skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cool landing page (I like how the pictures are localized)

I have a few ways, they are pretty specific to Toronto but I'll mention them anyway so you get the idea.

1) Redflagdeals.com - this is my primary source as it is the largest forum in Canada (with a huge center around Toronto). Basically it is a "deals" forum like slickdeals or fatwallet in the states, but there is a TON of talk about things to do in Toronto, great restaurants, and of course, deals on stuff. For me I browse this often and if I find something I like then I'll check it out. For example, I found out about "O'Noir" here, which was a restaurant where you eat in pitch black, and all the waiters are blind.

2) Local blogs - things like blogto.com show me a lot of the independent type stuff around (festivals, smaller shops, bands, etc.). Torontoist is another one. For example I just learned they are opening a Ping Pong bar in downtown Toronto from here.

3) Deal sites (like groupon, living social, etc). Basically it isn't just about buying the deal (as I only buy maybe 1 per week) but I keep an eye out for the new things to do that they feature - I might find a paintball place and keep it in mind even if I don't buy the deal, or some sort of trade show/exhibition, etc.

For things like a) sports and b) music I'd basically either know that it was coming (I'm a huge sports fan with seasons tickets to baseball and basically never miss a leafs game) so I don't really have to search out that info.

I try to be pretty frugal with what I do so that is certainly a bias - If I'm going to a new city the first thing I do is save the Wikitravel page to my iPad, then I'll check out some of the past groupons there, etc. I'll then check out some of the online coupon places (for example I got coupons for 2-4-1 mini-golf & bowling in Florida, etc). Last resort when I get there I'll check out the rack cards at tourist type places (in Florida I found out about a pirate tour boat, lol).

If I were you I'd be skimming forums as your best bet for crowd sourcing data, there are two different opinions for "things to do" one being a local and one being a tourist, but usually locals don't do enough tourist stuff, and tourists don't do enough local stuff... so there is an interesting middle you could find there (for example, I've never been to the Royal Ontario Museum, or the Bata Shoe Museum after living in Toronto for 5 years - these would be done by 75% of tourists). Of course you could skim foursquare data too but it seems to be done already.

Good luck
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_mouse_law

Every time copyright is about to run out on Mickey Mouse, they extend the length of copyright. So far, it's gone from 14 years to 70 years plus the lifetime of the creator.

It is obscene.
> If you’re using high-rolling chips you can almost guarantee that a casino knows what you’re up to. Turns out Big Brother is alive and well, playing craps in Las Vegas.

After I originally read the article, I was about to take my chips that I have from a recent casino trip to a belt sander. But then I read your comment. I think the writer knew what he was talking about (the high-roller chips disclaimer) but couldn't resist breathlessly hyping up the Big Brother aspect.

But then I read this comment in the original thread:

5 points by vegasbrianc 54 days ago | link

"As engineer for the Casino Industry 99% of the casino RFID solutions on the market track all chips all denominations. The Casino RFID system is used in multiple ways
- Tracking players bets - Ensure the dealer is paying out or taking in the correct chips - Accurate accounting - Fraud Prevention
So next time you go to the casino remember they are tracking you even when you cannot see it."
This is good info, my companies research came to the same conclusion on quite a few of these. A big one noted in the graphic is don't force registration to make a sale, this is a huge one. If you are doing this, you can add double digit percentages to your conversion just by removing it, you should get it out of the process ASAP. Make it easy to convert their sales info into registration info at the end of the process but avoid requiring it as a prerequisite for doing business with you. The old saying holds true, make it as easy as possible for people to give you money.
No because a given implementation and/or context is not the only possible implementation and context.

It's like saying we should get rid of laws against murder since if you are OJ Simpson you can hire fancy lawyers and get away with it.
Patent and copyright are great things to protect the little innovator guy that starts a new business

I think you read that in a book somewhere. I bet you don't personally know a single "little innovator guy" who has successfully been protected by a patent.
Oh definitely agree - I would say that anybody graduating form a US uni with a science degree should get a green card.

in my own field, we train physics and comp-sci PhDs then throw them out of the country like itinerant fruit pickers.
Thanks for the info. That's what I was hoping to find out by having these. They now live happily within my suite of various development/testing tools.
I did, thank you very much! Silly question, did you just remember the URL or did you just have superior google-fu? :)
Hollywood itself exists because of piracy. Movie makers went out there to escape the enforcement of Thomas Edison's patents.
That's because I wasn't making an analogy. I'm showing how two similar business transactions (ie, they both involve being able to use content of some kind be it software or music) are artificially made different by laws and "leverage". I mean, there are very few software companies that can place the limitations on their software and charge the same way the music and movie industries do.
Sure, there is a good argument to be made that 70 years plus life is extensive.

However, anyone who wants to place their content into the public domain is free to do so. I have done so myself many times. And those who do not wish to do so, that is their right as well.

What I would like to see in reform is moral rights of creators respected like they do in many other countries.
nobody "deserves" anything.
Their reasons not to buy a tablet are somewhat flawed.

They essentially say that...

1. Tablets aren't portable
2. Tablets don't have hardcore games
3. Tablets can't do "real" work
4. Tablets aren't better than laptops when it comes to surfing the web,
watching movies, etc.
5. Tablets will be replaced with other tablets (who would have thought!)

Reasons 1-4 are all based off the assumption that tablets should be able to compete with laptops and phones at the same time. However, tablets are in a different market than phones and laptops for a reason. Apple and some other companies have come along and created something that people have been longing for a while: an intermediate device between a phone and a laptop.

Tablets are portable, but not the same way phones are. That's because people would rather carry around something of bigger size with more functionality than a phone.

Tablets don't have hardcore games, because the majority of users are casual gamers. Hardcore games are for people who sit down at their computers for hours while leveling up on a game. Casual games are for people who want to play games in short spurts for quick fun. No long term commitment is needed.

Tablets do the work most people need to do on the go. "Real" work is done at a desk on a laptop or desktop. Tablets are there to fill in and help get the basic work done when you're on a taxi, plane, etc.

Tablets let you surf the web and watch movies anywhere, with ease. Instead of some distant interaction with your laptop using a mouse, tablets offer direct control using touch. They give you the features you need and no more. Content consumption and entertainment has never been better than it has with the tablet.

I will refrain from discussing the last argument listed in the article, as another argument will come along in a few weeks and replace that argument. There's no worth wasting my time doing something like that. :)
The writer doesn't have anything mixed up. Most of the chips were large value denominated and hence nearly all of the stolen chips were worthless the moment the thief walked out the door.

Also, the article is not claiming the thief was captured because of the RFID. The article is simply highlighting how the RFIDs in the chips foiled the thief by making the chips worthless almost immediately, and then goes on to highlight how RFIDs within chips are enabling casino operators to track user behavior in new and novel ways. The focus of the story is not that RFID was used to catch the bad guy, rather the focus is on how RFID tech within these chips has changed casino operation, from user tracking, to "turning off" stolen chips on demand.
It's not always true that development is a trade-off between fast feature development and stability. If you're building a monitoring system (like Cloudkick), more features means more stability for whatever you're monitoring.
This paper (referenced in the post) is also relevant. The application is to NBA basketball:

"Incorporating Side Information into Probabilistic Matrix Factorization Using Gaussian Processes." Ryan Prescott Adams, George E. Dahl, and Iain Murray. In Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 2010.

Paper: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~gdahl/papers/dpmfNBA.pdf

Code: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~rpa/code/dpmf-nba.tgz
I've read that it is working for them, but I can't recall the sources. If memory serves me, they benefit from expanding or establishing the reach of their search, web apps, native apps, and thus their ads. Since advertising is the keystone of their business model, anything they can do to ensure ubiquity of their brand (and thus, advertising) is an important thing to do.

Sure, it's "open", so developers can use other ad-networks, but that's not necessarily going to hurt them as much as it would to have no presence in the mobile space.

Now, why develop a whole platform instead of just offering their ads on other platforms? If Android becomes the dominant platform, Google is in a really good position, with respect to brand ubiquity. Better than they'd be if Nokia or HP or Apple had the dominant platforms, because there's no guarantee Google would have an "in" on any of those.
Does anyone have experience trying this in a more enterprise-friendly product? We'd have a struggle figuring out how to communicate these changes to our customers on a daily basis, not to mention the absolute horror if something changed/broke right before or during a crucial production run. There's a lot of things I want to implement from these ideas, but the examples I see are usually high-volume consumer websites, so I am curious if people in other areas have success with this.
True enough. If someone violates the patent, the Feds don't come in and bust them. The 'little guy' then has to take the violator to court and win before they can get any kind of justice. If it isn't a slam dunk (even with a patent), then the 'little guy' probably can't justify the risk of losing and ending up with the lawyer/court fees.
Nokia USA president is out, replaced by Microsoft vet
Microsoft Web Camps coming to Austin, TX and other cities
IBM has recovered extremely well from their partnership with Microsoft, but it took them over a decade to do it.

OS/2 was a horrible hit to IBM, and Microsoft is a huge part of why OS/2 went so horribly awry (IBM also made many strategic mistakes of their own, so it's not just that Microsoft behaved in a duplicitous way).
I doubt that removing tenure would result in the hiring of new professors. One recent trend has been to hire adjuncts as much as possible and to only slowly hire tenured faculty. Let's suppose that you have a professor (say a theorist) who works on a few ideas--but deep ones--she can take her time and focus on them instead of worrying about losing her job because she hasn't produced recently (funding is another story). Similarly, if she does something controversial--then again, her job is safe.

The incentive for most academics (say science/engineering) to maintain a strong reputation is personal. I do research because:
1) I want to know the answer to a question
2) I'm selfish and I want to know the answer first ;>

This leads me to putting in 100 hr weeks (sometimes you have to grind it out--other times, you have to step back and work less to be more creative) at times and being rather productive. Do you really think that fear of termination would result in the same output? Do you think that the average institution could pay researchers to put in the hours that they do--weekends, holidays, evenings, etc.?
Global data storage calculated at 295 exabytes
Tenure is the one big incentive academia has going for it. Un-tenured academics work like dogs for peanuts (given their skill sets) to get tenure. You take that away, and it becomes "work like a dog for peanuts your entire career". Who's going to take that deal without the carrot of "do what interests you without fearing for your job security" at the end of the tunnel?

Streams of irrelevant publications are only going to get worse when "publish or perish" extends to your entire career.

(Not to mention that tenure is a good idea for, say, climate change researchers, or people doing potentially provocative demographic research, or stem-cell researchers, or anyone else someone influential somehwere might want to see silenced)
lol... I won't be shock if Apple Sue Nokia for this :D
Not what I would call google-fu. Possibly narcissism-fu as I remembered it because I commented in the discussion about it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2086780

So I clicked on "Search" HN and typed in "Mz Everyday" and it was at the top of the list -- I mean the discussion was at the top of the list and I got the link from the discussion. (Maybe you can come up with a nicer term than narcissism-fu. I'm stumped at the moment as to how else I could describe it.)

Edit: Not that it was as simple as that makes it sound. First I wasted time checking my posterous account, thinking I had sent the link to myself. It took me a few minutes to make the mental connection that I commented on it and could search for my own comment. My mind is convoluted and I probably shouldn't publicly answer questions about my thought processes. :-X
> each full image of Windows dies 4 times a year

Does anyone understand what he's referring to here?
Which of the books you read for learning iOS would you recommend?
Conn. MBA grads start social site "shizzlr.com"
That was one of the main reasons I bought my iPad--it let's me read/annotate PDFs. This is great for when I travel!
He's referring to these: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=...

They are time-limited virtual PC images which expire after three of four months.
Oh don't leave. For one thing, you won't be able to sell in to the US regardless of where you live. Patents allow them to block imports as well as sue your customers directly. Secondly, you're not likely to find a particularly level playing field if you, as a Westerner, are trying to compete in Asia.
Question: why is everything greyed out on the site except for a Facebook "recommend" button?
I believe the most relevant at IBM and the OS/2 story, and the SGI move to Windows NT.

In both cases, the other party made many strategic mistakes, but Microsoft did many things to contribute to their downfall.

Others have mentioned Compaq (whose history is not one of unmarred success) and Dell, but those are companies that exist because of Microsoft, and have pretty much never gone against Microsoft's wishes. It took years before Dell started offering Linux boxes, and even now, the Dell Linux line is more expensive and lower quality than the equivalent Windows systems. For instance, when I was shopping for a laptop, the only Linux laptop from Dell had a non-LED and lower resolution display than the much cheaper Windows equivalent. Same model number, but the Linux version was crappy and $200 more. I bought the Windows version and put Linux on it with no driver issues, so it wasn't that they had to make compromises to make it all work...they just like toeing the line for Microsoft. (It's turned out to be a crappy laptop, anyway, so I won't be buying another Dell.)
Oh, I know. I'm up to about 50 investments so far. It is just that I have noticed certain patterns...
There's a point he omitted: In curve fitting, exploratory data analysis, data mining, etc., we are looking for X. We don't know if X exists. But if X does exist, then our methods have a shot at finding X. So, we look. Maybe we find something. We test what we find, and it appears to work as we believe X would. So, we start to believe that X exists and we have found it.

Do like following this 'paradigm'? No! But, when people do follow this paradigm and claim to have found X, then I can't be sure they are wrong!

E.g., maybe there is a statistical model that predicts the stock market. So, do a lot of curve fitting. Find something that appears to predict. Then if there is a predictive model, maybe have found it. Test the model on old data not used in constructing the model and see if it works. If it does, then we start to believe that there is a predictive model and that we have found it or something close enough.

When people do such things, I can't say that they are wrong.
I think he meant blew up in a metaphorical sense, as in "many countries followed in the production/proliferation of nuclear technology."
"I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of searches - informational and commercial," he said. "If you search ‘cancer,’ that’s an informational search and on those, Google is amazing. But in commercial searches, Google’s results are really polluted. My own personal experience says that the guy with the biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the highest."
Is this not exactly what the "Recommended Items" feed in Google Reader does?
Yeah, I'm getting this error:

fixme:x11drv:sync_window_opacity LWA_COLORKEY not supported
Hey man, I sent you a message from the form on your website. Waiting to hear back from you. Lets talk! -Adam
You presume a) everyone has access to healthy food as kids, and b) strength training is nearly ineffective.

What, you forgot about the massive population of poor the world has, western included? Or how many in the western world eat crap, because it's easier than making things for ourselves? Height is largely determined by what your parents feed you, once you're able to be on your own you're essentially fully grown. I know a decent number of people whose parents were either relatively poor, and they subsisted on mac & cheese frequently, or were largely idiots when it came to food and raising kids. And many of them are noticeably shorter than average. My wife, for instance, is just barely over 5 feet, and her family-then-single-father fell into both categories until he joined the military.

As to the second... I have absolutely no idea where you get that idea from. Maybe everyone around you weight-trains outside of the gym frequently, or you've never done so for an extended period of time? You're absolutely nuts, though.
Since an SSL cert costs about $20 a year, this would cost more. I don't see the point.

For $20 a month I can have my own VPS, my own IP, and my own certificate and side-step all of this.

Perhaps this is to arbitrage against people not knowing any better, or not having the expertise to implement it properly. In any case, does seem to be a small market.
Concussions and Brain Trauma
Ok.

> echo '1 2 3 4' | sed 's/ */\t/g' | cut -f2
2
I would love to know what the traffic is like on this article - because this has just shot through the roof.
When SGI switched from IRIX to Windows, or when HP switched from HP/UX to Windows, or when DEC switched to Windows...

What a trail of bodies.

The *NIX community should've banded together to make a POSIX-like standard for graphical applications and they would've maintained their position as a viable platform. X isn't enough, it's too low-level. Something at least on par with OpenStep is required.
Check out Involution Studios lust inducing office space
> It never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent
> and thoughtful people remain stuck believing in God.

Hey! I'm a theist. Most of the time. I keep meaning to read Donald Knuth's "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About." Has anyone here read/listened to it?

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/things.html
"In the fall of 1999, computer scientist Donald E. Knuth was invited to give six public lectures at MIT on the general subject of relations between faith and science."
"New business ventures could find a profitable place in space — in Earth orbit"
are you speaking from experience? if so, i'm curious - is it that you confined your search to boston, or that people elsewhere were unwilling to relocate?
I love the cr-48. The only thing I wish I could have is a full emacs install for use in a tab. I'll be completely satisfied once I figure that out. I have a personal "cloud" at home so it's the perfect complement.

Hardware wise its great. I've had a 14 inch laptop and a 7 inch netbook and this is the sweetspot. It can also run my 23 inch monitor.

The keyboard is similar to my Apple aluminum keyboard (the only Apple product I own and admittedly love). But to my surprise it's more quiet than the Apple keyboard.

The laptop's outer appearance is exactly what I've always dreamed of.

When more mSATA SSD's hit the market I will be upgrading it. I'd like to dual boot chrome OS and a linux distro of my choice.
They can't do that, because then every paid app (30% cut) would become a free demo that is unlocked with in-app purchase (5% cut). (Yes, their app guidelines prohibit this but it's a very fuzzy line that many apps have already crossed.)
You won't know about what you lose in sales in terms of discoverability on the App Store - it's easy to see it from your own perspective (mine is the same), but the iPad attracts such a wide demographic that you may very well shut out some newbies from using and buying your service.

HTML5 don't always play nice with app-switching either, but maybe I've just not used enough HTML5 "apps".
Fixed it for you :) Also removed the now-non-existent tbp tracker (unless I've missed the news?)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/363028/temporary/Spoon.net%20Sandbox...

edit: uh, I think. Transmission is throwing fits and not writing to disk...
That's isn't to say that they won't try to find a way. :)
Poll: Are HN Polls a trick to grow karma?
Fellow HN'rs. I was wondering if Polls are a trick to grow HN karma? What do you think? ;)
Dear Apple, quit being douchebags, I love my iPad, please don't make me go out and buy a kindle as well which is what I will end up doing if Amazon pulls out of the App Store.
I'm more amazed at currency being accepted at all, the North Korean "Super $100" I hear is nearly perfect but slot machine bill validators still rejected it.

It's one thing to have custom made chips with RFID, notches, decals and who knows what else but to accept paper as a valuable item seems to risky yet most counterfeit bills are rejected all the time.
How was that code derived? Does it get its form from copyrighted code Sony owns the rights to? If so I believe it should enjoy copyright protection.

We're seeing a nearly chaotic upheaval in how business is done in modern times, largely because technology is progressing so fast. This can confuse many of the issues at hand. However, I think it can help to view things using older more well understood models. For example, let's look at books. Harry Potter is a copyright protected work which appears to have given much value to both readers and author/rights holders alike. Each page of that book enjoys copyright protection; tearing out a page and adding words, making other adjustments etc., then posting the revised product online would violate copyright. If we can see the logic to that then I think it can help us to gain perspective when reflecting on the Sony incident.