skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just bought a house (chronicled it at http://blackrimglasses.com). My last townhouse was also automated. Here's the general setup:

We use Insteon for the automation system, hooked into a MacMini running Indigo from Perceptive Automation.

I have the system setup so it has "states" that the house is in, ie: home, baby in bed, etc. The "actions" you can do are contingent on conditions. So if my wife and I are closing up the house, but the baby is asleep, it will keep the light near his room from going on.

For whole home audio we have a Sonos, with five zones, including our patio. The Mac Mini system serves the audio. It also has AirVideo transcoding on it for our iPads. We use iphones and ipads to control everything (two of each).

When we bought the house, we put Cat-6 in every room, so most everything runs off hard line Ethernet. We have three dual band Airport Extreme's in the house for wireless.

The thermostat and sprinklers run off the insteon device and are controlled by the MacMini. Our stereo (Denon 3808CI) has a web and socket interface, so that is controlled remotely fairly often.

Our DirectTV's have the "whole home DVR" thing, which uses a MOCA coax adapter on each box to create its own network. We have two DVR's and two regular recievers.

I haven't yet done cameras and such, or motion detectors but we plan on it. Currently for occupancy sensing, I use a hack to get the locations of our iPhones from MobileMe.
Intuition and rationality are reflexive. At all times one informs the other. Some people prefer to lead or focus on rationality, where their rational mind trains their intuition, and some lead or focus on their intuition, where their intuition is checked by their rational mind.

I don't believe the two approaches can be meaningfully separated, but some people try to do so. Which can only cause problems as each belongs to a different type of problem. One doesn't rationalized where a lobbed ball will land when going to catch it, but a non-expert doesn't intuit where a mortar will land upon firing it.
Great idea. I think I will try this also.
New Ways Bankers Are Spying on You
I am grokking ruby, but it's difficult getting used to everything at the same time.

I definitely am not l33t enough to understand your email address.
Thanks ayb. Will be in touch. There is no email in your profile...just a twitter link. Do you mind either sending me an email (marcamillion @ gmail) or putting your info in your profile.

Thanks.
Unfortunately, not in the bay area. International based.
"But as the years passed and hardware became faster the relative slowness of dynamic languages became less relevant, while their advantages in programmer productivity became much more relevant."

Let's not discount the fundamental advances to compilation and performance of "dynamic" languages of relatively recent years. Just look at Javascript.

Dynamic languages look much less amenable to optimization at first than static languages, but many new techniques have been discovered, and sometimes there are even optimizations that are only possible to do at runtime if the environment supports it.
They're both important; beware of trusting the decision making of anyone who suggests otherwise. Rational analyses are almost always by necessity incomplete. There will always be assumptions we think are true that turn out to be false, facts we're unaware of, options we don't consider, or externalities we're oblivious to. Intuition often picks up on those things that we can't obviously articulate, or recognizes patterns that aren't otherwise apparent. On the other hand, people often use "intuition" as an excuse for shooting from the hip, justifying their predispositions, ignoring dissent, or simply being too lazy to do a rigorous analysis.

There's no substitute for doing your best to rationally analyze something, gather data, analyze arguments, etc., and not doing so in a particular situation is simply sloppy decision making. But that's merely one input into a decision making process that can also include things that fall under the category of intuition but which can't easily be articulated: ideas that give you a bad feeling or make you nervous, gut feelings about things, consideration of taste and aesthetics.

In the end there's no substitute for having good judgment, and good judgment and wisdom come from being able to use both rational arguments/data and intuition/feelings to arrive at the best choice.
I'd wager that people you see with "small sites, forums and blogs that can't scale easily to small numbers using relational DBs" are doing something wrong and they're probably going to have a long road in the NoSQL world as well. Just because you can make a query return the result set you want doesn't mean you've written the right query/schema design.

I assure you that there are plenty of performant sites running quite well on traditional SQL solutions that are FAR, FAR larger than those small blogs serving small traffic numbers that are having issues.
+1

The Arduino is basically a prototyping platform, which makes use of an Atmel microprocessor - namely the ATmega range (ATmega8, ATmega168, ATmega328 etc..)

The Arduino _isn't_ a microprocessor - a microprocessor is placed into an Arduino board. The Arduino provides a way to interface with the microprocessor (via hardware ports, and a software interface).
This is what I was thinking as well as I followed this thread. What we call "intuition" is often a conclusion from our subconscious mind based on cues and observations of which we may not be explicitly aware.

In other words, our mind is constantly watching and learning, and then matching that data to patterns we've observed in the past; not all of this information reaches the front of our consciousness.

Of course, if it's subconscious, it is easy to get misled, or match patterns inaccurately since there is no rigorous examination involved about the underlying assumptions.
The fluid nature of HTML is fantastic as well. Insert a div and the other stuff moves to make way for the new element. Remove it and things pop back. That sort of thing is a major PITA with standard Cocoa views.
Toys are indeed great, but don't try and 'win' with them. The rational approach with toys is to play with them.
I have two guesses for why C++ garners less hatred than expected:

(1) Lots of people who would have been writing C++ 5-10 years ago have moved over to Java.

(2) Lots of people writing C++ are actually writing C with classes.
Is Social Networking Disclosing Your Trade Secrets?
Good to hear you're more than 3 years old ;-)
Well, I can agree with this part:

The main thing is to have a process more than a single particular setup. I've tried all sorts of home-built systems, including water cooled, phase change, etc... The conclusion I've reached is that upgrading every 6 months is more important than trying to get the fastest possible system at one point of time. The time and energy I used to spend optimizing my hardware I now spend making sure it's easy to swap out my current machine for a new machine with the least downtime.

Not so much from the perspective of constant hardware upgrades, but from the perspective of being able to translocate and go (and, presumably, also back up an entire environment as easily).
Email sent :)
Javascript Voxel Editor
empiricism has the potential benefit of including unconsidered factors, or exposing misleading priors. Cache locality is a great example of a possibly overlooked confounding factor.

there is no pure or complete ordering of reason, intuition or empiricism. Wisdom is knowing when each approach is the best fit, and understanding that even the best approach selection heuristic is not 100% reliable.
How "tryptomine" caused a near Death experience
It is very important to know which drug is a SLEEP drug because sometimes doctors , knowingly or unknowingly, don't tell us that they are giving us a sleep drug (like tryptomine).
So a friend of mine took this drug and fell asleep on the steering wheel while driving. He was very lucky that nothing happened to him while his car crashed!
It raises a question that how much should we know about our prescription drugs?
OOP in a purely FP context
Every now and again I'll remember that guy who said he was going to build a Stack Overflow clone in a weekend. I still chuckle.
I've written an ORM for clojure (unreleased). It's 1k LoC, which is huge in clojure.

Let me tell you, I'm sick of writing ORMs, I'm sick of using buggy, abstraction-leaking ORMs. I'm sick of the need for ORMs. Relational DBs should provide ORM as a native, first-class abstraction. The fact that every programming language has ORMs, and that people are starting to adopt Mongo over say, postgres purely because it doesn't need ORM and has a nicer query interface is telling.

Relational DBs need to get with the times.
Nature (and evolution) can be both abundant and parsimonious. Abundant might refer to the explosion of life-forms around the time of the pre-Cambrian. Or, in our day, the extraordinary way that insects and flowering plants interact (and drive the speciation of each). Maybe one can think of these as evolutionary windows of opportunity.

In this case (emotion), my guess is that parsimonious applies. When there’s all that useful circuitry in the cerebellum (emotion), why reinvent it in the cortex? The cortex obviously has new and very useful circuitry but there will still be many applications where the old circuitry - and thus the cerebellum and emotion - are what’s needed.

Emotion has been around a much longer time than reason (and is found in a wider range of animals). It’s true that it was probably easier for evolution to invent emotion but history is also telling you that the evolutionary advantages of emotion are longer-standing and better tested than reason. Current events tell me that the evolutionary jury is still out as regards human-type reason - or at least the way these various quantities (reason, emotion, intuition, etc) are wired together in the case of human beings. Evolution may need a redo.
I think people are reading too much into this. Redhat has RHEL and Fedora, there is Jboss Community Edition, and JBoss Professional edition.

Nothing is nerfed, in fact the 'premium' offerings are usually behind the free versions in terms of features, but they do offer better management, upgrade options, etc.
Zenonia is The Best Android fps Game | InfoMov.Com
I agree to some extent, but most of the time all you want is generic data. What is used to get that generic data and turn it into some format that you can consume (be those objects of data structures) is irrelevant.
Some people may dislike partisanship, but do you really think most partisanship-haters despise 'majority-rules' voting? I mean, most elected governing bodies operate under majority-rules and it seems to work pretty well. Giving the CA legislature the ability to pass a budget without a supermajority doesn't seem related to partisanship at all: its about a fixing an institutional rules defect.
So it's alright for people to inflate Android's numbers by using all the phones, tablets, and e-readers when comparing them with the iPhone as was done some time ago, BUT when Apple adds the other iOS devices to the party (which off course makes a fairer comparison) and surpasses Android's numbers they're wrong?

Jesus there are more than 60 phones right on Android, more than 25 tablets, and a couple of readers. How is that a fair comparison? In any case, the real issue is not iOS vs Android, who cares about adoption rates of an OS when you're in the business of selling the product itself. The iPhone is still the most popular and best selling smartphone, and the iPad does the same for tablets. That's not going to change overnight because 20 new crappy phones from China are now Android powered.
Ask HN: Nigerians flooding my site with phishing emails - what to do?
I've been seeing the number of messages on my site - UniversityTutor.com - increase a lot lately. It looks like a lot of them are phishing emails (the same common Craigslist scam where they send you a fake money order and ask for a refund) and Google Analytics shows an unusual amount of traffic from Nigeria.

I have in place:
* captchas
* rate limiting per account
* geocoding the IP to block Nigeria

Because of the captchas I'm pretty sure humans are sending the messages (not bots). Of course the rate limiting and geocoding isn't fool proof because they can create new accounts and proxy the IP. So I am still seeing lots come through.

Any clever solutions to this? Thanks!

P.S. I'm looking into Evercookie and Panopticlick, but not sure if these are production ready yet.
This is fascinating. It reminded me of another documentary on conjoined twins who are fused partway down the spine. Almost the complement of these twins!

The wiki page for the other girls has information and links: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Abigail_and_B...
On the topic of mining Wikipedia, DBpedia (http://dbpedia.org) is a fantastic source for structured Wikipedia content. Extracting data is pretty easy with SPARQL.

Freebase (http://freebase.com) isn't bad, either.
Commented-out code isn't junk either - It's just not currently in use.
The Android/Blackberry version of the WakeMate has its own bugs which we have been resolving. The Apple certification has nothing to do with the Android release.
Would it be possible to half and half? :D

I actually happen to live in Wisconsin (Milwaukee)
>[2009-12-15] I'm glad to announce that I will be presenting an enhanced version of this talk at Black Hat DC 2010.

The bigger scandal would be if this vulnerability hasn't been fixed at this point, almost a year later.
It's not like the cost of paying developers to work on Java is a burden for Apple,

Perhaps, but since Oracle is trying to monetize Java through litigation and premium JVMs, it makes sense for Apple to stand back and let Oracle do the porting & maintenance.
RepRap self-replicating 3D printer
I'm not familiar with BBM , but it appears Kik works for Iphone, Android and Blackberry. The only significance I can see between using something like IM client, available on all these clients, is letting you know if message was read or not. Is there anything else, significant about BBM ?
3 and 5 are corollaries, and probably the most useful points in the article. It's so easy to get caught up implementing customer requests, especially when they wave money at you. It's much harder to stick to your guns and/or distill their requests into feature sets that do what they actually want, rather than what they asked for.
In the meantime, the 'advantage' of dynamic languages such as verbosity and the functional additions they had before the OO languages are becoming lesser, with newer languages having both static typing and type inference, functional features, etc.
Piracy is contributing to global GDP.
Extending a Table in Photoshop Time-Lapse
To anywhere near the extent that women do? Be serious. I mean, of course it happens. Sure. There are billions of people on this planet. But you're gesturing a dripping faucet while others are pointing at a gaping hole in the roof.
Intuition is like your nose leading you to yummy food. But you need to evaluate (chew and taste) that food before you are certain that you want to swallow it. It's an indicator that you are on the right or wrong track, and it can point to where you want to go.

But it is quite fallible in a way that "pure" rational thought is not.
If one day there are two versions of the JVM based on the same core, and one has more features than the other, the non-premium version will be perceived as crippled. Much depends of course on the kind of features affected. Tie-ins to Oracle middleware would not be a problem. Optimizations appearing first in the premium version before they eventually come to the open version would be a huge problem.

But I think Oracle's strategy is not to cripple the open version so much that it's really worse. I think they're trying to create a perception with big customers that they are on the safe side if they make payments to Oracle. So Oracle is effectively creating an SKU for the kind of people who also buy their other overpriced enterprise stuff. Smart move on Oracle's part, at least in the short run.

It has the potential to kill Java in the longer run though.
Ask HN: Please help a Swede. Education, the tech world or both?
Ok, so I read articles on HN every day, and I really enjoy them. I have encountered a problem though, what people "away from keyboard" tell me isn't the same as what the HN articles tell me. In 1½ years I will be done with the educational instance I'm stuck in at the moment[1]. I spent a year in the USA (Santa Cruz, CA) so I'm a year behind academically (I'm currently 18). Anyway, when I'm out of the "Gymnasium" (see [1])
I will have to make a choice. Do I start working within tech or do I get an education? In Sweden education is heavily subsidized so a lot of people are very well-educated on paper. Anyway, it wouldn't cost too much to get an education for me, except my best years. But at the same time, I'm not sure that education is necessarily the best thing for me, since I do want to live what Arrington refers to as "the pirate life". But at the same time, a lot of people who seem to be arguing that you shouldn't waste time at uni often hold degrees themselves and have something to fall back on. I want to create new things and I don't want to follow "the path", but at the same time I need to know that my life won't be shit in 10 years because I decided to live the pirate life.

I know that most of you live in the USA where college is really expensive, and yeah, education is expensive everywhere, but I will not be the one paying for it since it is subsidized.

Anyway, do I have to "follow the path" and not rock the boat to have a decent life in 10 years or will the pirate life (provided I'm good at what I do) be enough of a merit?

Also, since I am not american I can't just move to the valley (now or in the future), so since I'm a swede, the situation really is another one than if I had been american.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_%28school%29#North_European_countries
It's a bit old, but the Database Template Library is worth checking out. The DTL presents ODBC records as STL objects, enabling the use of all sorts of yummy STL algorithms!
You make the implicit statement that intuition isn't rational, which is interesting. I find my intuition is often most rational.
this might fall under a look-alike of the EFF iPhone exemption: http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/07/26

<startquote>
In its reasoning in favor of EFF's jailbreaking exemption, the Copyright Office rejected Apple's claim that copyright law prevents people from installing unapproved programs on iPhones: "When one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses."
<endquote>
You know you've made it when you're on the list of most of these alpha geeks. Dropbox, i.e.
Bump on this. I know that with medical transcription using speech recognition and then a transcriptionist turnaround time can improve from around 4 or 5 hours to 20-30 minutes or less.

Along those lines, consider charging per line transcribed rather than per page. Customers with short documents might balk at the price when they don't need a full page transcribed. And using a standard transcription character width means that you'll have more granular data.

And if you don't already have a terms of service (I didn't delve deep into your site, but didn't see it readily obvious) you need one that informs the user that the final documents are not guaranteed perfect and have some agreement that will relieve you from the liability if the user doesn't review their own document before using it in a professional capacity. A minimal error in a legal or medical document that isn't reviewed could have costly implications.

Lastly, two nitpicks:
1) you have the word "transcriber" on the landing page, but "transcriptionist" is the more common term for the occupation (e.g. medical transcriptionist)
2) The "Go" link in the header and footer isn't descriptive. Why not have a link that says "Transcribe" or something more readily meaningful than "Go"?
Scientology.
Inside of my JavaScript functions I use a blank line to separate my declarations (var) from the body and then my body from the return.
We are 100% responsible for the prescription drugs we take, even when subscribed by a doctor.

There is no excuse really when we have access to the internet and a quick google can tell everything about what drug one is prescribed and about to take (or not take).
Miss South India 2010
I also hope everyone starts doing it. There is no point in making research unavailable to the public just for the sake of keeping the journal's "level". The future is open content, but most publishers are still blind to it
Basically, your brain has two ways of operating. You have your slow, deliberate "rational" side, and a fast heuristic side. There are well documented[1] biases that influence our answers.

After you've practised and gotten good at something, you've got your brain to start using the fast side to handle things. For instance, bike riding. At first, you're consciously thinking and trying to control everything. After a while, you get heuristics that take over and it becomes natural.

This happens in a lot of subjects, as far as I can tell. So, you shouldn't trust your intuition blindly. But understand the biases you're likely to have and how your brain is immediately popping up these ideas can be useful. Perhaps intuition can be more powerful because it's our brain using some fast ways of coming to a conclusion?

http://www.amazon.com/Heuristics-Biases-Psychology-Intuitive...
The most important thing is to apply rational thinking to irrational thinking, what I mean by that is things like A/B testing where you discover the irrationality of others and rationally exploit it.

Intuitive thinking is highly valuable when there is no time to collect the necessary data for rational thinking, which is most of the time. When data is available there is little point to intuitive thinking.

They are both very valuable tools, but like any tool it's value is realized by applying it to the right task.
I believe on the smart mobile apps area it works a little differently. I've seen apps like Fring, Tango, and Textplus.. all appear on the top of the apps market, and what appears to be significant downloads. I think in general people will download apps just for the sake of trying and use it, but apps that get any long term usage is far and few.
I can't help but think if someone posted like that on here the comment would be downvoted to oblivion.
I find the "stackoverflow" style app to work pretty well regarding getting and finding answers, but it seems like Jeff/Joel don't trust it to work when they break things out into all these other sites like this one. Do people really just browse these type sites? And even if they do, doesn't tagging solve most of that?
"I don't know why Apple won't make something in between the Air and an iPhone."

Well that would be the iPad. This is from 2009, I wonder what pg thinks of the iPad regarding this quote. Really makes you notice how fast things change in a year nowadays.
I was gonna write something about how matlab isn't really that bad. And then I thought about how it's impossible to do anything with strings, y(0)=1; gives an error, variables from inside a function aren't stored in the workspace even if they are called from the workspace (among other stupid crap with functions), and God help your soul if you ever type the word "classdef" into an m-file. It's a good thing some of the built in functions are really powerful.
The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine
I used to think that, until I read Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. The work done by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky explained how "action without action" can actually work - no mysticism required.