skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh you mean Kalpavriksha! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpavriksha
Kinect designers to debut motion controller for PCs
You could do both at once, actually, so that users aren't subjected to the junk results.
awesome, trying it tonight!
Microsoft restores missing e-mails from Hotmail accounts
high density is sustainable, probably, whereas low density is probably not. how is that for a benefit? and don't discount how highly "fun" ranks in peoples' lives.
They also know that Goldman is putting $450 million dollars where it's mouth is.
6G iPod nano hack just beginning of long road to nano apps
Pretty much the same point of owning anything instead of renting/chartering/sharing - freedom and convenience.
Google has to maintain the status of a common carrier (somewhat).

If that filter the Alert team came up with triggers a lot of false positives, that would be hurting their business since legitimate websites could get excluded from search results (imagine the backlash).

Now I'm not defending them; I actually think they aren't doing it because they don't know how to handle the situation (profits loss versus angry users).

But I'm also pretty sure Mr. Obie Fernandez wouldn't like to be dropped off the face of the Internet just because it has ties to Jacksonville (yeah, cheap shot done on purpose: we know how filtering works and how hard to get right it is).
Nike Better World (Great parallax effect in HTML5)
A look at 2011. The plan for our startup.
I enjoyed listening to Jack Dorsey. Kudos to Kevin for letting Dorsey tell his story, mostly uninterrupted.

Kevin though... so many of his questions have the word 'like' in them.

"Like, what was that like?" or "Like, a working prototype?, like you and a buddy or something like that?"
Sorry, but you're wrong.

The fact that they don't always have it doing the smart thing you'd want them to do in no way lessens the fact that Google has a lot of compute power that they are throwing at a lot of problems.
Intridea is looking for someone to run one of our flagship products which is in the process of becoming a standalone company. You need to have a mix of technical and business experience, be self-motivated, and have a TON of drive and vision. We need someone who will essentially be the CEO of this product. Send your resume to jobs@intridea.com if you're interested.
This might be the most rose-tinted article about Google I've ever read.

There are nothing but complaints about Google's lack of personal customer service in regards to their AdSense program - what makes you think that future AI projects from the company would be any better?

Just because Google's made a self-driving car doesn't mean they're automatically the front-runner in that category. What about all of those teams that compete in the DARPA robotic car competition every year?

Also, the advantages that Maroon mentions (especially the safety ones) would most likely only come to fruition once self-driving cars become ubiquitous - something that its hard to imagine happening within the near future (or at least during the current incarnation of Google as we know it).
Agreed. The deeper you delve into Google's TOS, Privacy, or other legal-requirements pages, the more their corporate identity of 'fun and clear' dissolves.
It looks like a domain that http://domai.nr would spit out.
Very interesting point, this might be almost nothing at all then.
By your logic, CalPERS can't invest in any fund that invests in private companies, as that investment would instantaneously tip the company over the "500 investor" limit.

Meanwhile, what does diversification have to do with the structure of a venture capital fund?
Except for "Greater selection of goods, food and produce", all the ones you add seem like they could be costs rather than benefits, for many people. Closer proximity to other people in general, for example, was one of the harms I was thinking of. But I'm slightly more misanthropic than most Americans, I guess.

The one about greater selection isn't actually true, as far as I can tell. You can get pretty much anything shipped to your small town, and while you're less likely to just run across something at the store that you find you like, you'll be paying lower prices for everyday stuff. I live in the DC metro, and every time I travel to visit friends or family (who all live in far less densely populated areas), I'm struck by how much cleaner, cheaper, and open everything is, and how everyone seems friendlier and less suspicious.

An advantage neither of us mentioned, but which is pretty large, I think, is that people are less likely to have to move or change careers when changing jobs.
National Debt has become an imaginary number. I don't owe a cent on it. Let the banksters pillage the economy and try to collect on a nation of bankrupt people with rifles.
Exactly, the bill includes restrictions such as the original seller (e.g. Amazon) can't give a third party (e.g. Ez Books) billing information from the original transaction (Amazon).

"It shall be unlawful for an initial merchant to disclose a credit card,
debit card, bank account, or other financial account number, or to disclose
other billing information that is used to charge a customer of the initial
merchant, to any post-transaction third party seller for use in an Internet-
based sale of any goods or services from that post-transaction third party
seller."
This happened to a wordpress blog I worked on last year. The version was a few years old and the hackers were able to add some code to footer.php that checked the referrer and if it was Google, it displayed phentermine and cialis links. For regular visitors, it displayed the regular page. This way, when google crawled the site, the links were there, but when the web masters looked at it it was normal.
The strength of the PS3 doesn't lie with the PS3 core, but rather with the ring of SPEs that the Cell processor has. These allow insanely efficient data processing, where the PPC chip really doesn't do a whole lot except for managing logic and state.

However, nothing under OtherOS used the SPEs really, and it had no access to the GPU, so the speed came down to the in-order PPC core.
YOU can BUY Ahmadinejad's car -at auction -Current bid: $10^6
Thanks for the heads up. This was fixed. Rodrigo dropped you an email.
I'm actually quite curious about your amazon affiliate model, and what your upkeep cost vs income is?

Looks like a great site and will be perusing as I finish my current reading material. Any thought in a book recommendation engine or looking into amazon's api for similar items/books to integrate?
I pretty much agree with this.

In fact, when execution can be cast as implementing a computer program, one can be very formal about comparing ideas and execution; they are related the same way theorems and proofs are.

If we use the Curry-Howard isomorphism; the idea is often a type ("Let's make a program that turns X into Y!") (a theorem) and the execution is often a program (a term realizing that type) (the proof).

So it seems that the value of an idea with no execution (which is not a theorem until it has been proved!) would be abstractly the same value as an unproved proposition. Except now, the proof not only says that the proposition is true, but also realizes whatever that proposition denotes, because it's a computer program. In that sense, execution of an idea is worth a lot more than the idea, because it also provides evidence that the idea is not nonsense.

But who to give more credit to? The idea guy or the implementor? Consider that when we change even a little bit of our execution, we are changing the idea , because it will prove something different. In this sense, both the idea and execution are very much in the hands of the 'implementor,' and the 'idea guy' only provides initial inspiration, which by its commonality is pretty much worthless.

Well, or maybe not; there is value in picking the right initial inspiration and perspective. Is that something only really experienced 'veterans', 'masters', 'talented people', and 'gurus' can have, or can it be explicitly trained and taught, so that this nebulous notion of 'having the right perspective' can be as simple and clear-cut as using a cookbook? I think the latter.

What about when execution consists of other, non-programming factors like talking with the right people, or marketing or whatnot? It's certainly harder to formalize, but I wonder what value there is in treating the non-obviously-programming parts of what is viewed as 'execution' as just another kind of programming, but not done with the usual compilers/interpreters.
I think we're talking around each other, which is what this whole issue is about.

I'm coming from the perspective of a ruby application developer. I've got my server, it's all set up, I type 'cap deploy' and it takes care of everything, including my dependancies. I don't need to 'figure out what works,' because my application is developed locally, I already have all of the versions worked out, because it's what I was building the software with. This situation is a happy one. Everything's good. Yes, I'm technically using two package managers, but I don't really care: it's all been abstracted away, and everything _actually works_.

If I try to do things through apt, all of the gems simply aren't there. Or older versions of things, which break because my code was written with newer ones. It's simply a non-starter.

However, from a sysadmin standpoint, where you're keeping Ruby on a system for a certain reason, the use case is totally different.

The real problem happens when people who use Ubuntu because they're new to Linux want to start with Rails, and it has to be explained that almost nothing they read will actually work properly. They're the real people who suffer out of all of this, not you and I.
One good side effect of using Google Voice for everything is that I've never noticed or been affected by this bug.
In California, it is $800 or an amount based on total revenue, whichever is greater. The formula differs for LLCs, S Corps, and C Corps. Furthermore, S Corps do not pay the franchise tax in their first year unless they are profitable.

Generally, incorporation as an LLC is preferable for entities making more than $100,000 in revenue, while an S Corp is preferable for lower revenues.
Awesome! THe efreedom stuff was really starting to bug me. I use StackOverflow a lot.

Google is still hands down the best search engine.
Fearless Predictions for 2011 (by Michael Mace)
At a very modest average value of $70,000 per employee for 3000 employees, that's about 2 years' worth of salaries. That's not a lot of money for FB to spend.
You're very welcome :) If you have any feedback and ideas for improvements, let me know.
It does make it hard for their competition when Apple is able to buy a huge set (sometimes "all available production") of components at a reduced price.

I am expecting an iPad price drop on the next version or an iPhone strategy (cheaper old bottom, new bottom, new top). This money allows for the iPod strategy to repeat with the iPad.
Energy efficiency

Better availability of private services due to economies of scale

Psychological sense of community (vs. isolation)
Ask HN: Good masters programmes for 'smart-ups' / late-20s career advice
Dear HN,

After doing an undergrad in maths and working for a handful of web startups in my 20s -- I've learned a lot about software engineering and growing businesses in the process but am nevertheless hankering after a tech job where I can get a little more leverage out of more specialised quantitative and comp-sci skills.

It occurred to me to investigate a taught masters in (say) machine learning or computational statistics as a way into this kind of work -- both as a refresher for the relevant skills, but also as a way to meet people doing interesting things and potentially find good co-founders for a data-driven start-up, or connections with existing ventures.

I'm sure I'm not the only one with this kind of experience, so thought I would ask HN: What were your experiences with technology-related post-grad programmes?

Anyone meet a co-founder there? anyone drop out? find the skills you learned an advantage at a start-up or, at the other end of the spectrum, when applying to Google etc?

Are there any programmes which you'd recommend as having an environment particularly conducive to hooking up with co-founders, jobs, funding, commercially viable research spin-offs etc, as well as solid teaching? While I can guess the big names, I'd be particularly interested to hear about experiences, especially in the UK but elsewhere too.

Alternatively: anyone think this is a crazy idea and I should try and teach myself, start hobby projects and look for a job at (say) a larger outfit where I can pick up and start to use more of these skills on the job.

Cheers, sorry a lot of questions there!
It could happen sooner: If there are enough posts like this, someone may be developing a programmable platform of some sort and think "I know! I'll borrow some ideas from Haskell for the DSL!!"

That's all it takes.
My "perspective" is that Sandy Bridge has nothing new on the trusted computing front and Microsoft isn't smart enough to use that hardware anyway (see Palladium).
It works now.

Admittedly it's an ancient operating system, but rather some random internet person found out than a potential employer...
I think people are missing an angle in this story. I don't think the interesting part is the $450 million they invested or the vehicle they're setting up for investors. It's Facebook's future IPO and Goldman likely just bought themselves the primary role in issuing that IPO -- of which they stand to make billions off of.
Have you tried: security@google.com

They usually respond within 24hrs.
Sadly now that it has served its purpose, it has been shut down. Granted I hardly ever need it now that I have a smartphone but it was very useful when I didn't!
Just reading what's been quoted in the blog post, this makes it so that an upsell purchase is a distinctly different transaction from a previously completed purchase.

What was possible before:
1. Visitor enters billing information and makes a purchase
2. Visitor is shown an upsell page
3. Visitor clicks a link on the upsell page
4. The item that was clicked is automatically added to the previously completed purchase

Now, step 4 isn't possible. A retailer must make it clear (by virtue of asking for billing info again) that there is a new purchase that's about to happen.
I'm building a job board for developers, and Facebook is giving me cheaper conversions than anyone else. But you need to invest the time in building high-performing ads, the current ads we run are performing 50x better than our initial ads. Good ad copy and appropriate demographic choice is critical.

I suspect when a lot of people say they find Facebook ads not being effective, they've just stuck an ad up seen a 0.0001 CTR and given up. Not that I'm complaining, it makes the ads cheaper for me :-)

Facebook could do a lot more to make it easier for advertisers to build high-performing ads, but I suspect they're afraid that it'd mean that the advertisers would end up spending less money of Facebook.
Traffic is caused by human error? I suppose flooding is caused by "water error", then?

Traffic is caused by too many vehicles attempting to use a limited resource at the same time. Driverless cars may make this more tolerable (certainly riding the bus does) but the idea that this will make traffic obsolete is laughable.
Canadian SEO: Back on the Sled for 2011, eh
Read the article: "Search is just the problem they first applied AI to, and the one they've grown to dominate. In the future they will have much bigger fish to fry."
> Python is well-integrated in Ubuntu and Debian

I've heard this before, but I almost wonder if it's the exception that proves the rule. That is, the rule is: your OS is not likely to provide up-to-date development library packages (or interpreters for that matter) for your scripting language of choice. As a developer, you will need to get and build stuff by hand, you will need to manage a complex set of changing load paths, you will need lots of coffee and help. You will come to rely on and love tools outside of the normal distribution tool-chain.

I don't do Python, but this rule has proven to be true for me for Perl and Ruby, on systems including OSX, OpenBSD and Debian. I always end up having to get cpanm to install Perl modules, Perlbrew to install newer (or variant) Perl interpreters and ditto for Ruby, rvm and company. (I dabble in Haskell and Lua, and it's true there too so far as I can tell. But my experiences with those languages are too limited to really say.)

I think that Python is a special case, and I honestly don't know why. Maybe they've figured out something that Perl and Ruby haven't. Maybe it's because Gnome is built using Python very heavily, and Debian ships with a default Gnome desktop and so they care more about Python. Maybe the Python team at Debian is just better staffed. I don't know, but Python is the exception here.
I don't think I've ever had this happen, but my outbound texts on Sprint haven't worked for a week ("invalid number of digits") so I gave up and used Google Voice for texts instead, which is pretty nice as a work-around.
A Privately Traded Facebook
I wonder if computer-controlled cars coordinating with each other (maybe not explicitly but using "swarming"-type schemes) could ease traffic congestion somewhat. But yeah, it'd only be somewhat, certainly not the end of traffic.
IOS Gorged, Android Stuffed, RIM Got Leftovers, Windows Phone Went Hungry
Driving a car a short distance in light traffic is fun.

Driving a car long distances, or in heavy traffic, or in dangerous conditions (snow and ice or heavy rain) is some combination of tedious, exhausting, and stressful.
Did you try referral marketing (like cj.com)? Did/would that help?
Your second point is flawed. The button makes using RSS more convenient. Removing it makes it less convenient. Saying people would not be "put off" by making it less convenient is naive at best.
> I swear to god, I was tired of this argument before I even finished reading it

I'm sorry if i tire you, but i think you misinterpreted what i said. Every solution will boil down to a loop, necessarily, so my point is it's useless to make distinctions like , "this solution is a bit cheating, but this one isn't". As long as it respects the requirements, eg no loop or conditional statements, it is no cheating.

> Nothing personal, but your argument is always used in these situations

I realize my original comment was oversimplifying things, but i fail to see which situations you are talking about. My argument, or what i originally wanted it to be, is that the line you draw between map and the constructor trick is extremely subjective. In such case, the only way to distinguish valid or invalid solutions is to refer to the original requirements.

> Please learn where to draw the line.

And please keep your condescending attitude to yourself. I perfectly know where to draw the line, and i still consider the limit tptacek made to be ridiculous. If you have any real argument to oppose me instead of sheer oversimplification and exaggeration, please proceed, but from what i see you just needed to vent, and in a rather unpleasant manner.
"What about all of those teams that compete in the DARPA robotic car competition every year"

I imagine that Google is hiring them. Sebastian Thrun, leader of the team that won the first DARPA Grand Challenge, is now part of Google's driverless car project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun
I also live in the DC metro area...maybe we've met at the HN meetups? Will you be there next Wednesday?
31 ways to persuade your Web visitors to convert
Rate my startup cloudharmony.com (cloud benchmarking & analysis)
Not sure what you mean. Previous versions of IE used MSN or Windows Live Search as their homepages, which now redirect all searches to Bing.
Why do you think the search feature in Android phones requires an internet connection?

I don't know about you, but I haven't thought of Google as being anything other than an AI company for a while now. It has actually surprised me for a while now how little AI most of their products have, which I guess might be evidence that I was wrong.
Intridea is looking for someone to run one of our flagship products. More details here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2064402
I don't understand. Is there something wrong with their methodology?
Emily Olson, Cofounder Foodzie, on Venture Sourcing Made Easy
I believe the original intent of the bill came about from companies selling you a product and then launching a pop-up ad. Consumers would then click on the ad and be billed a low, monthly recurring charge. They wouldn't be brought to a check out screen because they had just entered all of their billing information.

I forget a lot of the specific details surrounding this, but I think these sorts of things are what originally prompted this bill.

It started with good intentions and then politicians got involved.
Printing money does, in fact, create wealth, in some limited contexts:

1. GDP growth requires printing money, or else it will create a deflationary environment, which is dangerous because it creates an incentive to delay business purchasing.

2. Low levels of inflation create a more efficient way for the economy to adjust the mix of labor skill demand. Research shows that it is difficult to nominally lower a worker's pay year over year, but giving no raise in an inflationary environment allows a company to do just that. This is important to lower the rewards for resources the economy has a lesser need for, such as when bar codes reduced the need for grocery store staff.

3. And finally, printing money can help an economy recover from an aggregate demand gap (i.e., a supply-demand disequilibrium that doesn't automatically recover). This can happen in period of high unemployment, where wages need to fall to create more demand for labor, but a fall in wages reduces personal income, further reducing aggregate demand, further reducing the demand for labor. Printing money reduces the cost of money and gives an incentive for companies to invest more, which reduces the aggregate demand gap.
The strategy took AOL from a mere 200k users to 25million. It worked very very well for AOL. If they hadn't done it they'd likely be yet another long forgotten online services company like Prodigy, CompuServe or Genie.

But instead they're a multi-billion dollar company which everyone here has heard of.
Has had. TSR doesn't exist anymore.
Anything tangible or intangible that is capable of being owned or controlled to produce value and that is held to have positive economic value is considered an asset. Ideas aren't special; they're assets, just like any other economic resource. However, ideas are very illiquid. To extract the value of an idea, you have to execute it, which can take months or years and is very uncertain. Liquidity makes assets worth more, so ideas take a significant price cut since they're so hard to "sell". So that's why ideas aren't worth very much...
Out of date not just as a suggestion, but in the very specific sense that it was exactly what people did before LLVM and co.
Except that this isn't in the law at all. That scenario is still completely legal. There is no distinctly different transaction unless the upsell was to a different company, and involved that other company separately charging the customer.
Do Goldman's clients know they are getting snookered? (How can they not?) And if you know you're going to get snookered, are you still getting snookered?