skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First off I am a VIM noob. What makes me say I want to edit a file in VIM rather than something else? It would have to be the search, modify, save routine. As an example: opening an ini to change a specific value, so much easier and faster in VIM than any other editor I have tried. Another is the ability to use cut, copy, paste with multiple registers.
Looks interesting. How do you compare with Scout? https://scoutapp.com/
Please don't get me wrong, no doubt Watson is an amazing accomplishment but my point was it almost seems cocky that we talk about creating a level of intelligence on par of humans considering nature took millions and millions of years to do it.Mankind has made some decent scientific progress only in the last 200 years more or less and we have not be able to create even living organism as simple as a Virus yet.Again I have no background in these topics but just sounds to me that we are a little off when we talk about creating Singularity in the near future!
Does this have any relation to Blaze Mobile, http://www.blazemobile.com?
[ASK HN] Quickest way to get a design online
as a coder I'm limited to how well I can design, I have colors chosen and someone else has done a great logo but now its time to build a UI.

I want to get a quick prototype together and was wondering what process you (developer) guys on here use to build a quick UI for your side projects. 95% of people still judge an application by its design.
You think I would go for Nazis? I'm no Philistine.
I've been using Vim for a long time, maybe since version 3 or 4, because what sold me was multiple windows, either into the same file, or each window displaying different files.
His wife has a Mac and she is much more computer literate. She does anything that is required. He can't even use iTunes (Hi Rick!)
First, thanks!

The website and application are built on Tornado Web services (tornadoweb.org).

The front-end that you're seeing took about a week to finalize with revisions and fine-tuning, etc. At some point I just said "enough! let's put this in to production" and went with it.

The referral portion is also custom built, but only took a few hours total including the backend admin. The actual monitoring application took /quite a bit longer/ and is still in development.
Very interesting, but someone screwed up some kind of normalization. Italian women can't have heads that much shorter than Swiss women.
CSS2D Transforms
Internet Explorer 9 RC adds support for the CSS3 2D Transforms module, which enables elements that are rendered by CSS to be transformed in two dimensional space.
So is the base version of javascript used in most browsers today, why is age a reason to upgrade as long as it's maintained?

There is no direct upgrade path to Windows 7 from XP, and I am not rebuilding my environment and re-installing all my apps, I have a better use for my days.

XP is fast and "stable", well documented, everything runs on it. I've yet to see a good reason to "upgrade" to something else that won't even fit on a CD.
An early inspiration for our precomputation approach was Seth Teller's 1992 Ph.D. thesis (bio at http://www.csail.mit.edu/user/1544).

Seth worked out the (5D) math to trace the propagation of light through portals and precompute the set of visible polygons from any point in a so-called "architectural walkthrough" -- i.e., traversal of a space with lots of walls.

We knew that would never work for something as low-power as the PS1, but we were intrigued enough by Teller's work to try a very watered-down brute force variant.

As Andy describes in the article, this is what led to our precomputing the visible set of polygons (and their relative sort order) for every frame of the game. This was actually hard for three reasons:

- we had to distribute the precomputation work across all the artists' SGI workstations to get it done in under an hour per level
- we had to store a sorted list of polygons per frame in a compact enough way that it would fit
- we had to weave the foreground elements, which were not precomputed, into the background, which was

It was a really fun, but very challenging, project to get this all to work.
Internet Explorer 9 RC supports playback of H.264-encoded video using the HTML5 video tag and now WebM video as well when a VP8 coded is installed on Windows.

Appears no Theora support.
Very thoughtful piece, thanks a lot for sharing this. It seems so far that M&A valuations are following up serie A valuations (see Google & Path for instance). The bubble, if it exists, is no longer limited to the seed ecosystem.
Techmeme moves toward Twitter
Oracle patches decade-old 'Mark-of-the-Beast' bug in Java
I just checked and I've spent almost exactly $60 on my pay-as-you go phone since mid-October. That comes to about $15 a month. I make no effort whatsoever to reduce my phone usage, other than the fact that I don't enjoy talking on the phone at all. I use AT&T, so I pay $1 a day when I use the phone and then it's 10 cents a minute for calls outside of the network. As it turns out, most of the people I talk to have iPhones, so I'm not getting charged the 10 cents per minute. I also buy the minimum amount of text messages every month (200 for $5). I've never used all of them and they roll over each month, so my current balance of text messages is about 475. This may not be for everyone, but it's working for me. My phone is also the 'dumbest' phone I could find. Cuique suum.
Authentication code is computed. A phone number is for those who cannot compute it themselves (so Google will perform the computation and give you the result over the phone).
I don't think it's really fair to lay all of the blame with node and ruby/rails in this case; the distro package managers are just as much at fault:

http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1285063820.html

It really just depends on what you're trying to do. As a desktop user you probably care most about stability; we can't have a python upgrade breaking apt. As a developer it's often important to have an up-to-date version of the tools and libraries you're using.
> I admire your optimism, but in my humble option unlike the French revolution, in which they eventually managed to rid themselves of dictators and obtain democracy,

How long is your `eventually'?
New iPhone Carries $171.35 Bill of Materials, IHS iSuppli Teardown Reveals
If you’re not sure, err on the side of caution

Maybe that is what they are trying to do
How a new manufacturing technology will change the world
Unfortunately I despise IE too much at this point to ever bother trying to use it again as my main browser. You made us all suffer too much over the years, sorry guys.
I haven't confirmed it, but I have heard [1] that it tries to download Flash content if you don't have Flash installed.

[1] http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20110210#l-826
> By spreading a rumor that Mubarak will step down through official channels and generating real expectation for that to happen [...]

Confer the stepping down of the Germany Kaiser after WWI.
Can you explain a little more in what ways you find it inadequate? It's hard to fix or enhance a feature without a little more feedback.
> Also, you can't map receptive fields -- which specific
> areas of cortex correspond to what sensation in what part
> of the body -- if your patient is an amputee, and there's
> no "master map" that's precise enough since it varies
> between individuals widely.

This is a very good point but I don't think it's an insurmountable problem. After amputation or deafferentation the "unused" parts of the cortical map get taken over by adjacent representation areas. However, after hand transplantation cortex recovers some of it's normal organization[1]. So it's at least possible that cortical stimulation could lead to the same result.

1. Frey et al. Chronically deafferented sensory cortex recovers a grossly typical organization after allogenic hand transplantation. Curr. Biol. (2008) vol. 18 (19) pp. 1530-4
Your right on the money iuguy. We built this tool for the community but also for us internally to do research and expand our knowledge of mobile performance. Expect to see a report on a ton of new findings leveraging this tool.
Bidirectional RPC with Go's netchan.
Instapaper Releases A Full API — With A Brilliant, Unique Twi$t
Are you sure you want a CTO, or do you really want a free developer/tech-cofounder?

A CTO is someone who offers technical leadership, usually over a development team in a startup. Do you have a team of developers that needs leading?

I agree with krisrak, but you allude to his first point. If you have revenue, I'm guessing you have a product.

For kirsrak's second point, you have to realize that most technical cofounder candidates will think (although may not ask outright) "Why wouldn't I just take your idea, build it without you, and own 100% of the company?" If you have revenue, then the answer is that you've hopefully gone through enough customer development and iterations to achieve a product-market fit.
Al-Jazeera has "Hosni Mubarak 'may step down'" (http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/02/2011210...).
No relation to www.blazemobile.com but I could see the confusion.
I'm reading "Seeking Wisdom", which outlines Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger's investing philosophies. Two things stand out -

1. They almost never invest in high technology.

2. They talk about how an unsexy business that produces value for its shareholders is just as good as a sexy one. Money has no memory - money you made from dividends or equity increases in a company that sells bricks is just as good as from a company that sells something more exciting.

Thus, I wonder if a lot of high tech companies are like airlines - people own them because they're sexy, whereas totally decent boring unsexy companies are much lower valued.

That doesn't get into whether Twitter will justify the $10B valuation or not, but interesting to think about - saying Buffet and Munger have done pretty well would be quite the understatement.
In that case "web application" is a misnomer. If the current state has no natural URL, it's not a legitimate part of the World-Wide Web. Instead the authors are tunneling a proprietary protocol over AJAX to carry opaque content to a single-purpose GUI app, just like all the terrible client/server apps from the 90s only slower.
I was all set to start a new project on node.js a couple of months ago, but ended up back on Rails. Not because node.js itself seemed flaky, but because libraries were scarce (e.g. anyone know of a credible ORM?) and, where available, often in alpha.

This isn't a criticism: it's inevitable in a young platform, and I'd happily help develop the libraries. But it didn't seem a feasible option for a project that (a) had deadlines and (b) needed features beyond the (impressive) node.js core.
The video is fascinating, but a complete fabrication in terms of actual consumer products. The plank at 2:50 is an excellent example: to see past the plank entirely, the camera array would have to be wider than the plank. Probably 6 inches or so, in that case.

We may see it, and multiple smaller lenses could indeed solve the crappy-focus problems, and still keep the resolution high. But until I see a legitimate demonstration, I highly doubt the shiny through-occlusion tracking will work as well in any product using it. Better than current cameras, certainly - it can still track depth - but nothing like their examples.
Is this a stand-alone fob-style system, where the keycode is unique to a point in time with no knowledge of the connection? Or is this some sort of second-channel verification, where the requesting connection is hashed into the one-time-pad?
While I've never read that book, the one bit of Buffett advice that always stuck with me was, "Invest in what you know."

And I definitely know that Twitter ain't worth 10 billion dollars.
Keeping it simple while still remaining functional for "advanced" users is one of my primary goals. We will start with the basics, but only so we can actually launch the product asap.

That's really the problem we're looking to solving though. Simplifying the mess. (that includes billing)

In the end, we have a certain feature set that's our internal goal. Whether their is demand for every part of that is another topic. Polling and a/b testing will determine where our development efforts are focused and how the first iterations shape up.

btw, thanks :)
Same here; that's why I forwarded the oldest email in my account to another address, took note of the date on it, and saved it to my hard drive; headers intact.
"Mathematics: Its Contents, Methods and Meaning", seconded! I bought it a couple of years ago when I first read about it on HN and have to say that it is a highly readable account of mathematics.
deal.
You may hear of un-published openings (almost every single instance, in my experience - they save some for the fairs), and you've gone past the initial HR barrier if you sell yourself well as a person. Bypassing hoops you have to jump through helps immensely.
plus the way I understood , Watson has tons of algorithms of finding the answer and it runs all of those on the input in massively parallel system with processing speed much higher than the human brain , if Ken Jennings is using a much much smaller and slower device and still is almost par I think the engineering of watson is almost trivial compared to the Brain considering Ken's brains also tracking other 20 million parameters of his body and regulating all of that at the same time
Yeah, I think that is indeed the case - it is moving into series A territory. Big question is if it will go upstream to series B/C/D where the big $s are ... :)
Because the ability to deal with and lead people is, always has been, and always will be, the most valued skill anyone can possess.
>>"I'm a literate person and I've probably already combed through your website. "

You'd be surprised. The vast majority of people haven't done any research on the exhibiting company at all. It's a real treat when they have visited the website! Unfortunately, not the norm.
no offence, but you should also get some design work...

some honest feedback: website color palette does not look professional, hi-res logo graphics needed, background color change will be good
A competitor for RSA's SecurID:

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

I've been thinking how you'd do this as a generic application for web apps. A daemon somewhere on the web that resets your password once a day for all the web apps you use to "original password+unique daily code". Then you log in with that code from your phone and your original password.
That's like asking "Who's the best prostitute?" It's totally subjective.

As an example, for 3d game engine design, clearly Tim Sweeney of Epic Games is one of the top developers, if not THE top developer, in the field today. TODAY.

That said, I wouldn't hire him to write an operating system.
Google Weddings
It seems inevitable to see massive burn outs though at the later stage rounds in a year or two. Surely even the hedge funds will see the failure to gain traction soon enough when these companies need another $10M for a Series N+1 in 12-18 months, at which point one can expect them to either fade away or sell for pennies on the dollar. In that case the PE firms and HFs are the losers and things are mostly contained elsewhere in the overall ecosystem. And with the $10's of billions in cash companies like Google are carrying on the books, that leaves a nice buffer to contain the damage.
What? Source? I haven't heard of this before. That makes zero sense. Do you have any actual information about this?
I've been running the beta for a couple of months now, testing sites I've been building on it as I go along. I can tentatively say that yes, it falls into the "all the rest" category for most common css/js issues that have plagued all its predecessors to varying degrees.

It has still felt too slow, bloated and plagued with dialogues ("I can run faster, disable add-ons", "This page wants to use flash" etc) to serve as my main browser (currently FF for work and chrome for play), but the sooner IE users move to IE9 the better for front-end devs the world over. Thumbs up from me to MS for IE9.
Erlang VM and OTP is magical. Erlangs stability is derived from OTP, having process hierarchies, running multiple servers, and designing VM/language/OTP from the ground up and continuously there after as a integrated system capable of many nines uptime.

JVM is awesome in other ways.
I've been using this two factor for a while via google apps for business and there are multiple failover options:

1 - hard copy code printout (optional)
2 - failover to secondary phone (optional)
IE9 RC Released today. Faster, Includes CSS 2d Transforms and more...
> To put it in perspective, HBGary's (not HBGary Federal) technology is a thing called Digital DNA that cuts down the amount of time it takes to analyse memory fragments. That's their focus.

naive question here. Why don't they market themselves as a memory analysis or debug toolsmiths or something else, instead of security firm?
this is awesome, especially from the perspective of a programmer who was 9 when he first played crash. how full circle.
That seems oddly contradictory, since most of what's "new" in 7 from an XP user's perspective was introduced in Vista. It's not like they rolled back anything. The difference in reception between Vista and 7 was due to PC hardware having caught up with Vista's requirements and software/driver makers having fixed their compatibility problems in the intervening three years, more than anything else.
Creativity everywhere – results from Tnooz THack London
yes, i'm certain. straight from the email:

"Unfortunately your transaction volume was too low to be approved for a merchant account at this time. "
Please step out of the bubble and talk to someone not involved in the tech world. To them and most people, twitter is a buzz word used by news channels to sound 'hip'. Thats about it
To address the fallacy: Just state that labour and capital get half the returns each. We don't need to decide who or what creates value to make that statistic interesting.
> NPM reminds you do "sudon't" if you run it as root.

To install NPM itself, you either get a bunch of 'sudont' errors or have the app fail with the normal, secure /usr/local permissions when it can't write there.

Try it.
Activision cancelling Guitar Hero franchise
go to http://initlabs.com, at the bottom I have put links to 3 blog posts I found from hacker news that is a must read. That will give you an idea about hiring for new startups.
We're talking about different internets, though. You're talking about the hypothetical patched internet that uses Google's #! remapping, whereas I'm talking about the internet as it exists right now. If I go to Gawker with lynx right now, it will not work, period. The fact that there exists the details of implementation somewhere—and the fact that the implementation is trivial—doesn't mean that it should become standard across the board.

I hate to invoke a slippery slope, but it seems a frightening proposition that $entity can start putting out arbitrary standards and suddenly the entire Internet infrastructure has to follow suit in order to be compatible. It's happened before, e.g. favicon.ico. All of them are noble ideas (personalize bookmarks and site feel, allow Ajax content to be accessible) with troublesome implementation (force thousands of redundant GET /favicon.ico requests instead of using something like <meta>, force existing infrastructure to make changes if they want to continue operations as usual.)

All of this is moot, of course, if you just write your pages to fall back sensibly instead of doing what Gawker did and allowing no backwards-compatible text-only fallback. Have JS rewrite your links from "foo/bar" to "#!foo/bar" and then non-compliant user agents and compliant browsers are happy.
He is also best measured by popularity I think.
Ask HN: Startups with a goal of absolutely no VC?
For a long time I always felt like one of my goals was to start a business that I could raise some VC for and then grow into something enormous.. I can admit, that I'm a 37s fanboy, and over time have grown to loathe the idea of raising VC.

I'm working on something right now, that I think could be pretty big - but I'm much more concerned with creating an amazing product, growing slowly, having it cover its own costs, and becoming profitable as soon as possible - rather than even consider raising VC.

Just wondering what percentage of HNers are on the same page with me when it comes to starting a business, or are on the other side of things looking to raise capital?
Depends on the company - pretty much any outfit large enough to have a professional booth with HR drones is going to be by-the-book.

Another problem if you are anywhere nice is that the HR dept treat this as a holiday, so you are getting a bunch of people who are in your town to drink, stay in a nice hotel and 'bond'. Having to talk to a few smelly students isn't the highlight of the trip.
>> first, you do it in non-human primates and show that they can effective control the arm with the implant...
Then you show that the implant is stable

Uncited, I'm not sure my reply is worth much - but such studies have already taken place.

Non-human primates have shown dexterity with such devices - but the 'interface' has a life of around 6 months due to prolonged ,
subtle vibrations in the 'brain probe' and scarring.

EEG inputs, while non-invasive, are susceptible to interference and work best with additional triggers such as speech to extend ones 'vocabulary' of movements. The
reason being it's hard to to calibrate.

Lastly, electrocorticography (ECoG), seems a happy medium: picking up high frequency signals within the skull and atop the brain. So no issues with scarring and the signals are easier to map to brain regions.

'Google Tech Talk' on the subject (1hr)[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFWnTONOvVo

[1] Includes footage of monkeys + robotic arms @ 9m30s
It is important to distinguish between active and passive attacks.

The verification code generated is valid only for a very short time - so unless the hacker phishes the code, and uses it within 10s of seconds, the code is not valid.
Facebook Contemplates a $1 Billion Tender Offer for Employee Shares
Canned air should be as fine as it is for other kinds of dust. Chalk is basically inert, so there are no worries about affecting electronics or anything like that.
TidyFS: A Simple and Small Distributed Filesystem
Why we made iValentina DB for iPhone / iPad Free
I've been to the Zappos office - don't mistake the random crap for anything other than an extremely motivated, tight run ship - those guys are killer business people - top to bottom.

That said, my personal taste leans more towards the 37 offices.
Charlie Munger is worth reading and listening to. He once said in an interview that a person should only be allowed to make 20 trades in their lifetime. (Or some smaller number.) His reasoning was that it would limit emotional influences when making investing decisions.

I've been wondering if Microsoft's stock price is low due to the perception that they aren't sexy. Their corporate division is making loads of money and they are priced like a low margin commodity business. Of course, maybe their long term survivability is in question and so the stock is low.

I would rather buy stock in Microsoft at its current valuation than buy stock in Twitter at its current valuation.
Yeah, that is the question - what is the "endgame"? Of the 3 scenarios I outlined, which is most likely?