skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When the intel Atom x86 chip starts to appear in small embedded devices, its really going to shake up this sector. Until recently, you had to have all sorts of customized kernels, toolchains etc just to get whatever opensource project that scratched your itch to run embedded.

Soon your post-it sized computer can just run centos with a more or less stock kernel. Forget that arm nonsense. You can do it now with a Soekris (Geode CPU) http://www.soekris.com/ if you're so inclined. You don't even have to be a "hand selected early adopter" to be able to buy one.
Since his was the first published stack overflow, containing the blueprint for the shellcode Lopatic, Vicm, and the 8lgm used in 1995 to kick off the "stack smashing" rennaisance, I'd say his work there is already complete.
AT&T Text-To-Speech (TTS) Demo
I have a Haworth Zody chair at home (Craigslist in Grand Rapids, MI, office furniture central) and another Haworth chair at work, and I assure you, it makes a difference. I felt it'd be out of place to drop name brands in the "how much does comfort in the office affect productivity" thread a couple days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=234445), but oh man. (NB: I am tall.)

The Steelcase Leap chairs are really nice too, and I have no doubt that the Herman Miller chairs are great. Absolutely try any of the above and see how they fit first, though -- there's another Steelcase one that just doesn't work for me, at all. They're all expensive, too (craigslist nonwithstanding...), though one that fits you perfectly is well worth it in the long run, and they all seem to be built to last. As expensive workspace stuff goes, they'll certainly depreciate more slowly than a huge, expensive LCD monitor.

Just like keyboards -- some people love the split keyboards (including me), some people can't stand them but love the clacky ones, but the important thing is to have one that actually fits you if you're going to be using it several hours every day.

That said, I bet Jeff Atwood gets an awesome Amazon commission if anybody buys one of those through his blog. Yikes. :)
Panda3d and what is "pythonic"
Nature = what is. (By extension, "supernatural" = "what isn't." By definition, it doesn't exist.)

If that is what you mean by "prayer" and "god", then you shouldn't use those terms, for the same reason that you don't call firetrucks "lampshades" and asprin "peanut butter".

I suspect that those concepts never worked for you because they don't work, period. Giving them up is called being an atheist. Why not just own that?
Well, I did say they were like "ephemeral" extensions.

If I can reuse the formula in many spreadsheets, it becomes more like an extension.

Once upon a time, I couldn't imagine something in the browser like the interface for Yahoo Pipes. But once Javascript becomes capable enough, some programmer thinks of it sometime later, and here it is! So how is that not extending the functionality of the browser? The fact that the code has to be reloaded for each site just isn't a big deal for the end user until download times become a pain in the butt.

Yes, it seems basic. All software "extends" the computer. That is what's so fundamentally great about software!
Woke up on Friday morning (read: lunchtime) after a to-4am code-a-thon with a startup project I'm working on, refreshed and ready to take a well-deservered early weekend of rest and relaxation.

:) Right.

Needless to say, the first thought I had when I woke up was "wouldn't it be cool if..." and the rest, as they say, is two days of pure hackery. I give you the end result: TweetSnap.

It's a really simple premise: enter your Twitter username, get an image back which you can put on your site to show your latest tweet.

It's designed for people who uses websites/etc which don't allow the typical "insert javascript snippet for AJAXy awesomeness" but does allow you to hotlink images (great example: forum signatures).

I haven't looked to see if anyone else has done this yet, mainly because I just did this for fun and I don't really care :) But try it out, give me your feedback. Temperamental results to be expected while on shared hosting :)

For the techies:

- Rails 2.1 w/ a minimalist MySQL DB

- Image generation done with RMagick 2.5

- XML parsing with Hpricot

- Message parsing a combo of htmlentities and a custom lib (supports characters like ø™¡)
He is definitely very far advanced, but academics still make very good walking robots.
http://www.msl.ri.cmu.edu/projects/actuator/
http://www.rhex.net/

Some other efforts that come to mind help illustrate the territory. Honda made a horribly unscalable walking mechanism in the ASIMO. It will never be more than PR. The best work from CMU & MIT's Leg Lab got spun out into Boston Dynamics. You've probably seen their "big dog" video.
http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=BigDog

Boston Dynamics is part boutique research firm and part startup. They'll probably be the first to sell a walking robot.

Honda makes a clunker, and the hungry, small companies make something that will actually work.
I wouldn't. If is knowledge is truly a priori, and you truly didn't have it, there would be no way that you could know.

My advice would be to look at the person. If the man seems rational and honest, then maybe there is something to it. Then again, maybe not. It's really up to you.
Time cannot change by definition. Nothing can move in spacetime for the same reason. This is why the late Sir Karl Popper (of falsifiability fame) once compared spacetime to Parmenides' block universe and called it "Eintein's block universe in which nothing ever happens". (Source: Conjectures and Refutations).

In his textbook, "Relativity From A to B", renown relativity expert Robert Geroch wrote, "There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes." Very few physicists know this but it's the truth, a nasty little truth for some, but the truth nonetheless.

In conclusion, any talk of time travel in any direction (forward or backward) is pure crackpottery. There is only the NOW, the ever changing present. Don't mod me down because you have a different opinion. Incessant propaganda and sci-fi movies like Star-Trek have duped a lot of people. Just think about it and figure it out on your own.

Nothing can move in spacetime.
I was meeting with some guys that funded both XM and Sirius. Others were confused why they invested in both, in a space with only two real players. Their logic was clear: we will be invested in the winner. It paid off greatly.
Usually blog spam means the blog in question took content already available and stole it. Think of it as e-plagiarism.
At least we have In-n-Out!
That is not what nature means.

In the broadest sense, nature is what exists on a material level. If you assume a priori, as Hume did, that all things that exist do so on a material and sensible level, then sure, that is a fine definition of 'nature.' But that's an assumption that, right or wrong, not everyone makes, so it isn't correct to say that.
No, but here is a great post from somebody that does at 37 signals: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1001-standing-versus-sitt...
I felt a little sanctimonious afterward (since I definitely hope YC doesn't turn out to be a non-profit)

I realize that this is sensitive information and you guys may not want to share, but I'll ask anyway. Has YC broken even, yet? Is it close? Nowhere near?
TechCrunchIT - Because We Need More of Arrington's Buddies
This is actually kind of neat. The image is updated upon request right? Are you caching at all?
The Great Seduction by Debt
The fact that you can turn eggs into omelets but not vice versa is a thing we know from our kitchens.

Unless you feed a hen nothing but omelets. Am I right?
Yeah, there were some other weird linguistic nuggets. ("as sufficiently as possible"?)

If I had to guess, I'd say that his issue is that Google requires you to use a particular language, whereas Amazon doesn't? You're right, it's odd.
News.yc is, among other things, an educational resource -- and teaching is about saying the same things over and over and over, to a new group of students each time. That's how it works.

If you want to read a site where "we've already discussed that, so you can't publish it again" is a valid criticism, you need to switch to reading scientific journals. I don't think that the alternative -- trying to turn news.yc into a site that behaves like a scientific journal -- is going to fly. We don't have a required curriculum that prospective upmodders must read. We don't make them pass an entrance exam. They're allowed to just turn up and vote. That's how this system works.

On this and other sites, I've always craved a moderation system whereby I could nominate a certain collection of modders whose votes I trust above others. For example, if I could click a button and see what news.yc would look like if only the YC class of 2007 were allowed to vote, I might be able to filter out the articles which were of interest only to freshmen in CS. Unfortunately, I've never really seen such a thing. Obviously, allowing an arbitrary set of such queries would risk creating a huge scaling problem, but you'd think that a site could offer a choice of two or three ways to weight the moderations. You could divide the incoming readers into "cohorts" based on year of arrival (or even other demographic information) and offer options for reading social news within your own cohort.
Sorta :) The biggest slowdowns are the generation of the image and the Twitter request. When an image is (successfully) generated, it's written to a file.

The next time you query that user, it'll return that file unless it's been longer than a certain amount of time (currently set to 15 minutes). If it has been, a request is made to Twitter. If they've updated their message, a new image is generated, otherwise the stored file is used.

The time between updates is stored in a single handy constant that I can alter to adjust for bandwidth.
gets me every time...
Perhaps I haven't framed my confusion into a proper verbal frame, but there were quite a few books in my life screaming "try this!", and I was unable to find time/application for them in this crazy-fast pace of startup life. Startups I worked in were all hungry, fast and aggressive predators, consuming other people's code (open source), other people's research, algorithms and even ideas for products. I haven't been inside of something genuinely new, let alone doing my own, truly mine, thing.

What I've done, and companies I was a part of, was just that - a bunch of incremental improvements based on 4-6 months release cycle. How can I be not sad about that?
Why, is google down? :P

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&...

(Sorry, I couldn't resist, either.)
I tend toward atheism, but I still have trouble with the fact that we don't know why or how the universe was created, or how space was created.

That said, I also have faith (ironic, right?) that science will figure it out - they figured out gravity, calculus, relativity, etc. so why not this?

Not knowing why something happened is not enough for me to say "God exists." It means we need to keep looking for a reason.
I recommend http://zong.com/

They have an API.
What about the hen's mother?
While I would agree there is a large amount of "crap work" involved in academic research I think it is a stretch to label it trivial. It is practically the opposite by definition.
Can a lack of sleep set back your child's cognitive abilities?
Given a sufficiently efficient hen, you could feed her her own eggs.
This is a cool idea.

We had our fun with image hackery with featurelist. A lot of users discuss things on forums, etc, where they can't post javascript/flash, so we created little banners like this so users can get other people to vote for their feature requests:

http://featurelist.org/widgets/feature_badge/513/banner.png
I come from a country where there is very little investment in technology and almost no innovation happening. I hope one day I will have the financial freedom to do something similar to YC there because I strongly believe there are many talented people waiting for opportunities and so many places where technology and innovation could be extremely helpful.

So I just want to say thanks for what YC does. It changes people's lives and inspires others which I believe is something extremely satisfying and something to feel immensely proud of.
When do you think Moore's law will fail?
He is not a caloric restrictionist.
This is not true - I have been taking 500mg for a year. 500mg is about equivalent to the dosage that they have given to mice in similar studies (per kg).
But wouldn't you have to feed omelets to the hen's mother also? Otherwise the hen couldn't have been born. And the hen's mother's mother, and mother's mother's mother, and so on, leading back from the final egg.

edit: on second thought, this is probably too much philosophizing.
Remarkable progress they are making at AT&T Labs... a website that speaks what you typing... in lame, monotone, computer-like voice... mind blowing!
Nice! What technologies did you use?
Very very cool, what did you program in? Have you had any previous experience with Twitter API/RSS feeds? Reason being if you are pretty versed in rss feed pulling/image generation the backend is done pretty quickly, as most of it is just knowing how to do it. I'd imagine you spent more time on making it look pretty. Does it automatically filter out replies and such?
Blind Cat Gets Around Using Echo Location
nature is what exists on a material level.

On a material level... So, what exists on a non-material level?

The existence of information implies that it has some representation in some medium. Scramble the representation, and the information is gone. Qv, the files on my hard drive that time I used a magnetized screwdriver to put it in a new case, or the speaking ability of old alcoholics.

Pretty smart people sometimes get confused by different levels of analysis and then start saying absurd things. We can talk about semiconductors or registers or instructions or lines of code or functions or programs. It's not that each one of these conversations are the same, but they do imply one another. When we talk about an abstraction like "purple" or "justice" or "motherly", we're implying all the real world examples (past, present, and future) of these abstractions, and focusing on what they have in common.

"Justice" doesn't exist apart from just things, any more than "purple" exists apart from the typical human experience of purple light. There's no sense in looking for Plato's Ideal Forms; you won't find them, no matter how many caves you turn around in.

I would argue that, when we talk about "nature", we are referring to all that exists, but that's not enough to know how to use the term, which is why you find that flip definition unsatisfactory. We're specifically focusing on the level of analysis that involves fundamental properties of things. Since things are the sum of their properties (in other words, "things are what they are"), "nature" is what is, "natural" properly means "consistent with a thing's fundamental properties", and "supernatural" is "imaginary and not real."

God isn't natural, therefor, God doesn't exist. Quid erat demonstratum.

And that's why geeks are atheists ;)

In all seriousness, I actually think that this is what people usually mean when they use the terms "nature" and "supernatural". They sometimes bundle in the assumption that supernatural things can exist (which is a contradiction) and that humans are somehow magical non-animal creatures and not a part of nature (which is silly.)

But that's an assumption that, right or wrong, not everyone makes, so it isn't correct to say that.

If the assumption is right, then the people who don't make it are incorrect, aren't they? They might mean something vague and undefined when they say nature (in fact, I'm quite sure most do), but that doesn't mean that the soup of contradictions most people carry around in their heads is even slightly valid or worth worrying about.
Isaac Newton was highly religious and he was smarter than any Digg user. In fact, most smart people in Newton's time were religious. Atheism in those days was associated with poor uneducated people, the same way racism is today. Doesn't that disprove the hypothesis that intelligence causes people to be atheist?

Wait, I know what you're going to say to that. You're going to say that Newton et al. don't count because they lived before Darwin. The theory of natural selection, you say, was the first non-religious explanation of life that smart people could believe. Before that, everyone just defaulted to religion because there was no better theory available.

It's a nice idea, but I don't buy it. When I became an atheist as a teenager, I wasn't thinking about evolution; I didn't even have the foggiest understanding of Darwin's theories. I've encountered many other atheists who don't. Obviously, evolution is not usually what causes people to reject religion.

I think the real difference is that, in Newton's time, it was fashionable for smart people to be religious, whereas in our time it's fashionable for smart people to be atheist. Evolution was just the fashion's tipping point.

Specifically, Darwin caused a few very smart people to change their minds about religion, and the greater bulk of somewhat smart people (who desperately wanted to seem like very smart people) followed suit. Now anyone who wants to be considered smart will reject religion out of conformance.

Basically, people will believe anything as long as their being wrong has no noticeable impact on their lives. Intelligence has little to do with it. And the moral of this story is not that you are all conformist sheep, but that it doesn't matter. If Isaac Newton struck out on the big questions, then you probably will too. Just stop trying to answer impossible questions, and go live your life.
This is the most impressive app I've seen in weeks. Very cool.
I wouldn't go as far as saying the demand function has a negative slope during most of its domain, but it may have small segments with a negative slope.

But I totally agree with you, the evidence here shows that the wine market is ridiculous.
Dawkins here is insisting on a definition for which his professional training gives no special insight. So why should he be recognized as some "expert"?

To paraphrase Dawkins' speech to the University of Kentucky,

The thing about being an atheist is that you don't think that "theology" is a subject at all. You're not an expert in fairies, but I'll bet you have no problem not believing in those.

Actually, since Dawkins is an expert in Ethology, the evolution of animal behavior, he is in fact uniquely qualified to talk about religion, as that is among the most odd, fascinating, paradoxical, and complex behaviors that evolution has yet produced. In The God Delusion, he outlines many of the factors of the human animal that make us particularly susceptible to religion.

Theologists are the ones not qualified to analyze religion.
Heh, I remember using this back when Slashdot was in its heyday. The voice generation was actually really good back then.

I used it to make this techno song about Slashdot:
http://why.gd/Kluge-Naming_Convention-01-Dotted.mp3
"Some statistics and probability is just generally useful". Amusing how this is the last sentence in the paragraph. Would be quite different if this were written today :)
You're not explaining that very well. Yes, classic relativity is a deterministic theory which doesn't have a time arrow. You can look at it as a single, static universe defined as the sum of all moments. But that's neither here nor there. Classic relativity is, strictly speaking, wrong: the real universe is, as far as we understand, provably non-deterministic.

And in any case, it has nothing to do with this article, which is about the time arrow defined by entropy.
Rails 2.1. No previous experience with the Twitter API, but I'm used to building RESTfully designed applications (which Twitter is). I chose to pull the XML version of your timeline as opposed to the RSS version, because the information is purer.

First day was getting it to work, second day was design. Replies aren't filtered (although I'd like to do that at some point, for the moment I'm happy to keep it simple).

Biggest effort went into RMagick, which was incredibly frustrating. On the second day I rewrote the majority of the stuff I wrote on the first day so that it was better organised and less of a mess.
This reminds me of a conversation I heard once in college that stuck with me.

A: I believe that when you die, your energy goes back out into the world, and becomes a part of everything.
P: Yeah, that's why you get cold. Entropy.

The problem is, when non-geeks talk about energy, they almost never really mean energy. Which is a shame, because real energy is a lot cooler and more magical than the ghosty chi-stuff they're talking about.
I think breaks are more important than a nice chair. I set a timer to go off every hour. I get up, refill my water and/or coffee mug, and take a walk around the office to check in on the junior staff.

Many of my best ideas came just after stretching and human interaction.
Pretty much just relying on the PHP/GD image manipulation functions and some TrueType fonts.
OK, as per your theory of conformism, smart people want to be accepted as smart by other smart people. That is why they are atheist in the current times. The fallacy of this argument is so transparent in that smart people are generally considered non-conformist. That is the essence of geekiness if one can put it that way.

That there is god is for the theist to prove and not the atheist to disprove. What anyone who is rational chooses to believe is the sum total of his knowledge and his experience. You have lumped smart people as characterless by calling them conformist. So either you are a charlatan theist trying to get in a word sideways or someone who is truly and hopelessly wrong.
If you quit your job for 3-6 years, you lose a large part of what it takes to make money: if you are technical, you lose skills, if you are in sales, you lose contacts, etc. The truth of the matter is, in Slovakia (as well as most other places) the men want the women to take care of babies, and the women agree. It has nothing to do with it being "the most sane option", or the "first years being the most magical". If it were that simple, the men would be lining up to quit their jobs for a few years of magic and then come back, no harm done.

In reality, the men are not keen on staying at home, and for good reason - you lose your marketability, and poetic ideas of parenthood aside, it's not all that magical to take care of a screaming, pooping kid who is too young to engage in activities that adults find interesting.

If am probably coming across a little harsh but having grown up female in the Eastern Block, I am predictably annoyed that the men from my part of the world are quick to preach to women what they don't want to practice themselves. If you think staying at home is so great, why do you immediately say David's wife should do it?
On Rejection
Our understanding of the physics of protein folding and protein design is still so limited that I continue to be amazed at the results that David Baker (and some others) can get. I am still skeptical about how general these methods are, what the false positive (and false positive) rates are and how much specificity we can design into our systems