skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I strongly believe that if the community reaffirms the core guidelines to the newer users

nickb is #1 on the leaderboard ... http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Patch Your (non-DJBDNS) Server Now. Dan Was Right. I Was Wrong.
My favorite stationery is from Muji, http://www.muji.net/eng/

What pisses me off about Moleskine is that they lied about the "used by famous writers like Hemingway" thing. It worked as a marketing ploy, but it is just not very endearing to lie to one's customers.

Edit: found better Muji link, uk shop has web catalogue. Notebooks: http://www.muji.eu/pages/online.asp?V=1&Sec=1&Sub=4&...
the alternative is that people become reliant, then, on the implementations guess as to what the person meant. in order to still call such a thing a standard, you'd also have to standardize the guesswork involved in correcting people's mistakes. this would lead to a very large and cumbersome "standard" that violates principals of minimalism and least power. that being said, you can bet your bottom dollar that programs like "tidy" are really useful sometimes =D
I'm assuming that enough murderers are rational or can be talked into being rational after they've been sitting in jail for a couple of years.
The "best practice" bit is priceless.
Feedback on My Online Music Community 
Hi,

My wife and I have been running an online music community for the last one year and just rolled out a new design yesterday. We have tried to improved looks and usability. The link is www.Muziboo.com

We have a very active community there and thats the core USP. People give/get a lot of feedback from other members on their music and collaborate a lot. I think community page reflects that spirit.

I would love to get some feedback from HN community and ideas on how to spread such a thing more

Regards
Prateek Dayal
Co-Founder Muziboo.com
Cool 1970s Calculators
Tom Wolfe and Michael Gazzaniga discuss neuroscience
Yahoo, Now Offering Search as a Web Service
Flock shocked by 'tramp' minister
Interesting that you would state that I am "tossing around" an "'antisocial genius' archetype" "every bit as loosely as the author of the article" . . . first off, WHAT "'antisocial genius' archetype"? . . . (there someone goes again, playing armchair psych, which has been my point all along) second of all, just WHERE did you get this "'antisocial genius' archetype" from in my posts? Serious. Please quote me. Please.

You make no sense whatsoever dude.
Beach Dressup
So I log into my Debian box, and there are some updates pending with the following description:

SECURITY UPDATE: Randomize UDP query source ports to improve forgery resilience.
References: [http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2008-1447]

So there's some more information, although it's not saying anything that hasn't already been said. Looks like I'll be patching boxen for the next couple hours.
Except the biggest Bittorrent tracker one, and a few other finished projects.
"Grooks" by Piet Hein
I'd be happy to see data if anyone has any. But the whole piece is built on ratios and trends more than any particular datum.
doesn't look like it worked out, stats aren't that good:
Started: December, 2005
Total Male Members:	338
Total Female Members:	417
I met my mate on the Internet, but not on a dating site. There's a large difference!
VisualVM v1.0 released
And how does the gigantic spinning odometer thing improve function, exactly? Besides wasting space and leaving the rest of the interface horribly cluttered?
Yahoo is bang on with this one.

BOSS + Amazon Cloud counters the huge infrastructure edge that Google services enjoyed till now.
Of course, there is something to be said for the ability to exist within a free (non-systemic) community, no?

I mean, we can have a "system" where the members of the community come to a consensus about appropriate content, downmod people who violate that consensus, etc.

I dislike very much the knee-jerk reaction to create rules, order, etc.
Here's a video from Joshua Bloch
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design
I think what you're suggesting is the most likely scenario, Jobs is an achingly pretentious nob who doesn't like parodic commentary. A shame. Fakesteve was pretty much the only Apple-related weblog I could stand reading.
Belgians to Pay Nearly $1,000 for iPhones
Yeah, and according to the linked wiki article secondary ion mass spectrometry has been around for a while.
That is the most beautiful bit of RE I have seen in ages. Thank you.

I always do one-off RE transformations of text in vi or even just sed, but this alone is reason enough to start writing my more complicated RE one-offs in Python.
MetroPhase2
i'm working on movie search as a side project and have been doing it via scraping
Heh, I had the name wrong. The site in question came up in conversation with a English chick I know when we were chatting about dating sites at the pub a couple years back.

Beer + time does cloud ones memory.

Anyway, a quick Google search reveals that the site that I was talking about is called mysinglefriend - I think she originally told me mysinglemate or something, which is where I got confused.

Sorry about the mixup.
It is unfair to count that as 35 lines, when several expressions are crammed into every second line.
One thing you are forgetting is that software is also getting more complicated. Meaning you need a faster machine to run it.

If software needs are increasing at about the same rate as the hardware (and I think they are), then you are wrong.
UGame’s Community Gamer Site Opens Up Public Beta
Come on - if you are smart enough to know how to use ssh keys then you are too technically smart to fall for this. Grandma is not going to have her server hacked because she tried this. It's gotta be a joke.
You're not taking anything away when building open source software into proprietary systems, other users are free to get the original project just like you were. FSF licenses just restrict the way I can release my derivative work.

At best the FSF license can be seen as an understandable restriction on freedom to preserve open source software by requiring reciprocation. To me there is no question that MIT and BSD licenses are more free. FSF style licenses made more sense when open source seemed like it might be a delicate beast at the mercy of proprietary forces, I think its clear now just how robust open source software is.
Are you guys avoiding using IMDb's data since it can't be used commercially?

http://www.imdb.com/interfaces
As someone running a VPS host company, I disagree with the article.

It cost me far more administrative overhead than to run a shared hosting arrangement.

Firstly, although the onus is the customer to be administrator, they need plenty of help and hand-holding. Many times they are happy to pay for this help - but now we are looking at a different market completely. (The smart VPS hosters are using forums and wikis to let the customers help each other out.)

Secondly, VPS customers need far more disk space, RAM, and CPU power than shared hosting. The more infrastructure you have to maintain, the higher the complexity and administrative burden. VPS customers usually demand higher availability too.
Tools like BeautifulSoup (Python) and hpricot (Ruby) make processing HTML just as easy as processing XML.
I think he probably meant:
http://www.mysinglefriend.com/
I've got a Dell 24", and opted for the more expensive version aimed at graphics designers, because the optical properties of the LCD are quite a bit better than the 'consumer' line. That, and it replaced a ten-year-old 19" ViewSonic PF790, so this goes to show you how often I buy monitors.

My advice is to go for quality over size. There are cheap 30" monitors that cost as much as my 24", but I can work on this thing all day and not feel fatigued.
Digital Evolution
I don't like the required quoting/unquoting in let and lambda. Otherwise really good.
The blog post which I posted is a little old but I guess the topic of digital evolution is interesting. By the way, I have one digital simulator written in Python. If anybody needs it, let me know.
Metropolitics
The Von Neumann poker model. See http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tom/papers/poker1.pdf , pages 7-8, theorem 2. In a nutshell, it works because the opponent can't be sure if you have a very bad hand or a very good hand. Yes, it's a simplified model, but my game theory book says a computer analysis of straight poker gives the same result: when given the worst possible hand, you should always bluff.
This is a really funny parody of the idea that all you need for a Web 2.0 startup is a cloned Unix command.
the GPL is definitively the license that will apply to AI entities in the future

Sounds like the plot from http://www.accelerando.org/_static/accelerando.html
What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away?

I'm not so sure. It's not as though Apache has gotten that much bigger. What's changed is the patterns of architecture; people getting lazy and then being stomped by traffic.

But you always have a kernel. You always have a web server. That part is progressively reduced by hardware advances.
My point is not about the current market. It's about how trends in hardware and wages mean VPSes could eventually come on top.

I've had comments from other hosts almost the opposite of yours :)
Experts have
their expert fun
ex cathedra
telling one
just how nothing
can be done.

Outstanding.
Activision & Vivendi Games merge: A New video game giant is born
Lots of privacy issues, unfortunately.
As long as you didn't spill coffee and damage your keys in transit, it's fine :)
Again, how do you know this without consulting an attorney? You keep spouting legal facts that may or may not be true (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt) but are you, the CEO of a publicly traded corporation, going to simply say no because you think, despite no real legal expertise, that you are never legally required to help an investigation? Or are you going to consult with attorneys? What about the small guy who owns a video rental store that makes $40k a year in profit for him? He's going to have to go plunk down 10% of his yearly earn on a retainer just to discover that fact.

And even if what you say is true, which it surely could be, and even if it were common knowledge, it's still irrelevant. Corporations don't exist to police the government, it's the other way around. Penalizing a private enterprise for cooperating with a government agency's request is ridiculous.
Well, we have to do something with all those extra cores we're getting courtesy of the hardware guys. We might as well encrypt/decrypt the data that we're using with the extra cores that we're going to have.
The problem with the apps described in the article is that they've attempted to make as much money as possible, instead of figuring out how to serve patients better.

My doctor doesn't charge my $30 for a phone call, or to give me a prescription. Doing it online benefits both of us...so why would I pay extra for it?

I know a company in Norcross, GA doing web apps for doctors submitting insurance claims, so there's definitely some traction for webapps in the docs' offices.

If someone decides to run with this, let me know, and I'll pass along a few connections.
Folding the business because you think a government order is unethical would land you in jail. When you run a publicly traded company, you have a legal responsibility to represent your shareholders' financial interest.

If you want to be technical, the Bill of Rights does not secure the right to use a phone without the government knowing who you call. In fact, it doesn't even secure the right to privacy. It kind of flirts with the issue, but it's a common misconception that it guarantees it.

Maybe I'm biased because I think patriotism is stupid (as Shaw said "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.") but if captains of industry folded their corporations every time they perceived an ethical violation we'd have no stock market left.
It's not the corporations' responsibility to police our government, it's ours. We should be impeaching Bush and various members of his administration undoubtedly for issuing the requests.

But you just cannot have an orderly society in which corporations are expected to pick and choose which laws and governmental agency requests they are going to follow and which they are not.
Hmm, that may be true, but there probably aren't five humans left who still play it for the bot to face.

Actually I'd think 5 card stud would be far easier still.
Ask YC:  What would you do with 128 cores on your desktop?
This article: http://newteevee.com/2008/07/09/the-pirate-bay-wants-to-encrypt-the-entire-internet/

...got me thinking that perhaps encrypting everything coming in and out of our computers might start to use up 128 cores that we should have in the next decade or so.

What are applications that you can see occurring in 10 years that are impossible right now because we have a measly 2-4 cores on our desktops? What would you love to see?
Focusing on touchy-feely stuff like whether some software is better because their spokesperson is a genius/is a kook/made money selling software/popularized the editor millions use/wants to help some people with their riches/doesn't wash their hair because they are afraid of getting soap in their eyes/etc is fun but not really satisfying.

Matt, I think there is some merit to your argument but you fail to take into account the fact that many of the applications you think are superior also have long histories relative to their relatively unencumbered counterparts.

If I look for new proprietary software, I don't tend to see many examples that are as superior to open source software in the same way I might say Microsoft Office is to Open Office. More often I tend to see proprietary software left in the dust as in the case of Apache vs IIS unless I look for niches.

Can you cite any good examples of well-known new proprietary software that is clearly superior then their open source alternatives?

Note I say "open source" and not "free".
Insurance Day at PFA: How to Save Money on Your Homeowners Policy
Commentary on how to save money on your Homeowners Policy.
Deception isn't twisting your Oreo cookie one way when you've got the nuts all night, then doing it the same way later when you're bluffing. Deception is playing every hand the same way, such that your opponent can't deduce what you hold from your betting patterns. For instance, though it would clearly be a losing strategy, if someone raised at every possible opportunity, their range would always be 100% of all possible hands and you'd never have the slightest clue what they hold.

This is no less relevant against a bot than it is against a human. Odds are no more relevant against a bot than they are against a human.

The math is so trivial to calculate as to be irrelevant. And if you think humans make far more mistakes than machines, you should try downloading poki and playing a full ring game.
I'll start.

Graphics rendering has been known to be embarrassingly parallel for decades. And, generally graphics rendering can absorb as many nodes as you throw at it. I'm sure that dedicated graphics processors are always going to be better at rendering than generic processors, but perhaps OS makers are going to be including a lot more eye candy in the OS once they can establish 128 cores as a minimum specification for their OS install.

Ray traced desktops? Icons with fur simulations or fluid dynamics?
This isn't a direct answer, but in 10 years I don't want to have a desktop. I want a cheap dumb terminal with a big screen, and I want all my apps and data in the cloud.

In the cloud, computers with tons of cores make a lot more sense.
Heh "It is your responsibility to secure your new key pair in transit." it's not even https. Funny!
Let's try and see... flagged.

I really really really don't want to see political stories here.
That would be an excellent idea if browsers actually stuck to standards and didn't have any bugs.
Unfortunately that will never happen, so developers are forced to write invalid code.

Also XHTML doesn't allow tons of useful things.
It leaves XML as a dead duck. Sure legacy things will use it, and corporations will probably still love it, but it's had its day thank god.
Poker is not craps, and it's certainly not a game where people sit around a table and whoever calculates the odds best gets the money. There's absolutely no parallel there whatsoever.

Have you ever even played?
Most people forget that calculators did not start with the electronics revolution. Before that there were hand cranked and electric motor powered calculators. Division was a bit slow as it took the form of repeated subtraction and even multiplication required some patience but they were effective tools when you needed greater accuracy than was available from log tables and slide rules.
So the bot can probably play optimally better than a human, but optimal play just ends up in a draw (or a loss if there's rake) for both parties.

It sounds like they've finally gotten the bot to where it can exploit human tendencies. If so, that's seriously impressive.
So how is dropbox? You just made my day with that file, because I really dislike scribd. Probably the most annoying thing on the internet (of course, after the Rick Astley pranks).
I agree with most of this, but certainly not the line "It’s driven the computer revolution, which is the most significant shift in technology"

Microsoft in my view completely stifled any innovation for ages with their monopoly and unethical business practices. We went backwards in some cases. If it weren't for microsoft I think a lot more innovation would have happened in computing.

Thankfully that's all changed now.
Live Web2 apps : ideas and implementations
So psychology and math in poker are sort of two sides of the same coin. Generally, psychology means narrowing your opponent's range of possible holdings as much as possible, while preventing him from doing the same to you. You do this to enable yourself to make better math-based decisions, and cause him to make worse ones.

If you can accurately pinpoint your opponent's range, and predict how he'd react with the hands in that range on future rounds, the game becomes a rather trivial math problem for a computer. It can simply enumerate all of the possibilities and determine the correct course of action.

Unfortunately narrowing a person's range and predicting how they'd play in future rounds is very hard to do for a human, and presumably even harder for a computer.
The Real Long Tail: Why both Chris Anderson and Anita Elberse are Wrong
"Techcrunch once again reports non-tech news in order to get more page views"

But that wouldn't even be news.
That might be optimal from a certain standpoint, but it's not optimal at all for exploiting another human's weaknesses. Your goal in poker isn't to break even or even to win, it's to win the most possible.
Won't a player playing gametheoretically optimal tie with all other players? That's what my math-nerd poker friends all tell me.
Ask HN: iPhone alternatives?
I wonder what people choose as iPhone alternatives? In Germany, the iPhone will be severely crippled by T-Mobile (300MB data transfer limit), therefore I am looking for alternatives. GPS is a must, because I want photo tagging. Touchscreen would probably be good, because browsing is the main feature.
Has anyone done a good comparison of Scribd vs PDF taking into account things like latency and browsing over a slow connection? I never even think about the time it takes to download a PDF on my DSL line but I can imagine that Scribd might be better at letting you see just the first page of a document over a bad connection.
"is 4 really a widespread standard in the Python world?"
yes.
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
Oh! I always thought it was a deliberate filter against lists of items taking too much vertical space.
And he submits a lot of stuff. 17 people voted the thing up, though.
Apache can get bigger though. Right now it runs in threads, and in-process php parser (for example). Why? Because it's too slow otherwise.

But get a faster machine, and people will get lazy. It's hard to code apache like that - much easier to have one process per request, and use one-run cgi scripts. Once that's fast enough, that's what people will code for.

This is just an example, but I still think applications will manage to consume any extra CPU that comes their way.

Example 2: Disk capacity, three years ago you would never have thought of a reason you'd need much storage, and now we have videos.

The faster the desktops get, the bigger (and higher quality) the videos will get. That won't stop till a single 2 minute video will take 250MB. (At that point we'll need bigger monitors.)

Example 3: Memory. One reason to use SQL cursors is so that you don't need to store the entire result set in memory at once. And used to be everyone programmed that way. But not anymore - memory is plentiful enough that queries are typically stored in their entirety in memory, and then walked through. They still use cursors to do that, but give the languages time to mature and you'll find it'll turn into random access arrays.

It's the nature of people - they won't spend time to optimize something unless they need to.

All your arguments assume usage (CPU, disk, bandwidth, memory), holds steady. Now assume they won't, assume they'll go up, and re-run your arguments.
In that article, tesseract seems to work the best. Maybe I should give it another try.
No. It is not a justification for anything. It is merely an observation that one cannot make claims about emacs being ”more powerful” or “more extensible” based on the number of extensions it has, because they have been developing over many years, and shouldn’t be over-hasty in criticizing areas of its development which will be dramatically improved in the next release (not that it shouldn’t be criticized, notice).
> You're not taking anything away when building open source software into proprietary systems,

I don't think that's necessarily true. Imagine an open source system that's fairly popular, but with just a few developers. ProprietaryCo hires them all up, and users realize that if they want improved versions of said project, they're going to have to pay, or find some new developers. Far fetched? Not really, it's pretty similar to what Sun Microsystems did.

So, there is some risk to the community. What 'protects' BSD licensed projects best is to have a strong, and diverse development community, which is one of the things that the Apache Software Foundation tries to encourage.
You know you're good when you realize what you have built is crap and start improving it.
Belkin doubles down on wireless HDMI
I'd probably browse the web and read news feeds. In addition, I'd watch video, program, play games, and use IRC.

I'd also set up scripts in the background to copy files from one HDD to another ad infinitum because I'd feel bad having all of those cores and not doing anything with them.
Okay. I have used both extensively: emacs for several months, and then TextMate for the last 2 years, and I find TextMate more powerful. I decided the painful learning curve wasn't worth it, because it made the editor less flexible, and it made what flexibility it does have unpleasant to exploit.

And I'm a certified machead, so that was no object.
Six Mobile Ideas
Artificial Life Simulations
Open sourcing Google browser Sync
Their projects only succeed if they use illegal content to push them.

This was also the reason youtube succeeded and right now they are only selling ads for about 4% of all content, because for the rest of the content, the original post doesn't own the copyright.

(only have german source http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Zeitung-Google-von-YouTube-We...)