skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I envision a bot as a neural-network-based engine that adjusts its play based on fitting different opponents into different patterns. Honestly, the easiest way to develop a potentially-good bot would be to give it every piece of input and try to evolve a good player, as opposed to trying to develop all the logic manually. Such a bot is guaranteed to have some artifacts which cause it to respond to certain situations and generally play sub-optimally, basically making it look like a human player, anyways.
LoseThos O.S. v6.18 Released. Includes Chess with A.I.
Let's step back for a moment and think about what our goal should be in medicine. Suppose we could extend everyone's healthy life by 10 years. How much have we gained? Say there are 7 billion people. Have we added 70 billion man-years of healthy life? Not necessarily. After all, every year people experience 7 billion man-years of life. After 10 years, we'll have added 70 billion. So this great medical advance is the same as waiting 10 years! All we are really doing is speeding up the rate of accumulation of man-years. And even that is only temporary. After 10 years people will again be dying at the rate they are today (just 10 years older).

You could get the same speed-up of accumulating man-years by increasing the birth rate - more happy humans racking up experiences. But wait, the birth rate is falling! Is that a moral catastrophe? Yes, if you want to maximize the rate of accumulation of healthy man-years.

So these issues are complicated. It's too easy to focus on this personally. Sure, I want to live forever, and I'm taking steps to do so. But for the population as a whole, the calculus works out rather differently.
The source code isn't open at the moment, but that should change. The face tracker is a library called MariLena.
Here are photos from the conference: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1558264@N23/pool/
Probably wouldn't help -- loot that hits cactus gets destroyed.
But, in practice, how often does a service change an URI only, without changing the input or output parameters (causing you to have to re-factor your client anyway)?
interesting site. hope they add more schools because not everyone is a K-State fan.
The PC's High Water Mark
Things are better now as far as I know. See the link I included elsewhere in this discussion to learn about what Yelp did in the past.
flying carpets for the mind?
I like this sort of approach for community oriented captcha. Ask a question that anyone within the community would know or could easily find out but a general purpose spam bot or average person would be unable to solve.

If the community is profitable enough or becomes big enough some spammer will spend 15 minutes or 50 dollars on mechanical turk and find all the answers. As others have mentioned it is an arms race in the end. Back and forth each side upping the challenge.
See my other point. Does Sony have to build a line of proprietary PCs so that people can develop for the PS3?
My suggestion is to get an editor to look at that tutorial. It's fantastic that so much effort was put into presenting the language, but reading it is rather painful.

At best it's written like a oral lecture, at worst it's wordy, condescending, overuses of italics for emphasis, leads by the nose for no apparent reason, and has obvious exaggerations that aren't clarified.

The grammar is all fine and so is the general structure, but I suspect a good writer could help a lot with the remaining details.
Courts helping banks screw over home-owners
I'll have to read that article when I have some free time. Thanks for the link. :)

While I do like some of the messages and ideas Michael Pollan (author of linked article, plus Food Inc.) is promoting, I always take him with a grain of skepticism. He's correct sometimes, and incorrect or questionable others. A common symptom of someone who's not a doctor or researcher in the field.

I personally classify him in the same arena as Michael Moore. Not to be ignored, but instead to be questioned for every made claim, requiring non-cherry picked studies and scientific research to back him up.
Cygwin is GPL.

Distributing even a simple unmodified GPL library with your code is a huge PITA. Your app may not become GPL'd, but you still need to distribute a copy of the GPL with all its attendant "paperwork" and 3 year ftp servers and original sources, yada yada.
Cool. I agree, it'd be better to know who they are, but I like to stay as friction free as possible...

That's cool. I've heard good things about CI, but haven't used it. Back in my PHP days, it was always Zend... ugh.
Google Apps for your domain is awesome, except when it isn’t
Great work, but I think a library to do the opposite would be more useful.
Without getting into detail (or touching on the related copyright issues), I would sum this up as follows concerning the software patents at issue in this case:

Google is taking its cue, of all things, from the Supreme Court's Bilski decision, which upheld business method and software patents in general but which also gave lower courts a powerful tool with which to smash them if it liked - and that is to invalidate them as unpatentable "abstract ideas" if they did not satisfy the so-called machine-or-transformation test and if there were no other basis by which to remove them from the abstract-idea category.

Many here were deeply disappointed in the Bilski outcome but, take heart, that battle is not over yet. Even while rejecting the machine-or-transformation test as an exclusive test for saying that a particular business method meets the test for patentable subject matter, the Supreme Court nonetheless upheld that test as a useful indicator of whether something was patentable or not. If, for example, a software patent failed to meet that test, then a court could potentially conclude that it did not constitute patentable subject matter. What then? In all likelihood, a court would say, as did the Supreme Court in Bilski, that the challenged patent fails as constituting only an abstract idea, which is not patentable.

Courts have more and more been using the Bilski precedent as authority to strike down software and business method patents on abstract-idea grounds. Bilski pointed the way and many courts are following. (See, e.g., http://ipspotlight.com/2010/08/19/district-court-rules-inter...)

The Groklaw piece referred to in this article discusses this in more detail (see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20101111114933605). Moreover, in an August 13, 2010 piece (http://groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100813112425821), Groklaw reported that "Groklaw member Celtic_hackr went through [the Oracle software patents] and sees none that are tied to any specific machine."

With its latest filing, Google is revealing its strategy as one of taking on Oracle's software patents head on and asking the court to declare them invalid on the abstract-idea ground (among others). This is very aggressive and has potentially huge consequences.

Bottom line: Oracle can go fishing for opportunistic dollars but it will do so against Google only at a potentially devastating cost to its newly-acquired Sun assets. In the precatory words of Groklaw (in the item last cited above): "And may software patents crash into the ocean as an unintended consequence of this patent attack."
There are 2. It's Buchheit.
wine is not an emulator.
Nope, not "in other words". That's not even remotely close to what I said.
"Faster than C ... as most C programs being single threaded and ANI being inherently multithreaded."

in terms of South Park it is a Chewbacca argument.
Another example of it would be - "C is smarter than Python because most of programs in C is smarter than ones in Python." (C and Python choosen randomly as i have no idea about Python :)
Monitor Business Data from One Real-Time Dashboard with Geckoboard
Really, with just music files on from known good sources in an already fixed format - I'm seeing them put it in a caddy, rip the files dumped from their app via antivirus scrubbers to a network drive or other local HDD and then [unfortunatley] chuck it in the bin. Would that be too hard?

They'd perhaps need an intern for that as a short term project. After the initial c.900000 music file (100,000 albums) then uploading would probably be more feasible.

900000 tracks of 5MB (assuming lossy compression) at 10Mbps would take over 40 days of 24-7 uploading (not allowing for errors and outages and such). 10Mbps was still quite fast for uploads in 2003 I think (faster than the current average in the US according to DSLreports). S-ATA RAID0 write bandwidth was about 34MBps at the time, roughly 27 times faster than the network in-flow; I'll assume read was faster and so this is the limit for disk-to-disk transfer. Assuming shipping took a couple of days you'd expect to finish the transfer a month quicker.

I'd be interested in how it would be cheaper for Apple for the initial round to accept uploads only, especially given this retards the lead time (to selling the tracks) by a month or more.
Spinning it off into its own company might actually make a lot of sense. Anyone who doesn't think there's a huge, morale-killing war brewing inside Apple between the old-guard Mac cult and the young iOS Turks hasn't spent time around any large companies.
looks like a great app!! If you have a little savings and your job offer isn't too stellar, I'd say run with it. Assuming it contains a useful set of features now, focus on marketing what it already does and worry about replacing your co-founder as a secondary problem. Unless of course your co-founder was the one you were counting on to do the heavy lifting on marketing and early adopter customer support.
We tried going that route but it meant we didn't control enough of the stack to avoid issues related to updates etc.

Bugs would arise. Didn't work out.
Dengue Fever Strikes Miami: First Local Case in 50 Years
The web that time forgot
Amazon.com plans to hire more than 15,500 temporary workers
Agree, "you can't control what you don't measure".
I'm with you there...I like that Smarty covers up some of PHP's quirks, like htmlentities($var) vs urlencode($var) becoming {$var|escape:'html'} and {$var|escape:'url'} respectively.

There are also nice little shortcuts in Smarty, like wrapping templates in {strip}{/strip} to strip newlines and whitespace which would be tricky in PHP without using output buffering.
not only are they welcome, they're the majority, participating in about 80% of the hands dealt
See also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1892042

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1893619

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1893947
> his was also done on an old version that had maybe 40 levels to dig through.

If I recall correctly, Boatmurdered was played on the pre-Z level build. So there's only one height level.
What kind of bugs did you encounter?
* What is 3 + 12 / equal too? FAIL
before I got this mac, I used an old (currently 6 years old) thinkpad running bsd as my main computer. Flash video killed the performance of the machine.

Eventually I discovered that setting my browser (midori [1]) to identify always as mobile safari, I get far better performance and video that I can actually watch.

[1] http://www.twotoasts.de/
the rooster? FTW!
> Java isn't open until anyone can freely implement it.

This is the nub of the matter.
A personal anecdote: we tried advertising on Facebook to people aged 30+ who are interested in Catholicism (and other similar keywords) for http://BeadifulRosaries.com/ and had absolutely no luck at all.

We spent a lot of time crafting ads & landing pages but they didn't amount to much. Adwords destroyed them.

Active searching > passive clicking.
I actually have a dev box that's an older Athlon XP with 1 GB of RAM that is surprisingly useful for finding performance issues. Things that don't show up on my monster desktop show up -really- fast on the clunker.

I'm a firm believer that developers should have old hardware to test on. :)
By offering 20 defenses, Google is showing it intends to fight the case just as aggressively as Oracle. In another sense, they're not revealing much at all, but rather raising every conceivable objection now to keep their options open (as a case progresses, introducing a new argument if an existing one turns out to be flawed becomes problematic).

The most interesting thing - though I don't know enough to guess how far they will get with this one, is paragraph 3 under 'Defenses': '3. Each of the Patents-in-Suit is invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 101 because one or more claims are directed to abstract ideas or other non-statutory subject matter.' This particular argument would, I believe, invalidate most software patents if sustained at trial. I am not a lawyer, and especially not a patent lawyer, just a pre-law student with a hunch.

It will be interesting to watch this case unfold. Judge Alsup wants to retire from the bench and return to private practice, but he has a very good reputation for handling complex litigation cases (and explaining the legal issues clearly in his opinions); this one looks to be time-consuming, but would also boost his reputation significantly.

Edit: snap ;-)
I've been programming 40 years, so there. Here are some he missed:

- Keep at least two rubber bands around your punched card deck. It doesn't take too many times trying to put your cards back in order after they fall on the floor to learn this.

- Adding a pastry when you submit your job to the operator may mean the results will come out fifteen minutes earlier or more.

- Keep your paper tapes in a waterproof box!

- In Fortran 66, try not to GOTO a GOTO that goes to another GOTO. Keep that code readable.

- There's always room for Easter Eggs in games.
Ah, flip my comment around, then. Thanks for the correction, I didn't notice!
Ask HN: Building momentum for a localized marketplace
Getting traffic on a localized site is hard enough, but we've seen with Groupon and other sites that it's pretty doable if you have the right pull, especially from the urgency of the deal.

So I've built this amazing localized marketplace (skyara.com) that has gotten extremely positive feedback across the board and a good amount of press (initial traffic spike), the only problem is given that we're focused on SF, only a fraction of the traffic is SF while the rest is across the country (currently not useful). Our return rate is incredibly high, but our localized growth rate is just sluggish.

Given most web start-ups are able to leverage a national scale given it's web, I'm struggling to figure out how to build marketing campaigns centered locally. Some of my ideas are holding localized events, similar to the Yelp elite events back in the day when they just started. Other thoughts are using contests and giveaways to spur more local WOM and action or possibly engaging a PR firm to help build local awareness.

Curious to see everyone's thoughts on building up this type of presence, I guess in the same areas of Craigslist and used car online marketplaces.
Before people celebrate, remember that Google's arguments are negotiations via the legal system, not a battle-to-the-death over principle.

If Oracle offers Google and its ecosystem a reasonable deal, in which Google publicly acknowledges that Oracle's patents are valid, the matter will be resolved -- and Oracle's patents will be stronger than ever, presumptively, because they were legally tested by a dispute with a deep-pocketed adversary who eventually agreed to license them.

Compare also: when first sued by the Author's Guild in a class action over book-scanning, Google originally argued they had a fair-use right to scan/index the books without prior permission. When a settlement deal favorable to Google's continued operations was proffered, Google stopped fighting for the general fair use principle, and instead has been defending the benefits of their settlement agreement. [1] What should others who want to scan/index books do? Now, Google suggests they should get explicit permission beforehand, using the precedents Google set. [2]

I don't blame Google for making necessary practical legal compromises for their mission, but I also don't put them up on a pedestal, as if they were a disinterested champion who will establish equal rights for everyone. They'll pursue their organizational interests, as with any other ambitious organization.

[1] http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1828

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/opinion/09brin.html?pagewa...

"If Google Books is successful, others will follow. And they will have an easier path: this agreement creates a books rights registry that will encourage rights holders to come forward and will provide a convenient way for other projects to obtain permissions. While new projects will not immediately have the same rights to orphan works, the agreement will be a beacon of compromise in case of a similar lawsuit, and it will serve as a precedent for orphan works legislation, which Google has always supported and will continue to support."
Huh. I'm reading over the docs right now, and while I don't see anything about actually playing the game, they expose an interface for betting on hands. That's pretty interesting.
'Smart' Meters Draw Complaints of Inaccuracy
I'm not really sure what the big deal is here. I just tried this, and the only addresses it was able to import were for people with their email addresses set to public (or at least visible to me).

Has Facebook patched the issue already, or does Mike really think it's a security issue to do something automatically that you're already able to do manually or with a scraper?
Some aspects of it look copied to me - the class's 10 fields are in identical order. Some parameters to the function look lifted straight from code generated by disassembling bytecode (flag flag1 set set1). However, these may be explainable by some other means.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=permutations+of+10+item...
Maybe they're talking about price. I mean, a lot of today's supercomputers are just made of as many commodity processors and somewhat-specialized interconnects as fit in the budget. But in the future, you can have $50,000,000 worth of computing equipment in a 1" cube.
Or send it to Instapaper.

There are very few websites that I prefer reading in the original form, as opposed to in one of the above formats. I wonder what that says about the state of web design.
and the Google client was made mostly by @paul Buchheit, who just left Facebook for YC.
Cambridge/Somerville - Porter Square, Harvard Sq, Central Sq

Boston - Allston/Brighton/Brookline.
This should actually mean I don't need to visit facebook.com anymore if there is indeed POP3 or IMAP access, because (presumably) they will send full messages to Titan rather than the current "you have a new message NOW CLICK ME", and POP3 access to Titan means that I can get Facebook messaging through GMail.

The catch is probably going to be a lack of SMTP...
Sadly, because it is fan fiction, it will never be published.
Command line (bash) interface to Rackspace Cloud Servers.
Link Building Tips for Personal Blogs
Very interesting. However, the time frame doesn't work in this example, those studies showed reduced performance for a week, and then back to baseline or slightly above.
Get back to me once someone ports Python to it. :)
"we will be adding pieces and parts of our Java SE 6 implementation to the public project, and will cut over from using an X11-based AWT to a Cocoa NSEvent-based one with a new OpenGL-backed graphics layer."

http://lists.apple.com/archives/Java-dev/2010/Nov/msg00104.h...
Fun, but the good thing about slow computers is that they're also the cheapest; it's far more economical to just buy an old box for a couple hundred dollars (or even cheaper).
the author mentions he bought the domain from a domain name squatter...

When I buy domains from such folk I always do some due diligence to check things like:

* The complete whois history of the domain (who had it before they 'squatted' it - might there be a trademark issue, etc). Worth paying $10 for.

* Is the domain on any spam blacklists, corporate firewall black lists (adult content, gambling etc), etc

* What kind of search pollution does the domain have

... looks like I should add "is domain already on Google Apps"? And if so, negotiate the Google Apps account be shut down by the current owner as part of it the escrow fulfillment requirements. Thanks for this heads-up!

To the OP: If the expiry doesn't run it's natural course, I would contact Don Dodge at Google who is a community-focused executive who runs Google Apps. See if you have any mutual contacts via LinkedIn otherwise email me for an intro (see my profile for addy)
network latency rather than bandwidth had a greater affect on the speed of browsing

This has been well-known for a while. I present to you the TCP throughput equation:

http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3448.html#sec-3.1

The fundamental reason for this result is that the rate that TCP's congestion control algorithm increases the congestion window is tied to round trip time. Congestion window determines how many packets can be "in the air" at any given time, and starts from 1-3 packets in modern OS's.

Moreover, packet loss dramatically reduces TCP performance, and this can happen whenever traffic traverses a congested router along its path: once the router queue is full, packets get dropped, and your congestion window is cut in half and grows slowly afterwards. It might be surprising to some, but the effect of queueing delays can often dominate the effects of propagation delays due to the physical distance that a packet has to traverse.

I know this type of measurement study has been done numerous times; I'm blanking on more recent ones but I know for instance the Rocketfuel project [1] from 2002 did perform large-scale Internet measurements that included link latencies from various vantage points on the network.

[1] http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/networking/rocketfuel/
Mobile Commerce Is The Future, But Customer Acquisition Is Street By Street
What about .NET? By your logic, applications written for the .NET CLR don't support Windows (XP) either.
It's contrived because the goal of the story was to get people to think about metaethics. It's still pretty good for entertainment value though.

b) was a reference to http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/

There was some discussion of this when the chapter was posted. The rape idea was really weird, but it made more sense after reading some of the discussion:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/y8/interlude_with_the_confessor_48/q...
http://lesswrong.com/lw/y8/interlude_with_the_confessor_48/q...
http://lesswrong.com/lw/y8/interlude_with_the_confessor_48/q...
Ask HN: What to do with Angel Money?
I noticed that many start-ups put a lot of emphasis on raising large amounts of money through Angels and VC's. What can you/should you use this money for?
It's just Arrington being an asshat, you've been able to do this since... forever. In fact I saw this exact guide (using Yahoo) 3 days ago on another site, pretty sure this is Mike recycling someone else's content.

March 2010: http://www.labnol.org/internet/export-email-addresses-from-f...
This article, while quite a different point of view, has a problem. It keeps referring to "illegal" services like Napster, KaZaA, maybe others.

I don't think they were really "illegal" when they started, they only became illegal along the way, right? And I'm not even sure that "illegal" is a good word to describe them, given that copyright infringement is pretty much a civil action, only criminal in some extreme cases.
Aol To Unveil New Aol Mail On Sunday
Very good =Average+Help
I sense a discrepancy,like 90 % of drivers think they are good :P
Interesting, if he knows what he's doing. This doesn't fill me with hope however:

Building main executable...
src/types.cpp: In member function 'TypeStatus::operator uintptr_t() const':
src/types.cpp:1514: error: cast from 'Type*' to 'unsigned int' loses precision
Wish I could find a single page to read offline.
Be polite to the cab drivers. Ask first. You don't have to be an asshole just because the city ordinance allows you to be one.