skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think normal people (the non-technical masses which are necessary to make social-networking type sites a success) will come anywhere close to understanding what a decentralized or distributed social-network is.

The amount of time & money given to Diaspora and the like is mind-boggling to me given that 99% of the population will probably never understand what it even is.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it's too complicated for people to understand what is going on and most people will ignore it.
No problem, I hope it helps you out or gives you some inspiration!

Since I don't know much about machine learning: what do you plan to build your JS library to do or support? Is it just for research, or are there ways to use it in a more everyday webapp?
Progress really smacked me in the face when I bought a C64 emulator a couple of years ago.

What used to require a large keyboard with extra room for the computer, a large diskdrive, an expansion slot and a drawer full of floppies now completely fits into the size of one of those original joysticks. You hook up the joystick directly to the TV and it contains about 100 games.
Are you doing bioinformatics? If so, it's a great excuse to learn more about the field, and learning more about the field will make you care more about the work you're doing--a feed-forward loop. At least, when I started doing medical genetic research, that's how things worked for me.
Not to disagree, but I wonder how many of them got cancer or some after effect where no one bothered to make the correlations.

My Grandmother, while in the Canadian Airforce, was subjected to radiation tests(She and others were placed in a bunker during these tests). 60 years later when I look back upon the health problems she went through I can't help but wonder if there was a link. Of course no one, in my family, ever brought it up or even discussed the possibility.
As written, this is a dangerously solipsistic statement.

Dangerously self-referential statement. As written, of course.
I can't remember where I got it. I probably just googled for whitenoise, then looped a resulting mp3. I've tried some of the generator apps - some aren't bad - but I just have another app in the background running which I don't want all the time. A single looped mp3 I can play on any device. I've also got a sound machine I use for sleep - it's got a 'waterfall' sound I use as whitenoise to go to sleep.

http://indieconf.com/whitenoise15.mp3 is what I use most days.
Someone here gave me some feedback on one of my websites and this (first impressions) is generally kind of on my mind here lately. (Thank you someone.) Anyone have any thoughts on how this applies to websites instead of programs? (Or links to suggest?)

Thanks.
Well, to be fair, HTML5 also already has the <meta> extension mechanism. I know you're not making the argument that one is more "standardsy" than the other; you're just pointing out that both approaches are equally "standard".
Except that doesnt work, because that just changes the hash of the submodule (as stored by the supermodule) again. The problem is that the supermodule just stores the hash of the submodule. The only way I found of fixing it was to:

1. Create a new repo.

2. Get the branched submodule.

3. Check that in as head: Note, now HEAD will NOT compile - I've committed broken code.

4. Go back to the original repo.

5. Get HEAD: this pulls the hash I need.

6. Do the merge. The submodule doesn merge, because it has the right hash.

Surely there must be some way to just modify the hash. But I don't know where to change it. I found it in several locations, but I don't know how it works, and hacking my VCS isnt my idea of good sense.
"For a few years now, people have been expecting electronic textbooks to take off in a big way: They're cheaper than traditional textbooks"

Somebody never tried to get a site license for something that is worth its money. Electronic media are much too expensive for the education market (at least for universities etc.). A "traditional textbook" you can sell once you don't have a need for it any longer. The effective cost is less than the list price. I've also made the experience that electronic media usually lacks the depth of "traditional textbooks" unless it's the textbook put on the web.
You are right, there are many things that can be done, using machine learning, like music classification by genre,artist or predictions api ( mentioned in a general fashion on a purpose because you are limited to the datasets and problems you choose to work on ). If a Javascript library that works smoothly and makes these things work better can be given birth i think it is definitely worth it. And you are right about the node.js thing.
Twitter, Transclusion and Trust - Anil Dash
The CVV2 is not supposed to be stored in any merchant system, that's it's entire point! A merchant who does store it is actually violating their contract with the card issuer.
"New" as in "having recently come into existence", yes. Love it.

"New" as in "new to me" but actually created in 1986, no, not so much.
I also point you out to some interesting resources about concepts that you could easily implement in your library.
Like the NGD ( Normalized google distance ), just an idea, to make smarter tag clouds ? http://www.complearn.org/
Accompanying website:

http://darkpatterns.org/
Except of course with the new super secure card it can't be the banks fault because it's secure - so any fraud must be your fault and so you are liable.

That's what they tried here with chip+pin cards
That was his point. The MSM generally uses your cracker definition for hacker, but here's an article actually using your first definition.

Signs and wonders...
Yes, and I've done so in the past, but it gets uncomfortable by the 8 hour mark.
"George Cayley knew how to make a plane a century before the Wright brothers took off. If only he'd got the internal combustion engine to work."

This implies that all the Wrights did was slap an engine on a Cayley design and fly. It's an egregious misunderstanding of the Wrights' numerous essential contributions to flight that made flight possible.

1. The Wrights designed and built their own engine from scratch. Nothing available had anywhere near the power/weight ratio they needed. Essentially, the Wrights invented the first aircraft engine.

2. They invented the first correct propellor theory, enabling them to produce propellors that were twice as efficient as their competitors'. This, of course, enabled the engine to be half the weight and power. (This factor alone is why I don't believe the other pretenders actually flew - they didn't have the power.)

3. They developed a 3 axis control system. This is absolutely crucial to successful flight.

4. They discovered that the existing data for airfoil efficiency was wrong by a factor of two. Airfoils needed to be twice the size as was previously thought. The Wrights invented a wind tunnel balance that was able to measure lift and drag, and used it to develop a refined, successful airfoil. Nobody else came even close.

5. They developed their technology over a series of increasingly sophisticated prototypes. It's probably the first example of a directed research and development program.
To save you from having to watch the video, both contestants picked "Share", so they split the $250K equally.
A colleague of mine from university used to study various things using a C4 rotating mirror camera that was originally designed to film atomic explosions. The film is in a circle around a centrally located rotating mirror. Between the film and the mirror is a barrier with 140 lenses, and another barrier with 140 slits. As the image gets flung around by the mirror it's mostly projected onto the barrier with the slits, but sometimes falls on the slit. There it goes through the associated lens and gets focused on the film.

The camera takes 140 photos in a millisecond, giving a 7 micro-second inter-frame time. The experiment is done in complete darkness, and is set to trigger a flash of less than 1 milli-second. The camera has to be loaded and unloaded by feel in complete darkness.

The camera itself runs at a pretty high vacuum to allow the mirror to be reasonably large and spin at 60,000 rpm. The flash has to be pretty bright, and is fed by a 0.5 farad capacitor charged to about 10,000 volts.

The whole setup has to be driven from outside the room for safety reasons, but you don't want to be in there when the flash goes off. You can see it though the wooden door, and the room is noticeably warmer afterwards.

It's pretty cool.

Edit: Found a photo of it:

http://www.smf.phy.cam.ac.uk/fsp/Equipment/Cameras.html
The problem is the prisoners dilemma. It is in businesses own best interests to manufacture, design, etc, in the USA, but only if their competitors also do so. Instead they are engaging in destroying the purchasing power of their own customers (direct or indirect).

As a result, the only way this could be achieved would be by government intervention, but big business has that in their pocket, and the populace firmly convinced that globalization is good for them.
I guess I didn't elucidate my ideas properly. My point was _if_ you wanted to write an asm OS and learn from it, following in the steps of the masters might be more productive and enlightening. The PDP11 is sufficiently different from modern architectures, the scheduler as written in Lions relies on undefined CPU behaviour to work, that it wouldn't be a straight re-write; there is plenty to learn here. It would mean however that you would avoid plenty of unnecessary dead ends.
Yet more:

- http://www.zerohedge.com/article/algorithmic-crop-circles-re...

- http://www.zerohedge.com/article/its-not-market-its-hft-crop...

- http://www.zerohedge.com/article/todays-dose-crop-circle-quo...
Making Future Magic: iPad Light Painting
So I'm not the only one doing the happy dance? Sweet! I'm not calling it crazy dance anymore.
SOSYAL AĞ SİTELERİ SOSYAL AĞ SİTE SOSYAL AĞ WEB SİTELERİ
I know there are banks here in Sweden where you can get one-time VISA numbers for online purchases. You enter a maximum amount where you guess your purchase will end up, you get a VISA number and expiry date and all that, and it's valid for one purchase. If someone stores that number or tries to use it again, they're shit out of luck because the thing isn't connected to your account, you are not liable in any way.

However, those are only practical for occasional purchases, I'd assume you would run through the numberspace pretty quickly if everyone had that by default on their cards. But it's a neat idea. :-)
"Just learn to skip all that. Learn to only post when you have something to add. Only read an article when you actually care about the article. Only read the comments when you care both about the article and what others have to say about it."

Perfect advice. That pretty much applies to the entire Internet, not just HN.
Yes, but the card never leaves my hand, and since it's a challenge-response system, you can't skim the data off of it with a fake reader. This means that for someone to buy stuff in my name, they would need to steal my card and peek at my pin-code, and unless I'm a bumbling moron, I will notice if you steal my credit card.
Google supports Eclipse and have built several tools to enhance it (Source Android). Why would they undo all of it. There are more interesting stuff to do even for a big company like google.

My only problem with eclipse is that it's a bit slow, but I can always buy a powerful machine and nullify that.

Perhaps you need to explore eclipse more. There are several editor options, I use emacs and long time back I built a shared LAN editor plugin. I also customize the shortcuts/workspace a lot.
What, precisely, has the MPAA done that is so wrong?

Personally I'd take the copyright debate a lot more seriously if I could separate the folks who have legitimate and well thought-out points to make about the weaknesses of existing copyright law from the folks who just want to get stuff for free.
The behavior of a group and the behavior of individuals in that group aren't necessarily the same.

It's quite possible for the majority of people to vote based on agreement, and yet have the overall score of the comment be determined by those who vote by quality. Of the ones who vote by agreement, some will agree and some will disagree, and they end up cancelling each other out. The remaining comment score is made up of those who voted because it was a well-reasoned argument.

Reddit has the "Controversial" tab for this, though HN unfortunately doesn't make a distinction between a comment with 50 upvotes and 40 downvotes vs. one with 10 upvotes and 0 downvotes.
This sounds word-for-word like the arguments against online dating. Not saying they aren't valid points, just drawing the parallel.
I could image those seemingly-pointless patterns to be some sort of anonymous (since noone knows who the receiver is) steganographically-protected messaging. Well, I'm not serious.
I was just thinking about this the other day too. Some Swiss students posted a survey to Reddit asking things like, is karma beneficial or not? After thinking about it, it's not clear whether social news sites truly benefit from quantifying reputation with karma and other measures.

It creates an incentive to game the mechanic, makes it easier to game the mechanic with vote rings and bots and whatnot, causes people to comment and submit for the wrong reasons (build their karma rather than listen, learn, and contribute), and displaces the more natural, organic reputation from Web 0.99beta (Usenet, BBS, mailing lists, etc) where you actually had learn netiquette and figure out for yourself who knew what they were talking about and who didn't

Perhaps it's useful to some social networks, but I think HN is much more capable of getting along just fine without it.
For the same reason people ostracized by their social group might be sad or even suicidal. Most people cannot overcome the hard-wiring that cares about our relative social standing.
102 year old lens attached to digital camera
One thing I would like to see get addressed is how a popular sentiment can get upvoted so much. I feel that this undermines the importance of making an insightful or relevant comment. People can easily just speak the popular sentiment of the time and gain karma/have it highlighted.

However, this is an issue we can all try to address. Next time we see a comment that says "hackers rule", we can avoid being trigger happy about upvoting it but rather evaluate it in terms of its merits. As a corollary, I make it a focus of mine to upvote good comments that I disagree with, a particularly hard thing to do.
So wrong. Page-at-a-time is the /only/ way you use textbooks during class in higher ed. You're expected to have already done the reading before class; you don't /read/ the textbook during a classroom discussion. You use it to shore up an argument (see the proof on page XX) or visualize a point (see the diagram on page YY).

If the Kindle doesn't handle random seek well, it's no better than a textbook in that regard (textbooks also fail at random seek).
Actually I'm fairly sure it's only legal for them to hold you responsible to ~50 dollars in case of ID theft. Don't you think the CC companies would want to make you liable? Of course they would.
Interesting. How strictly can you filter the respondents using Mechanical Turk? And is it only by demographics, or also by interests and other criteria?
One way to look at it - What is eBay's largest category of products?

Surprisingly, it's clothing and accessories and yet most people associate them with collectibles. This is an opportunity.
This all sounds very wise...until you remember that Facebook itself was written by Zuckerberg when he wasn't yet out of college. Linux was written by Linus Torvalds when he was in college. Firefox was written by Blake Ross when he was a high school stduent. Chatroulette was written by Andrey Ternovskiy, another high school student.

Some people are just really good. And a startup makes them even better, and much faster than if they had decided to be "apprentices" or "interns" forever.

The thing about Diaspora is that UNLIKE Facebook or many other startups, its source code is on the internet for all to see. Do you think the original Facebook (written in PHP) didn't have security holes that would be transparent upon reading the source code? For that matter, do you think today's Facebook source would withstand attack if posted on the internet tomorrow?

The question answers itself.

If it achieves its potential, Diaspora will be hardened to a considerable extent because of the scrutiny that open source provides. This is not the time to slam these kids as wet behind the ears undergrads. Their code is pretty good for something written in 3 months. And if you really are that much wiser than them, they are accepting patches.
A "pataphysical program" would be an object diagram which took on a life of its own, loosing all touch with possible implementations, with considerable documentation, a CVS tree, a length license agreement, etc...
But they did evolve to extract useful energy from solar radiation. Assuming it would be easy to tweak photosynthesis is ridiculous.
There is an iterated version of the prisoner's dilemma and you don't need a clever AI to win. The name of the strategy is tit for tat and it basically wins over the long run.
Not quad core. Dual-core Intel Atom D525 1.83 GHz with GMA 3150 GPU on-chip integrated graphics.

GameSpy article on new C64: http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/111/1116901p1.html

Intel's CPU specs: http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=49490&processor=D52...

Wikipedia's list of Intel Atom CPUs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Atom_microprocess...
Having used Match.com for dating, I would never refer to another site I thought favorably of as "Match.com for x". Does that mean the response rate is low, and it's full of people desperate to make a commitment?
Chip and pin was broken pretty thoroughly early this year:
http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2010/02/11/chip-and-pin-i...
Would love to hear feedback about this startup from the HN startup gurus...
bitly has a fish
Beat me to it! There is also some decent coverage of Dark / Anti Patterns in the book "Designing Social Interfaces"
I say it's 50/50.

Some days you get Simon Johnson from the Baseline Scenario blog. He tends to do pretty insightful pieces. Other days you get Chana Walt and Caitlin Kenney, who make SNL's "Delicious Dish" skit look like Edward R Murrow.

All in all Planet Money did some great pieces during the crazy days of the meltdown and TARP and etc. It certainly helped me understand some of the stuff that was going on in the news with a lot more depth than the rest.

The quality has gone downhill somewhat. I think I stopped listening after hearing that back-of-the-throat-H in Chana crackle my car speakers for the 200th time.
Wonderful juxtaposition of old and new. Good photos!
They remind me of some of the Cellular Automate examples from Wolframs A new Kind of Science.
Stali - statically linked linux
Just rebranding or remarketing something isn't the same as actual innovation. The home computers of the 1980s, such as the C64, were fun in part because they represented something genuinely new and innovative in technology. Taking some PC hardware and slapping a Commodore sticker onto it isn't quite the same.
Ah, sorry, I see what you mean now.
They'd have to pay in lulz, of which they have none.
Reed did publish a findings report from their Kindle trials: http://web.reed.edu/cis/about/kindle_pilot/Reed_Kindle_repor...
A point and an idea:

(1) Modern classification algorithms like SVMs need some pretty hardcore math routines (SVMs require Quadratic Programming, which isn't trivial to implement correctly). Do you intend to implement these yourself? If so, that alone might be useful as a separate library, with the ML library built on top of it.

(2) I've been thinking about a JS distributed computing library for a long time -- sort of like Folding@Home, but instead of having to download a program, you just visit a website and let JS do the crunching (Ajax will pull and push data chunks). With modern JS engines, this has become more of a reality. So to bring it back to your question -- why not try to abstract as much of the math+algorithms from as many distributed computing projects as possible, and then build a generic JS library for doing distributed computation. You could have each distributed computing project as a benchmark -- i.e., start by implementing SETI@Home using your library, then move on to Folding@Home. I guarantee you won't be bored... ;)

Good luck, and I'm really glad people are pushing the capabilities of JS these days.

On a lighter note, can you imagine the derisive laughter if you had suggested this 10 years ago? :)
This also has the advantage of not bloating every HTML page with the jump list data. Using an external resource that is downloaded once at the time of pinning is clearly a technically superior mechanism and I'm surprised that it's not implemented like that already.
I agree with this. A large part of the addictiveness comes from knowing that every time you reload the page you might gain the tiny quantum of satisfaction that comes from seeing that number increment.

Hey pg, next time you're making changes to make HN a little less addictive, how about a "hidekarma" option, which would stop my karma appearing in the top right hand corner of every page?
Part of a good culture at startups is allowing the employees to evolve it themselves.

Our company is 5 people right now. Our lead engineer started buying friday beers for the team. Then I asked our CEO to have the company pay for it, and he did. We now have a beer and snack budget

One of the Junior engineers brought in a PS3. We destroy each other a couple of times a week playing Soul Calibur.

We've got a big long list of things we want to do to make our office a better place to spend time. It's empowering to be able to change your situation.
Then let us shed some blood and refresh the tree of liberty. Who cares about the MPAA. Let's DoS the government so we can fix it. For if we ignore the root of the problem we'll have to keep being mischievous to compensate for everything, and then what are we? We would no longer be civil, and disobedience would govern us. Seriously what's the problem? Government or one anomaly that is the MPAA? If it's the former then well need more than a little mischief. We'll need revolution (or at the least major reform)! If the latter, then why the mischief, go through proper channels.

Or maybe this is about having our constitutional right to bear cyber arms (and use at will). In which case I would encourage every cyber citizen to ignore the unjust anti-DoS laws and proudly use his/her low orbit ion cannons at will. that would be civil disobedience.

Sure we're angry at the MPAA. We can choose not to accept their terms (by not buying or pirating). Or if you don't believe in copyright, pirate the stuff and take on the legal consequences. But stooping to their level is dishonorable, and questionable in motive. Sure these dos guys are probably kids but we should encourage them to hold back and fight back honorably.
These are the same banks that denied phantom ATM withdrawals were possible and prosecuted people who reported losses for bank fraud.
Within days of introducing chip+pin (where you enter your atm PIN at the checkout to use the debit card) it was discovered that pin readers at all Shell gas stations, and a couple of major supermarkets had been compromised and were logging all the card details and pin of your ATM card.

The T+C of the card claims that since you must have revealed your PIN to somebody it's your liability.
Until there was a massive public outcry.
Karma is useful at the system level, but not for end users. You can use it to weed out the bad apples but it will only ever be a very superficial indicator of quality.