skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would also add to that list the Emotiv kit (http://www.emotiv.com), which allows "to create applications that can be controlled by your mind" by making use of the same type of technology that allows paralytics to control robotic arms.

Actually, the technology alone is highly impressive, but that an SDK is available to anyone for $299 is nothing short of mind-boggling.
Agreed. It will take a while to have "offline" translators available, but, if we can extend Moore's Law and increasing storage densities - then I'll conservatively predict that in 20 years, we'll have a pretty close to flawless babel fish like technology available, and that's just so we have five years to move the "online translation" technology to a local device. There are a number of research projects that are starting to make progress in this area.

2015 We will have universal dictionary lookup capability for most languages, and will have word-word translation in spoken, clearly written (handwriting AI is a long ways off - I'll make no predictions there), read, and listened to language. We will also have the capability to convert between all four (Write down a word in English, have it displayed and spoken out in French)

2020 will be the year that we'll start to see reasonably good translation systems that take into account some amount of nuance beyond word-for-word translation. This will be in a research environment, but will quickly move out of that environment into commercial applications.

2025 will be the year that Translation, as a skill set, will start to be replaced by machines - in particular, subtitling for movies into local languages will be predominantly done by machine system for all but the highest end productions.

2030 will be the year that we can write, read, speak, and understand, anyone in the world in each of our native languages, anywhere, any time. It will also be the year that Language Translation systems will be seen as a reasonable alternative to human translators.

So, as long as you plan on being a translator before 2030 - you should be okay - after that, all bets are off as to whether you have a career.
Off topic: I find it really interesting how visually distracting the goodbye video was because he had one sleeve rolled up.
No documentation in the docs node?
So I think the bigger story here is not that the pilot held the flight (really, it's not all that exceptional for a pilot to hold a flight for a late arriving passenger), but that Southwest is sophisticated enough to relay "hey, this dude's grandson was just murdered" to the pilots and flight crew.

It's also worth stating that even though other pilots on other airlines would have done the same thing, good for that particular pilot for doing it on that particular day.
Wheee! Third-party apps can now play video to Airplay devices! (off by default, which sucks and means updates will be needed to enable it).

Other than that - some minor iAd functionality, access to some additional metadata for media files, and playback stats for videos (frames dropped, bytes sent) and that's about it. At least on the API side.
Dude, it was just four years of Spanish... I can't be expected to speak as well as a toddler!
"Of course when he was prompted to provide sources, he was unable to provide any that actually lent credence to his dubious statement."

I already gave you a perfectly good example, but I'll give you another one:

"Conclusions — Increasing promotion of CCBs has mirrored trends in physician prescribing. An association between advertising and prescribing patterns could explain why CCBs have supplanted better-substantiated therapies for hypertension."

http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/99/15/2055
The real question is how far it will move from alpha, if at all.
It appears that science has reached its Ballmer Peak.
http://xkcd.com/323/
> You mean if production was moved from China back to the U.S. through government intervention?

Oh, come on, it's a hypothetical. They're not seriously suggesting that it will or should be done, and therefore they don't have to provide a how. They're just running the numbers for the sake of a comparison. You're overreacting.

> Then there would still be an "acceptable", as determined by the government, profit?

Um, no. As determined by researchers Yuqing Xing and Neal Detert from the Asian Development Bank Institute, authors of the study, and the people that came up with the purely hypothetical scenario.
Here's the Austrian provider that I use: http://www.bob.at/ (but there are also other cheap providers here such as http://yesss.at/). Both providers act as MVNO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operator) using the net of a larger provider - therefore you typically have a very good wireless coverage.

The phones of both provides are sold unlocked per default and all providers here use compatible frequency ranges for GSM and UMTS. That means that you don't have any problems using a phone from one provider with another provider. Plans of those providers also do not have any "minimum duration" - so you can quit at any time (although there's not really a reason for this, as most of the plans do not have monthly fixed costs, but only the variable costs).

Of course there are also other, more expensive providers with things like minimum contract durations and so on. But unless you want to buy a subsidized iPhone there's not really a reason to use them.
This is great to know, but it seems like a lot of unnecessary work on our part to make it work. That means for each file we have to manually create and upload a compressed version, ensure that the compressed and uncompressed versions are always in sync, and properly set up custom origins for the files.

Instead, Amazon's front end should just check the incoming accept-encoding header and automatically compress as needed.
I'm another avid Apple user who switched from an iPhone 3GS to an HTC Desire, and love it.

Granted, it's NOT as "smooth and polished" of an experience as iOS but I think the pro's FAR outweight the cons.

I found battery life to be much better (and I don't do any of the stupid suggestions such as "disable internet for longer battery!", I use all the features, all the time).

I also like that I can actually PLAY with the phone as a geek. Download and mess with .apk's from random developers, mess with settings, store/manipulate files on the phone, etc.

The biggest reason to do it though, is what you've already said: For a change. That was my main reason, and it has opened my eyes to how much fun it is just to change your ways for the sake of change itself.
No. Apple DOS filenames were limited to 30 chars. ProDOS was limited at 15 chars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS

My 33 figure was wrong (either me or Wikipedia). Maybe the directory entry had 33 bytes (30 for the file name, 1 for type, and two for track and sector)
You're being downvoted because your comment was snarky and seemed disingenuous. Nobody's saying that buying a copy of a piece of software grants you the copyright to that software (rather than ownership of that copy of the software), and a copyright is very obviously not analogous to a PC.
Are you in a big city in the US and need thousands or tens of thousands? Look through Yellow Pages (online, of course).

Just need a handful made? Post your question here: http://bbs.homeshopmachinist.net/ in the General section and make it clear that you intend to pay the going rate if you want to be taken seriously. There are a few guys there who can do small quantity injection molding.

It's a hobbyist board, but people there are quite used to the machinist's equivalent of "I'm a business guy and just need a cheap programmer to implement my idea." They will respond the same way you would to that sentiment.
How not to get a PhD
The other thing that is interesting, when speaking about nuance and such, is that a good translator that uses tweets, emails, other translated discussions, is that I can get instantly translation of emerging memes and subtleties in a language.
CES 2011 Intel/Gapingvoid Tribute
Flash and h264 are completely different and are not at all equivalent.

Google doesn't support Flash. Google supports BROWSER PLUGINS. And Flash is by far the most popular plugin to the point of being ubiquitous. Google CAN'T drop support for Flash without dropping support for plugins. Google could, symbolically, stop bundling the Flash plugin. But really they believe in an open plugin standard which allows for browser extensions.

By comparison h264 is more like a proprietary, out of spec superset of the HTML standard. Building h264 support directly into the browser is equivalent to supporting IE specific markup. Or maybe even ActiveX. It just exposes Google to patent suits.

The real problem is the W3C needs to recommend a codec for the HTML5 video tag. Until they do there is no chance for standards compliant implementations to exist because there is no standard. h264 is not a solution because it's not part of the standard. And it won't become part of the standard until it loses the patent encumberance.
Frickin’ Laser Beams: Fact vs Fiction
Interestingly enough a search for 'AIXI-MC' turns up an OKCupid posting as the third result. And it's correct:

possible instantiations of AIXI-MC or Goedel machines

is listed under 'I spend a lot of time thinking about.' Though I wonder if that's a failure of Google or a failure of the popularity of the term 'AIXI-MC.'
Actually, a smart phone with offline wikipedia is a much closer approximation to The Guide than the kindle.
Click on the Plans and Pricing page. No mention of Plans nor Pricing other than saying I can try it for free (unless it's in the 2:50 long video that I don't want to watch). I see this happen a lot on these service-based sites and it never ceases to irk me.
"Pro-tip": you can also do :.!date
The results were downloadable from the website if you took part. I copied the "other" column from the .xls file and here's a sort | uniq -c | head -21 of that table. 2188 people didn't mention other languages.

2188
55 Objective-C
40 Delphi
36 Java
24 VB.NET
19 VB
16 Haskell
14 vb.net
13 Objective C
12 Scala
11 ColdFusion
10 VB.Net
10 ActionScript
9 HTML
8 R
6 Lua
6 F#
5 vb
5 PowerShell
5 objective-c
5 Groovy

There were a lot of "objective-c and some comment", so objective-c is even more popular. Other languages in there included: ocaml, assembly, klingon, tcl, fortran, COBOL, and quite a few matlabs.

Here's the text file of that column for you to see for yourself http://pastebin.com/wMZUBMub
It's also worth questioning the value of these 'jobs' without context.

If technological progress has taught us anything, it's that the manufacturing jobs in question are simply not going to exist for very long. So it's probably for the best to be forced into a design- and service-based economy, before automation obviates these jobs altogether.

Forcing manufacturing back into the economy would be precisely the sort of ill-conceived, short-term, band-aid solution-that-makes-things-worse-in-the-end that's all too common in US political discourse and legislation.
My hovercraft is full of eels. Sorry, couldn't resist. Natural language processing, could we really see major improvements in our lifetimes? My gut tells me there are so many nuances to the way we work that the best we can get to will have to include many of the inconsistencies we have in understanding each other.
Every once in a while some company comes out with a really great solution to a problem. The most recent was with hipmunk and flights. When I used hipmunk for the first time, I had that feeling that after them, the whole landscape had changed.

I got the same feeling when I saw google maps - it was so far ahead of everyone, and not just technically but design-wise too. The same thing happened with mail. So on one hand you could say that their maps and mail are sort of standard, and that other companies have similar offerings.

But on the other hand, who set the standard in the first place?
So you agree that 100k/6.5 million would not unreasonable for the entity which would be charged that amount?

The linked article addresses inflation also. The licensors agree to not raise royalties by more than 10% per year. Unless you definition of "jacked up" encompasses 10% rise.

I see ideological reasons to support a free standard, but not business ones. YMMV.
Make CSS Buttons Like a Boss
"Backups and redundancy are achieved via synchronous replication, snapshots, and incremental log backups."

That's nice but you can't access these backups. They are there for the system failing - not for your own needs. RAID is not a backup strategy.
"I think the government has no business in private contracts in any of the above situations."

It is quite a stretch to extend rules from the above situations, which are clearly contracts between more or less equal partners to corporation/consumer retail, where the balance of power is so heavily skewed against the consumer.
If you're still at the idea stage, you will want to prototype first. If it's small enough, you can print it with a MakerBot (Desktop 3D printer for $1200 or so). Alternatively, you could use ShapeWays (the "fedex/kinkos" of 3D printing). Until you actually have production volumes in the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of units, this will be the cheaper, faster, easier option.
I'm not sure that's a good idea. Cork'd is known as being a part of Gary's awesome empire. If it were to be sold, many folks would miss that memo, and still assume it was associated with him. If the new buyers made any missteps, that could reflect badly on Gary, even though he's no longer associated to them.

I'm more surprised about the current strategy to let the site sit there and rot. I'd think shutting it down, while still allowing folks to log in and export their data for a year or so, would be a better option.
How Facebook's Private IPO Screws Other Entrepreneurs
Your feedback box blocks two of the signup buttons. That's pretty bad. :)
Open letter to BC Law School's dean to leave and get a refund
haha, indeed: http://bieber.ly/67ec
FYI - the page is now back to normal after my small experiment - http://bufferapp.com/pricing
Automated translation can get 90% of the way there, and we're very close to this point already. But for that final 10%, you basically need full AI that's capable of actually comprehending the subject matter in order to provide an adequate translation.

I think that's probably more than a couple decades out.
Actually, the number should be even higher in favour of America. If an iPhone that contains $171 worth of parts (source Broadpoint AmTech) and $6.50 worth of labor sells for $500 from China to Europe, currently China gets credit for $500 worth of exports and gets "charged" for the parts it imports from the US, Taiwan, Japan, etc. However, shouldn't the US get credit for the 500-171-6.55=322.50 worth of "value add" that it's design and marketing adds to the bag of parts and labour? In other words, the iPhone should be adding over a billion in "exports" to the US economy, rather than being almost 2 billion in "imports" as is currently calculated, or adding 50 million to exports as the Time article proposes.
[edit: Had coffee, thought sardonic voice could be misconstrued, rephrased.]

The calculation of national trade deficit is a matter of strategic import at a number of Japanese companies, which have scale sufficient that companywide policy registers on them. (I live in Japan's manufacturing heartland, and work professionally in the ambit of a particular company which makes, among other things, automobiles. That company is, to say things mildly, rather large.)

Back in the 1980s, when the US/Japan trade deficit was a source of friction between the two countries, there was great popular unrest in the US about it, including demonstrations where Japanese cars were destroyed to make a point. This unrest predictably had concrete policy consequences. Those policy consequences materially impacted the operations of several large Japanese companies, including that automobile manufacturer.

So they put their heads together with the PR teams and hacked the system. One hack was sharply curtailing the amount of final assembly they do. As I phrased it once, a Japanese chasis, Japanese camera, Japanese CPU, Japanese antenna, Japanese software, and Chinese paper box is a Chinese cell phone when the governments run their numbers. Journalists and politicians don't second guess them, because they're mostly ignorant. This keeps anti-Japan unrest to a minimum and is part of the reason why economic relations between the countries are so cordial now despite fairly little materially changing.

Japan historically has a contentious relationship with China. A portion of the discontent with globalism which was once directed at Japan is now directed at China. Many here would consider this to not be a bug.
Yup - standard fare for Europe for a long time now... a totally foreign concept in north america.

It'e sasier for operators to not have to deal with contracts and billing and just deal with self-service through supermarkets and hole-in-the-wall cellular shops selling phones, sims, and refill cards than it is to deal with contracts and billing...
Furthermore:

Adding a job in China isn't really in competition with adding a job in America. If anything there is a synergy. If Chinese factories can pump out goods cheap for American designers, that means we can hire more designers, and profitably sell more things globally.
Kinda like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#IPv4-mapped_IPv6_addresses ?

edit: Actually, now that I think about it, accessing IPv4 internet from IPv6-only LAN should be almost trivial. Lets say you happen to have 3000::0 IPv6 network completely unused, which also fits the entire IPv4 address space. Then you could configure your DNS server to respond to AAAA queries for domains that have only A records with an corresponding IPv6 in your free block. Ie news.ycombinator.com(174.132.225.106) would become 3000::ae84:e16a or something like that. Then your router which is default gw for the hosts receives a package destined to that special network, it takes the payload and puts it into a IPv4 packet with destination decoded from the IPv6 address.

It seems kinda obvious approach, wouldn't require any modification of the hosts or to the internet. Of course I don't know why anyone would want to run a IPv6 only LAN instead of mixed v4/v6, but maybe there is some reason to. Are there some problems that I haven't noticed? Surely someone must have thought about this before.
Slippy maps are great. The UX was a great idea, but it was almost entirely dependent on having the technology and infrastructure to implement them, including asynchronous map tiling client side.

I don't think that is in conflict with my original statement, and the remainder of the Maps API is truly bad. I regularly make the mistake of using the scroll wheel, get stuck trying to figure out how to show (or hide) street view, etc.

Regarding GMail -- it's a poor approximation of an existing, very basic desktop experience. There's not a lot of design innovation there, if you look beyond webmail.
I like the idea, however my first question was a bit confusing (not the math!):

"2x - 2 + -1x + 2 = 5x2 - 4"

Is it necessary to use 'x' for multiplication? It's a bit confusing to be solving for x and have multiplication be represented as x as well.

I clicked through a few more questions and found this:

"-4x - 3 = -3x + 3 - -9xx2 - 9"

Can you use a '*' to represent multiplication?
Nice, been thinking of starting an HTML 5 graph visualization myself. Though I would put less emphasis on the animation and more on the "clickability" of buttons. This jittering around makes it look broken - instead I would arrange all elements in their final position from the beginning and only use animations when a new node is created.
No. Just decipher the thing for yourself and go find those geeks. If you spoil it for everybody else, they'll just declare the effort null and void (they did not solve the puzzle themselves) and immediately release a new puzzle, which means your efforts will come to naught.

It's an honour thing. Go for it.
Attempting to track I/O with systemtap
That fails to indicate that doctors don't read peer-reviewed journals, and it fails to indicate that uneducated parents can make better informed decisions than doctors.

We've been over this already.
wow, this is really well done! i love the user interface for changing parameters (friction, gravity,etc.) and just overall smoothness

seems as if the algorithm grows unstable for very high node repulsion. even with a few nodes you can tell it is getting caught in a local energy minimum, plus the oscillations are jarring. maybe just cap the repulsion strength at 50k?

have you thought about adding hover text, upon a mouseover of the vertices?

also, maybe instead of spring tension, one could use fixed lengths given by the weights of another text file. giving user generated meaning to the edge lengths.
There is nothing, nothing here on Earth that couldn't be much more easily mined in the outer solar system, or any other solar system for that matter. The idea of Earth having resources that would make it necessary (or even feasible) to go through all the trouble and mine this planet is simply not viable. In fact, it's horribly dangerous for any alien civilization to come here for this purpose. Pretty much every ounce of material on this planet is contaminated with self-replicating organisms that would wreak havoc on any foreign ecosystem.

There are still some nefarious reasons why an outside civilization may attack us, for example to bolster a slavery-based economy or for religious purposes. There are certainly other reasons we can't even think of yet. But resources? No.

Territorial reasons are also void, since we can't project any meaningful power beyond close earth orbit and we couldn't even mount a serious planetary defense come to think of it. Pretty much anyone could just strip mine the entire solar system - including the Moon - without us being able to do anything about it.
The article is complaining that the statistics don't reflect the reality you described. In reality, America gets most of the benefit of an iPhone sale. But in international statistics, it appears as a $500 export from China to the US, which is obvious nonsense.
Son…I am disappoint.
It's not really that simple. First of all, from the article:

"It costs only US$6.50 per unit to assemble all parts and components into a ready to use iPhone. The assembly cost accounts for merely 3.6% of the total manufacturing cost."

So the Chinese company assembles (not produces) units for $6.50 a piece, which is only a tiny fraction of the total manufacturing cost. The other $180.55 of the cost of manufacturing comes largely from American countries.

And no, the article is not saying it's unfair that we can't take that last $7. In fact, just the opposite. It's lamenting the fact that most trade deficit calculations use the entire manufacturing cost (~$190 in this case) rather than just taking into account the value added ($6.50) by the exporting country. Calculating the figure this way makes the situation seem much more dire than it actually is, which results in extremist cries for a trade war. The author of this paper seems to think the $7 of value added by China is perfectly fair, and he's just trying to get others to realize that this figure is more accurate and applicable than the standard calculation.
I demand a similar experiment with marijuana.
Pattern Matching vs. Destructuring… to the death
Looking at the actual jobs that get pulled up by clicking on "historian," it looks like they are incorrectly identifying engineering jobs that use a product called "Historian" or talk about "historian data" from monitoring devices as actual jobs for historians.

I would think even a rudimentary spot check would have caught such a glaring error before they published the article.

Credibility fail.
No, Andy Grove is on the other side of the debate. This article says that the iPhone is good for the economy. It's Andy Grove that's saying its bad for the economy.
How Scientists See the World