skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Originally, I was making it graphics rich but then decided against it and went "barebone" http://picasaweb.google.com/sopybeepl/DevScreenshots#5427711...
I think, from the viewpoint of a mathematician, there has been more progress in solving Go than in solving chess. http://math.berkeley.edu/~berlek/cgt/go.html shows some progress on generic Go endgames; I've never seen something similar for chess. It all is either a smart exhaustive search, or the use of heuristics that humans think can be used to value positions. I am not aware of any research on the validity of such heuristics.

Because of that, I think chances are we will solve Go before we solve chess in the mathematical sense (at the same time, I think chances are effectively zero that I'll live to see either happen). Yes, chess has a much smaller search tree, but it is inconceivably large to start with, and its rules are ugly. That means that any mathematical breakthrough will likely have lots of ugly special cases (even ignoring rochade and en passant). Go, in contrast, has a much simpler structure.
* The software was usually built against specific versions (often modified) of 3rd party libraries. *

That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen... maintaining a different version of libraries outside of their main development trunk means that:

1. Extra steps when a new main version comes out - you have to repatch your differences in.

2. #1 incurs a delay, thus a longer time that your customer are running without patches, which may be a security issue.

3. You won't do #1 at all. Thus you become reliant on old, unmaintained, buggy, security-holey libraries.

The only time I can think this is acceptable is to fix problems that upstream won't fix, or are platform specific (ie, not with your custom software, but with the OS underneath everything).
Appreciate what you're saying and I did get that Watson doesn't truly "understand" us yet, but still, what has been achieved so far is pretty impressive and would have useful applications even in its current form. Curious to see what IBM will do next with this.
1. Mefeedia.com
2. Can't find it (it's old)
3. Execution, mostly.
Small town launches its own stimulus: a local currency
> With 8% of surfers clicking 87% of ads (can't find the link, it was on here a while ago)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2101163

As many people pointed out, that study was relavent to "display ads" only, so Google's context ads aren't really in that same boat.
The Computer Programmer’s Fat Loss Toolkit
Despite that, they can display ads with bigger accuracy. They have all info about users. But Google has made a very precise step with android. And anyone who would like to compete with them in this arena is still FAR behind.
The Placebo Effect and Your Diet
I think you're right that in aggregate it doesn't matter. There are enough people willing to put up with it for Google to be impressively profitable.

But sign up for an AdWords account, turn on the display network, and then tell me click fraud doesn't matter when some site in India takes half your advertising budget for the day. Google isn't as smart as everyone assumes.

In my experience, it's not an edge case - it's common and Google doesn't know or care about it if you're not spending the $10k per month they require to actually talk to a person. You just have to suck it up and not allow ads to be automatically placed.
Google is still "just ads" even if they do have other services and popular properties to put those ads on, which is why someone else's better solution would be a threat.

Does the next AdWords/AdSense need YouTube to succeed? No.
Mashmush, a mashup for listening to complete music albums, for free
Is there an official Hacker News account?
If so, please let me know.
I hate to ruin the party. Google can't fail. Even if they are or become susceptible to something, they have already succeeded tremendously. I really dislike contrarianism for it's sake.
The reason why wealthy retirees get Social Security and why the tax is capped at $106K/year is the same: it's to prevent Social Security from being a welfare program for poor people

Since everyone gets Social Security, this makes it much harder to get rid of. This was an intentional feature, and it has worked -- look at the fate of welfare programs devoted to poor people. The poor have very little political power and are easy to "other", making programs for them easy targets.

The tax cap is in place because Social Security payments are based on the amount you paid in. By capping the tax, this limits the payments necessary to wealthy retires which would make Social Security very expensive.

Anyway, nothing you're suggesting is totally unreasonable, but I think it's important to recognize that there is significant amount of political and policy savvy that went into to designing Social Security. It is both a very popular AND successful program.
> No, journalists will probably not do that.

What do journalists do anyway? I mean there has to be a reason why they call themselves 'journalists' and not just 'bloggers'.

I always assumed journalism would somehow include a little bit of research but ... nada. From my experience with the online "press" I just can assume that all those online journalist do not deserve that label.

Whenever I'm preparing a press kit I feel like I would be doing all the journalist's work and they only need (and most presumably will) take my copy 1:1, smack some Adsense on and republish it.

I have not much experience with print media so I don't know if the print journalists, too, are such a lazy bunch but online it's ridiculous.
Raising the retirement age will disproportionately hurt anyone who works physical jobs, who are already strained by the decline in construction and manufacturing.

Keep the low retirement age only for the declining number of people who work physical jobs. Problem solved.
They already told you they're a small team, with mostly windows users and AIR allowed them to offer a cross platform solution. This is a polite way of saying "you're an outlier, you're not our target user, please go away and stop bothering us".

Alex's point is that they should have built a native windows app in that case. Even on Windows, AIR apps kinda suck.

It all comes down to the oft-rehashed point from 37signals: build half a product, not a half-assed product.

AIR always feels half-assed. It's slow, resource-intensive, doesn't look like the other apps, and generally gives a slightly uncomfortable feeling.
I have no interest in using it, but I may be a little odd that way. I prefer the corporate impersonality of hotels. I've stayed in "bed and breakfast" spare-room places before, and I've never really been comfortable with the experience. I don't like that personal touch with people I don't already know.
So a company that sells a solution to click fraud says there is a lot of click fraud. Wow, that's really surprising.

Even if there is significant click fraud, which I personally doubt, it still has to be really massive to destroy the ROI of Google Adwords campaigns.
Won't there be even more complaining how shitty a native software is?
It's a C issue, not an implementation issue. Learn C well.

Alternatively, study OS kernels not implemented in C. It's all basic algorithms and can be implemented in any language, if you content with abstraction and don't mind working with emulated "devices".
Yes, i know. I'am just very tired. But anyway, i've added it now.

http://jsperf.com/dom-vs-innerhtml-based-templating/46

It performs really poor..
I've used Cyberduck for years, I'm a fairly technical person, I care about native apps... and yet I never realised that Cyberduck was written in Java.

So they've done a pretty amazing job. Perhaps that's possible in AIR too, but I don't know of any such apps (then again, I didn't know of any such Java apps until a moment ago).
> Actually, it's very common in Europe. They're called "SIM only" plans. They don't include a phone, but are way cheaper.

They're not "way" cheaper. They provide more service at the same price and no phone. Here is the full grid: http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/mobile-price-plans/all-plans...

> In Belgium, operators are prohibited from selling subsidized phones. Instead, consumers buy their phones full price and sign up for a SIM-only plan.

No, that's the point, you can't get subsidized phones and it still isn't cheaper.

> Example: An iPhone 4 16GB costs Euro 640 ($850) at Mobistar Belgium. Their iPhone plan costs Euro 45 a month ($60).

Which is the price of a plan with subsidized phone in France with Mobistar's parent company (orange) [0]

Origami Star starts at 39€ giving access to a 16GB iPhone 4 for 229€ [1]. Though for the same price you do get more voice in Belgium.

[0] http://iphone.orange.fr/forfaits.php

[1] http://www.orange.fr/bin/frame.cgi?u=http%3A//sites.orange.f...
Couple of clever things about W3schools learning experience that are missing from Mozilla's site:

- Working examples. W3Schools leads with them - Mozilla doesn't seem to have any.

- The 'try it yourself' feature. Nothing cements learning like playing around with the concepts for yourself.

compare the img entry for both:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTML/Element/img
Yeah, it always astonishes me how destroyed people can feel about a negative tech crunch mention.

If your consumer base is not the sort of tech geek who reads TC then TC frankly doesn't matter if you want to sell your product.
Sometimes.

I like Tweetdeck and Balsamiq Mockups and don't care they use AIR.
Offer HN: Free startup idea / designs
Hi HN,

A while ago I tried to sell these designs, as well as the domain. That didn't go over so well. I've learned a lot since then, and my co-founder and I on this idea decided not to pursue it, because we wanted to pursue our other startup ideas. So far, we've both progressed greatly with them.

So what I'm offering is the domain name crowdtutor.com, as well as 4~ PSD's + any more that I can find. We probably also have some docs and sitemaps floating around. If multiple people are interested, I'll do my best to judge who to give them too, although ideas on how to work this out would be appreciated.

The designers were done by a VERY good startup designer, currently working at a YC and VC funded startup.

Designs:

- http://cl.ly/0N0r0a170k340c2c1i05 (Homepage)

- http://cl.ly/2E2a051A0Y1l223H1w1J (Dashboard)

- http://cl.ly/1L2T3k302r0E3H0H3J3F (Dashboard Teacher)

- http://cl.ly/1X1s342E3i1I0z442J19 (Tutor Teaching View)

- http://cl.ly/0M0g1H1l1C3P0x1f1q3x (Tutor viewing Student Whiteboards)

- http://cl.ly/0I352V3a0F0C2k3f2w1s (Student Whiteboard View)

Hope someone can find a home for these!

Edit: I would be happy to give these away free to someone I know who will actually develop. But I would be happy to sell it to someone too. A lot of money went into this.
> I'm not sure why it's the author's responsibility to go setup a dozen different VMs

To make sure it compiles and works under dozen different distributions (in practice centos + ubuntu/debian usually cover most cases). If you don't test it, how do you know it's usable at all? Besides, as long as you don't invent some crazy custom build system, the only thing you really have to write is metadata and dependencies (rules file can be 3 lines long for autotools software).

Also, this way you can just push your software to a build farm like launchpad ppa and let them do the dirty work. If you include self-contained tests with the sources, you can even run them after the build to verify correctness for that environment. This is much better than doing it by hand.

Also keep in mind that the first person to deploy your software automatically to a couple of places will either use your/distro's package or will have to make their own. Building from source works only for one-person uncontrolled environment.
Clickable:

- http://cl.ly/0N0r0a170k340c2c1i05 (Homepage)

- http://cl.ly/2E2a051A0Y1l223H1w1J (Dashboard)

- http://cl.ly/1L2T3k302r0E3H0H3J3F (Dashboard Teacher)

- http://cl.ly/1X1s342E3i1I0z442J19 (Tutor Teaching View)

- http://cl.ly/0M0g1H1l1C3P0x1f1q3x (Tutor viewing Student Whiteboards)

- http://cl.ly/0I352V3a0F0C2k3f2w1s (Student Whiteboard View)
Soccket: Kick a Ball, Light a Room
We do not exist in a vacuum. My wife just left on a baby shower with some of her friends. They're going to eat at a local restaurant we've all seen, but only one of them have been to. They said it was good.

How miraculous! How spectacular! How.... utterly ordinary and common.

Most people are complaining about push advertising. I don't know anyone who says they want stores to take down their signs or websites and wants to ensure none of their friends ever talk about any products or restaurants or anything.
There's a TC Europe? (I'm from Europe and I didn't notice.)
Is there a decently written guide for creating ubuntu packages? The package maintainers guide confuses the heck out of me and it's way too long and disorganized.
Why is that? The payroll tax is regressive, and it makes the total tax rate of someone who makes $200k a year lower than someone who makes $100k if you factor in employer contributions.
I also got errors with Jade and Eco on Opera 10. The whole page fails with Opera 11, too: http://cl.ly/3s2a0i3V1s422b2Z1Z3C
Except that it's actually a regressive tax (being capped at $106k/yr).
so we should probably stop.

Agreed.
Several business ventures explored the idea of cyber hunting in recent years, but the practice has been banned in at least 25 states, the bulletin said, adding that officers should be aware of the existence of such devices.

Sounds a bit more complicated than just "gun + internet = illegal".
But this "just ads" is really widespread, when someone will come with a better solution, until they reach even 1% of what Google has, Google will come up with a better solution :) And no one would like to switch from expert like Google to some new guy
Simple mongodb backup script
Oh my goodness -- that's really fascinating. I had no idea that the new jQuery-tmpl templates were that egregiously slow. (Nearly 100x slower, for those who don't want to run the tests.) Thanks for adding 'em to the list.
Probably. However, that's not what the parent asked for.
Absolutely, good point. It's hard to resist the urge, though - seeking coverage (to get confirmation or otherwise) is only natural when you are passionate about your start up and want to tell the world what you are doing.

Customer development is still massively undervalued, though.
Theres a great programme called checkinstall that gets you 90% there. Rather than running 'make install' run 'checkinstall', or rather than 'sudo python installscript.pt', run 'sudo checkinstall python installscript.py'
> On the other hand, only good has come from this

Are you completely sure of that?
I meant to ask if Hacker News has an official twitter account that updates with every single thread, because I'm seeing a lot of bots.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide - a little bit better than Debian's official one. Unfortunately the more you do it, the more you actually need to refer to the Debian's guide and see why it was written that way...

I also recommend checking out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PbuilderHowto - pbuilder is "the" way to build packages, which I unfortunately discovered very late.
It's a commercial version of http://www.couchsurfing.org/ or http://www.hospitalityclub.org/

Not revolutionary, but great execution.
No problem after all. :)
It's really horrible. But it's not that bad for me. knockout.js does a good job with partial rendering via databinding (ie. only rerender what really changed or is added).

Also it's just beta 1, lets see what happens next.

But adding Eco Template as engine for knockout.js would be a great idea, i think...
As opposed to other sabre-rattling brutal countries that fund terrorism and _already_ have nuclear weapons.
Very well said, dools. I'm a co-founder of the app in question, which is HipChat (http://www.hipchat.com).

If we'd started out making native apps for every platform we wouldn't be where we are today. Sure AIR isn't perfect but it's allowed a 3-man bootstrapped team to create a product that hundreds of companies love to use every day and are happy to pay for.

Alex mentioned his team was going to try setting up their own IRC or Jabber server. That's awesome! The whole reason we're creating HipChat is because the vast majority of business have absolutely NO IDEA how to do that. The fact that more technical teams are willing to invest their precious work hours setting up and maintaining their own group chat system is a testament to how powerful a tool it is.

Of course if you set up your own chat system you won't get drag + drop file sharing, archived history, or inline image previews no matter how technical your team is. :)

Oh and we'll be opening up XMPP access soon so anyone who really needs a native app is more than welcome to build one.
Apparently it's a US-only feature.

I'm allowed to buy "loanable "ebooks from amazon.com but I can't actually lend them since I'm not from the US. Nice.

Given that the lending feature is only ONE loan for the whole lifetime of the purchase, it's more of a joke. I think people should rather write a kindlebay not kindle lending clubs.

Amazon is also doing this wrong -- an ebook is conceptually either lendable or not. I would say it is, so allowing the publisher to toggle this checkbox seems beyond stupid.

If Amazon is afraid of wide scale distribution (like this kindle lending club) perhaps they just need to define lending as something between 2 physical kindle devices done in a peer-to-peer manner.

That is, I have to be physically next to my friend's Kindle in order to share a book (using some adhoc wifi connection for example). Or, if I want to 'lend' to a friend 1000 miles away -- make the lending happen with a delay of a few days (for 'shipping') and even add some small ($1 ?) cost.

Basically they could have introduced with software all the inconvenience of actual physical book lending (proximity, distance issues) but instead they invented something new: one lending per book lifetime and publisher-defined "lendability".

Of course, the sane option would be to have all ebooks as lendable with some normal limits (say, once per month).
Foodspotting raises $3m
I agree completely. Let's say I'm an advertiser. I can put my ads next to a wall of search results, on some random blogs, etc... OR I can put my ads next to the photos, videos and profiles of the target customer's friends and relatives. Facebook allows an advertisers to tap directly into potential customer's lives, associating themselves directly.

Plus, fb has nearly perfect demographic information. If I want to advertise ONLY to divorced single moms, ages 35-45 in Cleveland who have birthdays in December, and identify as republican, I've got all that info right there on fb. Google can only guess.
To my knowledge no. I think this is one of the main problems in getting people to create system packages. I think this fosters the split between package maintainers and developers. It's not that the documentation is all bad, it's just not aimed at the audience I think it should be.

System packages just aren't what web savvy developers grew up on and the documentation feels out of step. But the capabilities and tools around system packages are awesome.

I might take a go a writing a simple guide, but I'd be more than happy to see other people have a go that know more than I do. Let me know if this sounds of interest.
Silicon Valley executives seek to invest in EA talent
> All I want is for nobody to get nuked.

If you are citizen of any of the countries that have nuclear weapons, have you considered lobbying to eliminate those? If not, then you are not really for "nobody to get nuked".
>> how do you check-in w/o code review?

Early, and often, that's how. Surely you don't forbid a dev from saving his/her work (where it's backed up) and keeping a stream of "undo" checkpoints in the repository until only after somebody else had a chance to look it over???

Now, it does make sense to have a review before merging a development branch to a release candidate, but not to block check-ins/commits in general.

OK, so I've known senior staff who did want to have just this sort of restriction, and I found it foolhardy then, as well.
Google has a leg up by virtue of the fact it could deploy any new product massively and immediately, but that barrier to entry is hardly insurmountable. It just means the new paradigm would have to be significantly better than the current one, for the following three groups:

1) Advertisers. Companies would need to see a significant benefit to moving to the new platform.

2) Site owners. Either by virtue of UI or increased revenue, a new platform would have to offer a significant advantage to site owners to spur adoption.

3) Users. This one's basically optional, and included in 2). A new advertising platform would have to be unobtrusive enough to not piss off users drastically more than current ads, but a strong enough showing in 1 & 2 would make that less important. Ideally, a new platform would offer ads that users want to see, by virtue of being either entertaining, relevant, or both. See movie previews in theatres for a good example of this.
Why is it necessary for HTML5 to specify a codec for the <video> and <audio> tag when no format is specified for <img>?

(I'm not being rhetorical)
Lots of companies used to be really widespread, now they're dead or dying - AOL, Yahoo, Digg, MySpace, Altavista, etc.

Google will have plenty of opportunity to fight for their position in the next round. Some companies can win that fight again and some can't, no way to know which category Google or anyone else falls in until after the fact.
For the record I don't think the FSF asks that all GPL software gets assigned to them. However for all GNU software (bash, gcc etc) They want copyright assignment.
Your post boils down to something like "developers should ship Debian packages because I use Debian and all my favorite software packages are out of date or non-existent".

Maybe you should move away from a distro that freezes for 6 months to roll a stable release which won't get anything more than security/crash fixes for 2+ years.
I'm not the OP, but I will respond anyway:

1. We have made changes to the 3rd party source code that we want to ship now, not when they finally let the patch into their source tree.

2. We get new updates from the latest release, patch in our stuff and we are set, quick test on the CI servers and we can ship. Yes, customers may be without the fix for a little while longer...

3. It is actually in our best interest to keep 3rd party libraries at their latest release, if we want secure software. Which is why it is part of our release documents and steps that are required to be followed before we release.
"At this time there is no evidence to suggest that such equipment was established for any purpose other than illegal hunting activity," the bulletin said. "However, the apparatus could be used for more nefarious activity that would be of direct concern to the law enforcement and public safety communities."

The first sentence could be from '1984'.

"There's no evidence that you didn't kill your wife."
my impression of Eric (I don't know him, I've only talked briefly at a couple of conferences) is that if he disagreed with something or thought it had problems, he'd tell you to your face.

I sat in on his speech "Why Django Sucks, and How We Can Fix It" at Djangocon last year:

http://djangocon.blip.tv/file/4112452/

And he gave a lot of tough love to Django in front of most of the establishment and people who are hardcore Djangonauts.

Speaking of questionable tactics, why create a HN account just for the express purpose of attacking him?