skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How convenient to ignore the fact that exhaustive search is completely computationally infeasible in most practical situations.

Genetic algorithms are heuristics, yes. There is no guarantee they will work. That doesn't mean they haven't been successfully applied in a very wide variety of domains. The facts of their successes clearly mean nothing to you, though. "Not guaranteed to work" is not the same as "not useful as evidenced by hundreds of papers describing real-world applications."

It takes a special kind of boorish ignorance to respond to a post where the guy comes up with a Starcraft 2 build that is "non-obvious" and pretty strong and whine about how a metaheuristic doesn't work/didn't work when you tried it.
Study shows Facebook most active Wednesdays at 3pm ET
I was replying to the "middle ground part", and Steve made it pretty clear touch on a desktop / non-tablet portable was not in the cards. I was making no comment on the various advantages of touch / direct manipulation / pointing devices.
Dvorak caught on like Esperanto "caught on". If you're a user yourself you probably know other users, but otherwise you can go your whole life and not encounter it. I doubt more than a few percent of people would even know what Dvorak means, let alone use it.

The only reason there's OS support is that another key binding is trivial. How many computers come with a Dvorak keyboard as an option? That's much less trivial and would be a sign of critical mass.

Google pretty much agrees, there's a paltry 144k results for Dvorak:

http://www.google.com/search?q=dvorak+%2Bkeyboard

Swype already has 325k. Not bad considering Dvorak had a 70+ year head start.
The question is not whether two wrongs make a right, but whether the first wrong will provoke someone to commit the second wrong. The argument may be 'horseshit' as a moral justification according to nearly everyone, but a small proportion of any oppressed group is likely to see it differently.

We should not condone violence against civilians, but we also should not condone the oppression of any group, and we should recognise that oppression can lead to violence, without saying that oppression is a justification for violence.
Great talk indeed. Note that most (all?) the material covered in the talk is available from the tutorials referenced on the README of the project on github: http://github.com/nathanmarz/cascalog

And the demo project: http://github.com/nathanmarz/cascalog-demo
What evidence do you have please? Seriously, there are just so many conjectures here. What Al Quaeda fundamentally likes or dislikes for instance, may have nothing to do with the actual reason pushing a young suicide bomber to accept the task. Many known cases of westerners becoming terrorists show a personal history of extreme religious views, which this sort of customs treatment can only serve to exacerbate, no?
I feel like I'm being helpful if I point out a UI bug in another HNer's product, because that might help them to correct it and make it better.

I feel like it might be necessary to point out a bug in a product I've tried to use, as explanation for why I don't use that product (when the discussion is topical.)

I might be inclined to complain about the Resumator bug, if it so affected me, but only after I've used it to apply to the job I wanted, and definitely not instead of.

Regardless of exactly who is being hypocritical, the message you're sending is that the annoyance of using Resumator (a service that DeviantArt did not build) is greater than your desire for this job.

If I were the potential employer, I would assume that means one of a few things, all of which are harsh:
- You're too lazy to submit your own resume, and would prefer someone contacted you in whatever manner most convenient to you
- You're too good to submit your resume, and would prefer someone contacted you in whatever manner is most convenient to you
- You don't like the job that much, but would definitely take a paycheck if someone who was willing to do the job for you would also pay you as though you'd done it
- You're FAR too detail-oriented, refusing to lower yourself to the standards of a poorly designed resume submission method.

You can extrapolate out the rest if you like, as an exercise to the reader.

For what it's worth, I don't necessarily believe any of those things, but one of those is the impression I got reading your previous posts in this thread.

Yes, submitting for a job is an annoyance, and can be time consuming. It's part of the process.
Wooo. Popular Science is all I had to read when I was a kid. It's precisely the reason I got into science and engineering.

Now I have something to read for the next year :)
I've always wondered about the human body. Right now I am studying engineering, but eventually I would like to delve deep into anatomy and biology. An automobile can theoretically run forever as long as it is properly maintained, even if that means replacing major parts - engine, transmission, even frame (but at a certain point the repairs are no longer financially feasible). Why then, can't the human body last forever? As long as we are able to make repairs and replace parts when they fail, I don't understand why people have to die.

With all of the knowledge and advanced technology of today, something tells me we should be able to figure out how to stop aging - or at least slow it. We should be able to cure cancer. We should be able to cure AIDs. We should be able to regrow missing appendages or failed body parts. Am I the only one that thinks about these things? I would love to get involved in this field one day. I know there have been great advancements in these areas, but it seems like there is so much more that we could be doing.
Actually, the US government probably could get Microsoft to make a change / add something a lot quicker than it could from the Linux community (money is a fine leverage). Many support organizations don't exactly get permission from Microsoft to bid.
Exactly. Failing to go through puberty is a developmental problem and it is doubtful that this child will live any longer than an ordinary human being, assuming her condition doesn't present complications that kill her long before that. I don't know anything about this Walker fellow, but from what I get from this article, he strikes me as a charlitan.
I'm not sure I would agree with the implication that this is the best time to post something. From the viral launches I've run (most recently through youtube.com/laughpong), around 10am ET tends to work really well (don't have enough data to talk about days, but Wednesday sounds pretty reasonable).

The advantage here is that at 10am ET most people on the east coast are at work, not asleep or commuting. If you can get a decent enough spike there, about an hour later people from the Central time zone will be in that same position, and then an hour later people from Mountain time. Then by 10am Pacific time there's another spike from Pacific time and from people on the East Coast starting to take lunch.

The "lunchtime spike" rolls from east to west coast like your initial spike, and by the time it hits the West coast, your "after work" spike is about to start.

By timing it right, you can potentially catch and ride all three waves of people who are looking for things on the internet. Just like in surfing, if you can catch the wave just right you can ride it for a long, long time. An essentially whole-day spike is a lot better than a massive spike over a very short period of time.
Really depends on the department. I have seen some that are almost "we already picked the winner" type stuff.
Who knows for sure that this isn't even a rare condition? In theory, there could be people living among us that are centuries old and might look like 20-30. If I was, I wasn't going to tell everybody. If you travel a lot people won't notice your condition. I believe this is just proof that the condition exists, not the magnitude of it.
Scary :( I wonder if officaldom gets the irony of acting like this? I mean this is exactly what terrorists set out to cause.
A bullet is an explosive? Really? http://xkcd.com/651/
The video never shows it in use. That's because even after you learn it, it's going to be much slower than typing. "Just like handwriting"... guess what; handwriting sucks http://lumma.org/microwave/#2007.07.12.2
Mac OS X/iOS Software Test Pilot

Seattle, WA
(Sorry, no telecommute/remote work opportunities right now.)

Us: a Seattle software company that's been around since 1989. Back then, we wrote code for NeXTStep; these days, we make highly-regarded productivity applications for Mac OS X & iOS.

You: someone who can make guesses about how a website or application is going to fail, prove that you're right, and then communicate it clearly and effectively to the folks who need to fix it. Ideally, you also have the ability to predict the things about our products that will confuse or dismay a new customer.

As an example of what we do, imagine we have four months to write, test, and ship two applications on a brand-new hardware platform (with no specimens of said hardware in the building) while still updating and maintaining our released products on both platforms. Could you keep up without going totally crazy in the process?

If so, we'd like to hear from you — we're looking to expand our QA department by adding another Software Test Pilot.

For more information about us, including how to apply for this job, please check out the "Company" section of our website, which is at
http://www.omnigroup.com/company/.
Technically, to the US government Windows is open source.
I didn't use a few of these websites in the early days, but for the ones that I did, they had one thing in common. They were easy to use.
I find it surprising Craigslist is missing from this list.

If you take a closer look, all of given examples have really polished up their design over time as they became more and more successful (well... except myspace that is).
Odesk isn't for freelancers to share gigs with their network (other freelancers) it's for Companies to hire freelancers.
That's a little tricky - the earth being round and all.
You can't put a satelite in orbit around New York (in spite of it being the center of the universe - orbital mechanics doesn't work like that)

Your only real option is how close to the equator you orbit them - you can get away with about 3 sats if you only want to cover the region very near the equator, unfortunately only poor people live there.
As you improve coverage further north you have to add more satelites in higher inclination orbits. Iridium already limits this - the coverage in the far north is very poor, which is ironic since it's one of the few places where you really need sat phones!
"one of the big problems is that the heuristics for a heuristic algorithm must be designed by with human insights."

Note that this isn't really true--the point of Lenat's Eurisko system referenced upthread was to have it come up with new heuristics and measure how effective they were.
I am so glad someone else caught this.
I don't see how mechanical_fish was attacking Nitramp, and he most certainly did nothing to silence him. Could you explain what mechanical_fish did that was inappropriate?
Fortunately it's completely sarcastic. The only thing more outrageous than that customs officer's behavior is the implication that a person's religious beliefs could ever be used as justification for preventing or controlling their entry into the United States.
Do you think white Christians who have been to Idaho should be prevented from buying fertilizer or renting trucks? Just in case they're going to repeat Oklahoma City? If not, I suspect you need to examine your priorities.

Your attitude will be the downfall of this nation. I'm not kidding. It is killing us. Please stop. Read something. Learn about the world. Get outside and realize the sun is still shining and we still have Ferris wheels and there are no freaking terrorists trying to kill you in your bed. Really. I am up to here with this crap.

Do you really understand the meaning of freedom so poorly? Sometimes you have to man up and accept a truly vanishing amount of danger in order to have a world you can live in like a real human being. Read up on road statistics, or infant mortality, or malaria, or actual wars in other places, then come back to me and tell me we have to toss out the entire freaking point of America in order to combat something none of us is ever actually going to see, but whose political fallout certainly does benefit a few powerful people.

Benjamin Franklin would probably have been mildly surprised that America lasted so long - but he saw clear as day how it was going to end. I just wish it hadn't been in my lifetime.
You don't think it's impressive? Go do it. I believe these guys are profitable with a headcount of 20-30 people (many of whom are content moderators). They've presumably built an ad-sales machine that works, a moderation machine that works, and build some fairly sophisticated custom software as well as the business analytics software behind it to measure/improve their sites. They've also built a "market testing" machine where they launch speculative blogs and measure their success/viability.

These guys have a GREAT growth curve and healthy margins- rare in the content world. Heck, look at Reddit. Great company, soaring page views, barely profitable.

I'm sure you're similarly unimpressed with Yelp? Threadless? Digg? Reddit?
This is tricky, because in the case of OpenOffice there are people saying "I would write code if it had a chance of being accepted, but I don't since I know it won't be." We're about to find out if they're for real.
I'm not sure what you mean by "informing public policy", but if the paper was to inform, they would provide summary of facts and facts only. The paper says it is trying to estimate drug harms using some set of arbitrary "harm parameters". I am saying you can't objectively estimate harms with an MCDA analysis. You're not going to get anything objective out of this unless you're framing it against an exact set of decisions you have to make. All you're going to do is find one group's interpretation. Although MCDA is systematic, and a lot of it including the ranking is generated automagically once you have everything set, overlaid with some "sophisticated" (Nutt's words in the interview) overtones, it is entirely subjective.

If you wanted, I could give you an MCDA showing cocaine is more harmful to society just by tweaking a few criteria a tiny bit. I could add a practicality criteria in that drinking alcohol is a cultural practice in many places, or I can separate two forms of drinking, responsible drinking and irresponsible drinking. There are so many ways to slice it that if you don't have specific decisions you're evaluating against, the whole analysis is useless.
It’s somewhat amusing and nice to see that Aubrey de Grey who is one of the few people on this planet seriously working on immortality and who always had to fight for acceptance is the skeptic in this article.
Also, as the bombing of Tokyo showed, one didn't need an atomic bomb to flatten a Japanese city of the time. Japanese housing was very flimsy (probably because of the earthquake risk; you either build something tat withstands a quake, or something that will not hurt you when it falls down on you). Bamboo and rice paper provide very limited coverage from any blast, burn very well, and leave almost nothing.
Why don’t people use the actual ± symbol in the age of Unicode? It’s a quick Google search, or Option-Shift-=, away. The title was inscrutable to me, but 7±2 would have made immediate sense.
As the person largely responsible for the implementation of the current design, let me put it this way: you did notice that one of those positions is for a designer, right?
My 3rd manpack will ship this weekend. Found via HN.
Clamato: A Smalltalk Dialect for JavaScript
Lots of questions about what we do. sorry for not being clear, I was on my way out the door.

We are a small agency (2 people currently) and we just have too much work, most of what I'm willing to share is small business websites, testing, documentation. I also have some work around managing our deployment that I'd like done.
I do not agree with that, but that is my opinion.
The reason for my opinion is that I find Reddit more and more political, mainstream (nitwits are more and more starting to come up there) and dumbing down (less links to interesting articles and websites, more links to stupid imgur pictures which are often used for SEO scams).
When I came on there years ago it looked a bit like HN but more diverse where HN is mostly entrepreneurial and programming.

I think interesting sites are:
http://www.groklaw.net/
http://www.h-online.com/
http://www.mondaynote.com/
http://www.project-syndicate.org/
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.corante.com/
http://www.metafilter.com/
http://arstechnica.com/
http://www.techcrunch.com/
Are you going to catalog / rate the apps that get submitted, ala Rails Rumble? That would be exciting, I think.
I am responding under the assumption that you are targeting generic small business that can be found in every town.

Do you have any friends/family who work in small business? Have they tested it? Have they been sold on it? My advice is to approach somebody who is a "real life" connection, offer them two to four months free if they participate as a test group that reports back about their experiences. Work with them in person through the installation / adoption process, noting any areas of poor UX in the application or anything confusing in the documentation. If it seems like it is an error that is likely to occur again, strongly consider fixing it.

If the first company isn't bullish on your project, find another. If you can't give your application away for free to people you know, it is unlikely to appeal to strangers.

Don't put your eggs in the one basket. Try to connect with as many companies that you can within these few initial months. Once you are reasonably confident in your ability handle troubleshooting in person, can explain what benefit your app brings based on real case studies and have at least
a couple paying customers, maybe you should consider writing to industry bloggers, pitching your new project.

Get referrals from the people who work in small business to others who they think could benefit.Your success depends on how you are able to tap into the very competitive small business market. If you don't have a huge marketing budget, banner ads are not likely to go far. AdWords are more reasonable, but consider targeting them to people in your area and niche yourself there before thinking national.

You should think in terms of companies, not individual users. Small businesses will have between 5 and 50 employees. How many people from each business will be using your product? How many licenses do they get for your price?

Good luck.
WPA enterprise allows a separate (changing) key for each user, typically what you get from an RSA token. Once it gets to the AP, it's then clear text (assuming HTTP) over the rest of the internet until it hits your (HTTP) service provider.

If you have control over the internet between the AP and your server, then you're safe. If you don't, then how safe you are depends on how much you can trust the owner of each router along the way. In general, you should be okay, except that every now and then you might end up on an untrusted router, and it's then game over.
Or .... buy enough stock to force changes in the company :)
Also, Hiroshima was built mostly out of wood and paper -- supposedly, the fires killed a huge number of people who weren't killed directly by the bomb.
Google TechTalk on integrating R
Just remember that on a Mac, which is the post's focus, Dropbox doesn't sync any metadata at all. This has important implications for Spotlight searching, preservation of text encoding formats, custom application bindings for documents, and many more things. You are in for a world of pain if you try to sync your entire home directory using this scheme.
Marco is one of the most consistently insightful thinkers out there. Glad to see him getting recognized like this.
> Expecting to bring those things back from Afghanistan and just walk through is ridiculous.

My reading of the story has the CBP agent pulling him aside solely on the fact that he visited Afghanistan and Pakistan. They did not uncover the other items until they thoroughly searched his pack while already in the interrogation room.

Edited to add (from the story): "Once inside the room, the Officer began to inspect the contents of my backpack."
Only if those proper nouns have twitter accounts. ;)
I check things out on Amazon not for the savings, but for the reviews. And that's content not created by Amazon. I guess I stick around for the recommendations - but that's also generated by Amazon analysing other people's actions.
That looks like the summary I was after, thanks!
I wish we could leave people like this alone, why does this kid have to endure a life of being a lab rat?

Also, giving "mankind the gift of eternal life" is a flawed idea. Simply by improving our medical science which has given people a longer lifespan has caused a ridiculous amount of problems.

There are too many people on this planet and by creating more and more that live longer and longer we are sacrificing the longevity of the human race as a whole, not to mention the other life on this planet.
Socket.IO 0.6 released
This is an appealing program and makes it legitimate to get paid for vuln research. The other group that pays for vulnerabilities is the zero-day initiative. Here: http://www.zerodayinitiative.com/

That said, since we're kind of a free-market bunch of folks here, what do you think these vulnerabilities are worth on the black market? Just curious if the prices are competitive vs. selling to Russian black hats.
Absolutely...we have a bunch of fun stuff coming in this vein in the next week or two.
Even though I agree with you, I have to point out:

You don't know that. Nobody does.

We don't know exactly how aging works and this theory needs to be tested as well. If we stop research because we just know something, we'll never get anywhere.
> but I don't think we should live oblivious to threats just because things don't blow up more often

But how do you have so much certainty there are threats? To me, I just can't reconcile this assertion that there are terrorists out there intent on killing us with the fact that they never do, despite it being comically simple to do so.

One might counter with the argument that the cargo plane bombs are an example of the ongoing threat. Perhaps, I will admit this is a possibility. But again, why are essentially all terrorist attacks never successful, when they would be so obviously easy on some of these large, soft targets? Perhaps these interceptions are something else? Impossible of course,
All the android phones on all the carriers outsell 1 phone on 1 carrier....what a surprise.

I want to see the updated data on what % of app dollars are spent on what OS today.
I hadn't thought about it. Can't change the HN title now.
Is the article accurate about Marco adding a $4.99 a month Pro subscription? I hadn't heard of this before - and plenty of us have already paid for the iPhone/iPad app.

Is this a change of plan for Instapaper or just misreporting by FastCompany?
Yes, but Andrew put the two of them in touch, and he posted the story, so he's reading.
Unedited HD footage shot with the Nokia N8 mobile phone
HN article title is wrong - article mentions only the iPhone numbers, not those for all iOS devices (iPhone+iPod Touch+iPad).
Mountain View, CA. RethinkDB (http://www.rethinkdb.com/jobs).
Hard systems problems. Fun people. Good pay. Internships year round. Join us, together we will rule the [database] universe.

This is everything we stand for: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1747713
Sure thing. That is another way to hone in on the center. Some sort of tactile gravity well implementation. I think that if 5-ways on candy bar phones were actually joysticks instead of 5 buttons this may work better. And it could definitely work on devices with mini-trackballs.