skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I look forward to seeing you there :)

Do you mind passing this around to other Vancouver hackers you know? I posted this at a terrible time and it fell the off the homepage already (huge fail on my part).
I know he meant overall karma. That's why I suggested only updating it once a day, but you could still check how recent comments are doing with the "comments" link on the top bar, so you'd need to hide those scores too, hence my comment.
And getting his tech news from his RSS feed.
In both cases Google appears to be using their influence poorly.
Based on the feedback we've gotten so far, a lot of people are interested in this kind of event. If everything goes well we will definitely be doing something similar again in the future.
I disagree. If you're not getting downvoted, that could just as easily mean you're not unconvincing.

Downvotes are ideally for low-value content. If your viewpoint is contrary to popular opinion, the onus is on you to explain your reasoning persuasively enough to not come off as a simple contrarian.

Downvotes are not a reward for thinking independently. They are a penalty for sloppy thinking or overly presumptious output. They are also the only way I can think of for fighting populist, short-circuit comments that troll for upvotes - by encouraging actual argumentation.
Same here, I discard at least two-thirds of the comments I start.
tl;dr: an ipad is better at being an ipad than a kindle is.
The biggest problem the online porn industry has was not specifically said in the OA. It is the fact that once an image, video or story is released anywhere on the net in non-DRM form, it can be saved and shared effectively forever out in the bits-are-free ecosystem. And a good work of art (even where the art is porn) is timeless. The world could stop producing any new porn/erotica today, permanently, and the existing supply of free stuff out there should make the vast majority of porn consumers satisfied for the rest of their lives.
Anti-competitive doesn't just mean "not good for competitors." It's about things that are harmful for the marketplace. For example, it excludes the ordinary enjoyment of copyright exclusivity. You might think monopolies are harmful for marketplaces, but as a society we've decided that copyrights do more good than harm, so copyright exclusivity is not in itself anti-competitive. A more relevant example: trademarks are not generally anti-competitive.

Imagine Bob's Booze complaining that Bacardi has pressured Thirsty Time Beverage Co. to use Bacardi rum in the "Thirsty Thursday Party Punch with Bacardi(TM)" drink. Bob wants to make a deal with Thirsty to replace Bacardi rum with his company's rum as a key ingredient in the punch. Suppose Thirsty Time always uses Bacardi's filtered water as an ingredient; can Bacardi insist that Thirsty Time also ship its famous rum (and nobody else's) as a condition for TT's use of the Bacardi brand name on rum-containing drinks? Would that be "anti-competitive?"
I'd run my own MMO.
Using 70/X will also work just fine.
Ask HN: Carriers and OEMs, why the bloatware and the stickers?
I'm very curious to why every large non-Apple PC OEM has stickers and bloatware all over their products. If they spent less time (and money) on those extra goodies that nobody wants, wouldn't they better off focusing on the core of their business -- making good computers, period -- while annoying their customers less?

Similarly, with Android phone makers who create their own custom versions of Android (and bundle apps that you can't uninstall), why not instead just use the stock OS and work on making the newest builds available as soon as possible, like the Nexus One?

It just baffles me when the way to winning customers' hearts is so clear, these guys spend the extra time and the effort to do the opposite. Am I missing something?
All the pictures are old white businessmen.

A real start-up matching site would have lots of 20-somethings, with about half foreigners, who have written some code.
In my experience, every textbook an undergrad is likely to use is already available on a file sharing site or torrent.
This still does not make sense

Onramp <-> Lane 1 : 2
Lane 1 <-> Lane 2 : 2
Lane 2 <-> Lane 3 : 2
Lane 3 <-> Lane 4 : 2
Lane 4 <-> Lane 5 : 2
Lane 5 <-> HOV : 8

So the total transactions for lane 5 is 10 and HOV is 8. This is not a counterexample to what I stated.
What I appreciated about this article was the idea of engaging yourself into a community for the sake of learning. I'm not sure that I do that enough.
This Levitt/Dubner article about prostitution argues that the increased availability of premarital sex hurt the prostitution "industry":

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertai...

Perhaps societal changes are decreasing the stigmatization associated with on-camera participation in the porn industry, and the result is increased availability of actresses? Supply up, price down? Is Reddit's Gonewild the equivalent of the Levitt/Dubner "premarital sex as a substitute good" argument? What about Girls Gone Wild? Aren't the "actresses" trading their time for free publicity?

Hasn't the porn industry relied for years on the illicit nature of its product as a means of avoiding consumer price comparison and the free exchange of information? Are online porn reviews preventing second-rate products from being profitable? I recall reading that, as an experiment, one city made on-site ticket scalping legal as long as it happened in some particular place (a roped-off area in a park across from the stadium or something similar), and the free flow of information led to lower prices. As porn actresses achieve mainstream fame (Sasha Grey, etc.), is it becoming more socially acceptable for men to talk to each other about porn and give recommendations? As with car prices, are better educated consumers becoming more powerful relative to the producers?

Fundamentally, if there were no social repercussions from participation in the porn industry, wouldn't more women choose to "go on cam" between classes or after the kids go to bed as a means of income? What if a short-lived "career" as a porn actress or stripper no longer carried a lifelong stigma? I believe we are seeing the economic impact on the porn industry as these societal barriers to industry participation begin to decrease.

Yes, the OP's linked article is about piracy, but this problem seems like the tip of the iceberg for an industry which is likely experiencing more fundamental structural change.

[Note that I've entirely ignored male participation in the porn industry as I've read that the availability of men is not a rate-limiting factor for straight porn. And, I've ignored gay porn entirely.]
This idea was a good one but I want to make a grumpy comment anyway. That "Planet Money" series is on the whole terrible. It's supposed to be in-depth but there's nothing deep about the pieces I've heard, just painfully bad dialogue issued by pseudo-hipsters all imitating Ira Glass to varying degrees of cringitude. I admire Ira Glass too, but this is analogous to folk singers imitating Bob Dylan's nasal whine instead of, you know, writing good songs. As for content, nearly all of what I've heard has been them asking obvious questions of economists who repeat the same obvious half dozen bromides such economists invariably repeat, which the Glassbots then ploddingly translate into even dumber terms, presumably so they can hear the sound of their own voices some more on national radio. That and painfully staged little sketches for idiots, like the one where they go to different supermarkets to play walkie-talkies and conclude that some of them sometimes price things differently.

It's so awful I can't listen to it any more: I find it traumatic to be exposed to people making asses of themselves. That's probably why I'm writing this, to expunge the trauma. Have I just heard the wrong 10 episodes or something?

Some of the economic reporting produced by This American Life, on the other hand, has been superb and genuinely in-depth. Since the intersection of the two sets is non-empty, perhaps the producers are to blame.
There is a similar post to the original article here that was posted to LW a few days ago, Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality , http://lesswrong.com/lw/2po/selfimprovement_or_shiny_distrac... . I have been strongly cutting back my browsing in general, including both LW and HN.
HDMI actually doesn't support the colorspace that all digital video is distributed in, so unless you know exactly how your blu-ray player is doing the colorspace conversion it's going to be slightly lossy just from that.

In addition, you're going to want to encode the video using a lossy codec, or the storage requirements will be stupidly large (think ~36 MB/s at a minimum.) So that's another lossy step from HDMI.

So, if you crack HDCP to copy blu-ray, you get (with each arrow representing a lossy conversion)

Blu-ray -> CSC from y420 for HDMI -> CSC to y420 for encoding -> encode

Wheras if you crack AACS you get the video stream on the blu-ray directly, and the only hassle is the cat-and-mouse game with key revocations (AACS is better designed in that it seems a master key cannot be derived from the keys we have easy access to.)

Also, the way HDCP works, you can't just dump an encrypted stream between two any HDCP devices and decrypt it later; you have to control one of the devices to the point that you know its key.
It's pretty much the hardest possible way to implement timing-independent crypto operations: enlist the operating system to enforce worst-case behavior, every time.

You are far more likely to slip up with this countermeasure than you are to slip up by swapping in timing-independent routines. The fact that you have to enforce timing-independence across multiple operations is one of the reasons that libraries that expose (or directly make use of) crypto primitives, like AES-CBC or HMAC-SHA1, are evil: the joints where those things meet are also fraught with trouble.
Umm...Its a website....you should probably just get over whatever is making you grumpy and get some fresh air. Sure its a community, but if it really is that hard to let go of then you really need some time out to sort out your real world issues.
Linkification: http://churp.me/
Ask HN: JavaScript machine learning library?
Quick question: would a JavaScript machine learning library be useful to you? If so, how? I'm thinking basic classification (NN, DT, Bayes) and optimization (GA, NN, RHC, etc.) and clustering (EM, KM) functions.
Swiping and signing is heck of a lot faster than figuring out which to insert the card in this particular terminal, waiting for the damn machine wade through its various phases and navigating through a couple of menus, and eventually entering the PIN code followed by the green enter key.

But that's not the real problem, in my opinion.

With hand-written signatures I was pretty sure that if someone stole my card then with great certainty he couldn't replicate my signature in a way a professional hard-writing analyst could be fooled. Thus, I would have some buffer of justice against the period between stealing my card and informing the bank about it. They could just run the signatures and I would have a pretty strong proof that someone else counterfeited my signature.

With PIN code it's different. As soon as someone types in the correct PIN code, everything is kosher and validated. I can't prove it wasn't me. It doesn't really matter that you're supposedly the only one who knows the PIN code because it's dead easy to eavesdrop and then you're out of luck.
I think the site just launched so it wouldn't be surprising if it's not yet representative of founders generally.

As an aside, I was recently reading a draft of HBS prof. Noam Wasserman's upcoming book on early founder issues, and one of the things he writes about is that homophilic teams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophily) underperform heterogeneous teams.
It would be interesting to simulate the prisoner's dilemma through AI agents and see if they develop a sense of trust over time. Maybe they would adopt a cooperative strategy eventually.

Edit: This paper seems to go in that direction http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.43....
"To make matters worse, he says the Kindle proved unable to keep up with the class discussion — it would take half a minute to load a page and by then, the discussion would have lost its momentum."

1/2 a minute? That isn't how long it takes me.
We know those two are domain experts because we have done precisely that.
Deploy Virtual Demos with LabSlice
LabSlice allows you to create demos stored in the cloud that you can easily share. Deploy either thick or thin client applications that your customers can load, tweak and play with in just a matter of minutes.

We extend the Amazon EC2 cloud to create a:
* Self-service environment, so that your IT and Sales Engineers can easily create their own demos in the cloud.
* Policy controlled lab, where each virtual machine is issued based on the size, type and lease duration restrictions that you specify.
* Sharable cloud, where you can give your peers, customers and business partners access to cloud demos simply by sending an email.

We would love to hear feedback from ycombinator and any ideas for improving on the product and making it more useful to other startups.
I am not dismissive, but writing scientific publications is really a hard work. Really hard work, even in black and white with just a few illustrations and tables.

So, I do think that we will be able to get wonderful tablet based text books, but it will be for main stream topics (most likely all the undergraduate stuff, like the Feynman books in physics) and not cutting edge.

This is why I put them at the "interactive CDROM" level, in the sense that it will be available for topics which were covered with these CDROM.

On a side note, I really hope people will produce a lot of good content for the tablets and make the content available for not a lot of money. The more we get people to know what is science, what we do as scientists, how we try to reason on problems and argue with data and theories based on data, the better the world will be.
People 25 to 34 living w/parents increases 8.4% in 2 years
Thx. I can't reveal too much here, but I do a lot more in the reranking area such that the top 20 will look very different for many queries when compared. I think these improvements go a long way to improving search UX, but ranking is subtle and so doesn't get noticed much (except when failing miserably).
Mageia – A New Linux Distribution
Read the Crosby & Wallach paper (after reading Nate's article) here:

http://rdist.root.org/2010/01/07/timing-independent-array-co...

I've been following your comments and I think you need to recalibrate your expectations about timing accuracy.

That said: you're right: you can add random sleeps to increase the number of measurements attackers need to take. But I don't think you can reasonably add enough delay to make the attack infeasible (where "infeasible", as always, means "not worth conducting").

In Crosby & Wallach, you'll see that there's also an arms race brewing between defenders who hope to add noise to confound exploits, and attackers deploying signal processing techniques to see through that noise with fewer measurements.

A more reasonable "half-assed" countermeasure would be to rig something up that notices invalid tokens, and re-key after a threshold.
Maybe if the publishers will stop being greedy and start selling these things for a reasonable price, they'd catch on like wildfire. The digital versions are currently nearly as expensive as the printed version -- basically it seems like they're charging the full price of the book minus the printing cost. The problem is, the dead tree versions can be re-sold when you're done, but the digital versions cannot, which makes them MUCH more expensive.
I don't understand why peopole rush to create yet another linux distribution, while what the linux world really need is a nice desktop. I mean, look at the number of linux distros out there, and look at the desktop options you have: only two or three "OK" ones: GNOME, KDE and XFCE... all a distribution does is assemble "tools" to get a working operating system, wich is useless if you are going to assemble the same tools and use the same desktop environments. Go fork GTK instead. Build YABCDE (yet another but cooler desktop environment)
The article did mention the research was already doing some sort of drug trial with mice. So hopefully they're already heading in that direction.
the lore is: they had serious technical problems the day before the launch day and decided to pull through anyways. The load on the already faulty system caused additional failures bringing the cuil's quality to it's lowest point, and that's where the most people saw it.
Another issue here is that IMHO all the best teams are formed organically (e.g.: Google Guys @ Stanford / FB Guys @ Harvard etc...) and not out of a direct inent to form a startup. As we all know running a startup w/ a co-founder is like being married. 1 issue that this site could run into is that just like on dating sites its very difficult to establish a significant amount of rapport and I would argue that having a good rapport with your co-founder is just as important as having a good rapport with someone that you want to date. Instead of using a site like this you should look around and determine which of the people you know and like would be the best fit in the role of co-founder. Something like Facebook or linked in would be a good place to search your network for potential startup co-founders. Or if you are like me you just start a project and annoy all your friends to test/review/help etc... so much that they either stop talking to you or become your co-founder.
So you're saying the system is broken? It very well could be but you honestly think any of these kids checked to see? And if they have tried doing it legally and fail then I would like to see more fight towards that issue, as in my opinion it's a bigger issue if corporations are controlling our gov't than them attacking a few pirates.

If a law is unjust you IGNORE it. You don't take enforcement into your own hands, much less anonymous enforcement. If you truly believe what you fight for you'd come out and be proud of it because you know you're right. But nothing says uncertain motives more than cowering behind anonymity for a cause.
I disagree.

Take the reporting on Toxie, their toxic asset. I think what they did was a good idea, I have followed their reporting on it for a while now. First they presented how one actually acquires these assets (they started with a trader and walked through that process) then they actually dug deeper beyond just monitoring the prices. They followed the individual mortgages within the security and found how one was tied to a mortgage fraud scheme and the other was tied to a guy who borrowed beyond his means.

I saw similar research put together by a well respected bank's equity research arm that decided to start visiting the homes which corresponded to certain distressed bank loans in Ohio. So overall, I thought the Planet Money team took a really good approach to their story.

Is it true that they have to sometimes dumb things down for the masses? Yes. No ordinary person is going to sit there and read through a CDO prospectus. But if I wanted something more in depth I would just listen to my Bloomberg podcasts.

Also, your criticism about Planet Money versus TAM seems a bit off base. I have found that Planet Money is the group that most often contributes the economic reporting/segments to TAM. Although there have been times when ProPublica contributes to both.
Am I the only one who's happy about that? They were a nuisance to website operators....
Also, do digital books kill open book quizzes?
> Isn't ask.com another search engine

In a way they still are but they also to a lot of ehow type SEO.
It's not a bug, it's intentional (and thus obnoxious):

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" />
I agree. Planet Money is a great example of what financial news should be. And it is a completely replicable phenomena. Its strength largely comes from a few personalities who are engaging, intelligent and intellectually curious and asking them to report on a subject they know little about. It gives a really strong mix of high end analysis and laymen explanations for the financial and economic mechanisms at work.

Whats interesting about this style of reporting is that it seems to actually produce more in depth and nuanced analysis than what you typically see in, say, the wall street journal. I suspect this is because the laymen explanations lea to side analysis of issue that would otherwise be washed over. Where most financial news sources would report on the current state of toxic assets and how they are effecting broader markets, planet money in this series has spent an entire year reporting on what a toxic asset actually is, how it progresses through a market, its role in the market crash and what is being done to correct it. And all of this in about 3 minutes once a week.
This is interesting. Why do you think it matters? If I cared at all, I'd be more concerned about all the other entries on the credit card bill that probably personify myself better than some random xxx site. By now, I think they already know that some non-marginal percentage (I would assume) of male credit cards have been used to buy porn.
A few ideas (of course you won't be reading this, so perhaps it'll be useful to those of us remaining on the service):

1. Logout of HN and have a friend of yours change your password and not tell you what it is. This keeps you from getting into the commenting/commenting-for-karma cycle. And you won't want to create a new account because karma addicts can't stand the idea of starting back at zero.

2. Find a community that better suits your argumentative needs. I would probably suggest looking a quora.com -- but, if you're addicted to arguments for the sake of arguments, then that's probably not a good idea either.

3. Take up photography. Seriously. It will center you and give you a vice to replace the void created by quitting this site (whether the ban is short-term imposed or long-term imposed).
Follow up: what would you do with clustering and classification on the client side? What about optimization?
It would not be immediately useful to me personally, but it is something I've been intending to build over the coming winter (for educational purposes and for interface experimentation).
Ideally, and in practice, are not the same thing here... People downvote things they disagree with, including unconventional views, all the time.
That's true, there's still a security concern once you've swiped a payment, but in terms of this secure card, the fact that you need the correct PIN to even see what the credit card number is would make me feel a lot better about losing my wallet.

I've got no data on this, but I'm personally more concerned about a lost/stolen card being intentionally used by someone else rather than a merchant screwing me over.

Is it world changing? No, probably not. Is it a significant improvement? In my opinion, yes.
Thanks for the help! I'm new to HN and still learning how to post items properly. Did you get a chance to look at the site?