went crazy that day. I still have the Reddit sticker on my suitcase that he sent out.
No I don't agree with any of them, it was not money hording massive organizations that built the engine of ingenuity that made America what it was. It was the upstarts, the scrappy guys in their garage, The Wright brother on a hill, United did not build the airline industry the guys that dared to dream did. Those are the people that create true wealth.

The carpetbaggers come later and try to convince you that their money hoarding (off another persons idea) is good for you. It is not, I don't understand why people allow their mind to be contorted by the "studied" on this subject. Those at the top have a vested interest in perpetuating these theories in economics. I am a die hard capitalist so long as it advances the human race, but what we have is insane. It does nothing to reward human progress. This is slash and burn capitalism.

#1 is a fiat.

#2 is horrible as the capital is not being used.

#3 is a fallacy, companies do not have to survive for individual survival. This thinking is what props up dead companies for years after their usefulness has waned. It is also what corporate leaders use as scare tactics to extort bail out funds. Capital will always divert to successful companies who then ramp up production. What we have now is the elimination of the butcher, baker and candlestick maker due to walking dead monolithic companies. If those where allowed to rightfully die you would see the return of the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker (metaphorically), as people stopped looking to corporations to be their new Mamas.
Yes. I'd argue emergence is the phase where the phenomena is first being discovered.
Like the idea, but the blue text on white is hard on the eyes. Maybe a black on gray color scheme like HN?
I'll be at Launchup tomorrow if anyone wants to meet up.
This is another open/closed debate. Boxee is pretty easy to make new channels for. AppleTV will always be more exclusive. And Boxee has a full QWERTY keyboard on the back of the remote :-)
I would think that Apple would employ a lot more computer engineers and people on the hardware side and that these would be the tech employees at apple with highest salaries, but I might be completely off base.

Anyone have any ideas if this is true?
Have you ever read The Prince?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince#Generosity_vs._parsi...
Ask HN: looking for a tech cofounder, already have 13k users after 2 months
I'm looking for an exceptional technical co-founder who knows RoR and potentially C++.

We started up a few months ago, but my co-founder has decided to move on (he thinks a competitor will take us down - I don't!).

We've already been featured in lifehacker and mashable, got 13k users, signups are flooding in, with a sensible business plan and investors interested.

Looking for someone based anywhere but looking to move to SF, even just for YC this winter.

drop me a line: niccolo.pantucci@gmail.com
Kind of reminds me of a friend who worked in sales. Whenever he was going to take a client to a restaurant he would always go to the restaurant the day before find a waiter who was going to be there during the lunch meeting and tip heavily so as to be sure of good service during the working lunch.
Eventbrite DFW Presents: Un-Plugged
ArtistX 0.9 Screenshots
Those things are inherent to the human condition. They are hard wired into our DNA. Where we go, so will they.
So, Jobs announced that iTunes 10 was available today, and they are advertising it on the front page, but when you try to download it, you now get an "available soon" note for 10, and a download link for 9.2.1. I wonder if they ran into some snags...
Toronto... perhaps things are different in Ottawa.. in fact I hope they are ! :)
Does not each statement convey exactly the same amount of knowledge about the phenomenon's behavior? Does not each hypothesis fit exactly the same set of outcomes?

No.

When you talk about an emergent property, you are saying that there is an issue of scale to pay attention to. Below some threshold the phenomena does not show up. After another threshold it clearly shows up. And this is sometimes a useful piece of information.

Take, for example, the statistical algorithms used by Google translate. Effective translation is an emergent behavior of the corpus the algorithm has to run off of. If you provide it with a small corpus, you get garbage translations if anything. If you provide it with a large corpus, you get good translations. And the knowledge that size matters is sometimes useful information. For one thing it tells you that the results from a small corpus are not indicative of how effective the algorithms are.
"NoSQL" has come to symbolize a number of different things, depending on who you're talking to and when. I've seen all combinations of one or more of the following:

1. The rejection of what some see as an overly complicated and inflexible query language in favor of map-reduce phases or other application-side querying/processing.

2. The rejection of serialized transactions in favor of something like eventual consistency, often with application-specified conflict resolution.

3. Or it could be a rejection of the relational model (especially as it is popularly implemented) in favor of key-value, graph, document, column-oriented, etc. models.

If I read you and the authors right, I think you're thinking more along the lines of 3 and the authors are focussing more on 2.

I think both "sides" are just starting to come to grips with the idea that these design choices can be orthogonal (a relational DB without SQL? an eventually consistent SQL DB? a graph DB with 2-phase commit?) and choosing to reject one part of "the old way" doesn't mean you have to reject all of it. The upshot is, we're going to have a lot more tools to choose from for our own unique problems.

So, I'd say: don't worry about feeling like a curmudgeon! Rigidity will have its place in the beautiful gleaming pluralistic future of datastores that the SQL vs. NoSQL "debate" is building the road towards.
Everyone else waits a few extra minutes, but meanwhile the maitre d's work income is vastly improved while you get a quick seat for a fee. In the end, the net effect on society is probably neutral at worst. At best, no one else even notices and both you and the maitre d' have a great night.
For anarchism to actually eliminate violence, it has to have some mechanism to protect society from Genghis Khan and Jack the Ripper.

Statistically, Genghis Khan will eventually be born somewhere outside your society and eventually show up at your doorstep with hordes of horseback archers, and you can either surrender, join his empire, and pay taxes (ending your experiment in anarchism) or have your entire society destroyed almost to the last man, leaving a few survivors to warn other societies of the tale (ending your experiment in anarchism).

If you had the only anarchist society in a world of states, you could probably freeload on those states to stop any full-scale Genghis Khan from getting too powerful. Let's hope your experiment in anarchism is landlocked between several states who will leave you alone. You could allow for voluntary defense, and theoretically handwave away defensive violence against people outside your society as "doesn't count". But on some level you have to realize your society depends upon some violence to survive.

Jack the Ripper will show up inside your society and fuck up your voluntary social contract all on his own, when he goes around killing disreputable women (luckily, many forms of anarcho-socialism lack money and thus would have no prostitution per se). In that case you would need some sort of violence (possibly voluntary on the part of the violent people) to either kill Jack the Ripper, or lock him up in a cage, or kick him out of your society. If you do that, you have violence within your society--if you don't, you have violence within your society in the form of Jack the Ripper.

It turns out all of human history has been an extended experiment in solving these very problems, and the only steady state, as discovered in parallel by nearly every culture on earth, is in fact the State[1]. At best you can have voluntarism within the State, but you cannot sustain anarchism without the State.

[1] Existing primitivists, such as the bushmen of Africa, have largely been forced out of their traditional lifestyle by the State. If there are primitivists who do, in fact, maintain their traditional lifestyle, they only do so under the explicit protection of the State, as discussed in the freeloading example above. In other words, it's still an anarchism that requires the State to function, which is a contradiction in terms.

Hunter-gatherers are not necessarily anarchists. Many of the greatest empires in world history were built by hunter-gatherers, who on account of their hunting and gathering made much better soldiers than people living in civilizations. They ate a more balanced diet, got more exercise, knew how to kill things, and knew how to kill things as a team. Horseback archery isn't a skill you get to hone much as a farmer. If you have that basic skillset, civilizations make pretty good targets once you run low on animals.
Implementing vanity profile URLs with Rails
had 1.896 unique visitors since the 28th, not bad for my standards
It's an interesting question, and to me a real ethical gray area. At my favorite bar, I usually tip very generously, and all the bartenders know me. I tend to get my first drink free, and if I stay for a while, often a shot with the bartender later. For those, I tip extra big - not quite, but almost, the cost of the drink. For a while I felt bad about "taking advantage" of the system. But in fact I think this is part of the system, because every bar needs regulars, and since people like me and I don't cause trouble, my patronage is useful even to the owners (though they may get less revenue from my drinks). I also think this may constitute a sort of perk for the bartenders - to be able to give free drinks to a limited number of friends probably makes them enjoy their job more. I do notice that after I get a free one the bartender makes some sort of note on a piece of paper near the register, so maybe this is an official part of the system.

I'm not sure if the restaurant business is the same, but I can imagine that the owners anticipate this sort of thing, and maybe even encourage it, since it means their employees get more money and might be happier as a result.

But yeah, it doesn't seem particularly fair, at least the way I was raised to think of it.
Hacking behavior: use the stairs instead of the escalator
> `sys.excepthook` is how you can do that.

Awesome. Thank you kindly.

> error: tracebacks too long

I like your style.