skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm seeing this everywhere else on my internets, but I will have to play the "OT for HN" card.
engadget reported that Watson "destroyed" its human competition while others reported that humans were "taken down."

In reality, Ken Jennings was beaten on the final answer.

I'm interested in seeing whether Watson has an "aggressiveness" algorithm that allows it to respond before the answer is fully spoken. Humans have an advantage in this regard because it goes right to the heart of intelligence. If the game boils down to reaction time, Watson will probably win.
For the curious, it's been estimated that Mubarak's wealth stands between 40 - 70 billion dollars. This number seems shaky to me, but according to US officials he's worth at least 2 billion. No one knows for sure, and he has distributed it amongst his family, but it is all but certain he's keeping that money.

How did he get so rich? Well if you have a major business and you would like to expand into Egypt, the law requires 51% Egyptian ownership. I'm not privy to the investment ownership of companies based in Egypt, but its a pretty good bet that Mubarak enforced a pay to play scheme to major and minor corporations.
How much of the Watson code is Java?
Yes ... us scientists have an awesome life. We get to implant cameras in the backs of our head (http://gothamist.com/2010/12/03/video_photos_nyu_prof_instal...). Truly the good life!!
Show HN: Github Trends
Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Rivendell
In my opinion, twitter vs facebook isn't a fair comparison at all.

Facebook is games, and photos, and chat, and events, and groups, and coca cola's official page. There are a lot of reasons to visit facebook.

Twitter is short status messages. Basically twitter is about half of what facebook was 5 years ago.

I think the 200 Million number is dishonest. I'm a twitter user, and have been for at least a couple of years...but I think I log into the site and look at it about once a week (here is my twitter: http://twitter.com/blhack). Most of those logins happen over my phone, meaning I don't see the "trending" ads...or any ads at all.

I said that I don't really use twitter. This wasn't always the case. I used to check it probably 10 times a day...but then a new service came along and replaced it for me. It does a better job at status updates...so I switched (and so did most of my friends). This is also a huge problem for twitter. What is twitter giving me that I can't get elsewhere (in my opinion: nothing...doubly so because the new layout is so hideous)
Civil rights issues are hacker issues. Even if they're not in your country.
You know that is a great question, and I have mentioned this (not on every occasion). It almost always gets the "Umm maybe that will be an option but we can't guarantee it". This always screams to me "Yeah this ain't gonna happen". Ha.
Some people are going to find this to be awesome (mostly the paranoid), while others will just be frustrated they now have to remember two passwords.
I've been doing something similar for the last month or so but I decided that Project Gutenberg data was fine for me since what I am producing (haiku poetry) is slightly more formal than how real people talk.

I also ran up against the problems of storing huge data structures in memory - my list of n-grams had something like 57 million entries, which I was able to manipulate into a dictionary with 9 million keys.

Unfortunately this was still too large so I turned to the Redis key-value store. I'd been somewhat dubious about the benefit of these so-called "NoSQL" databases but I have to say that Redis was perfect for storing these huge data structures and the Python libraries made the whole thing really easy to work with. I recommend you give it a try if memory issues are limiting what you can do.
That depends on what "better" means. If better means actually winning in Jeopardy, then two games is not enough. Final Jeopardy plays a significant role in who wins a game, so it's not just like combining multiple games into one.

Even on the question level, a disclaimer should be given if Watson doesn't answer enough questions for statistical significance.

Finally, the issue here is with contributing to the statistical ignorance of people watching the two game match. Sure, Watson has played many games already before the match but that's not what's being shown on TV.
Why Atlantis now provides totally free SQL Server tools
They aren't? You're only supposed to use them if you follow Google's convention, in which case they should be reliably replaced with a normal URL sans the hash. Of courses your scraper must be aware of this, but it should be a somewhat reliable pseudo-standard (and it is just a stopgap after all).
Panasonic Shows Advanced Fuel Cell For Home Use
Disgruntled College Student Starts ‘UnCollege’ to Challenge System
Hooray! Mubarak to concede power to his vice president, who has said that Egypt isn't ready for democracy, effectively deflating the protesters' demands while changing pretty much nothing, and leaving the door open to come down harshly on dissenters once the eyes of the world have moved elsewhere. That's great!

Seriously, this strikes me as propaganda of the worst kind. All of us here are in the business of making things better - the promise of the web is all about democratization and equalizing hierarchies. What can we do to help, both here and elsewhere?
These results are very biased by the early-adopters that frequent hackernews.

There are WAY more people out there are using the recurring functionality of the gateways (ex. Auth.net, Braintree, Linkpoint / First Data Global Gateway) than one of the standalone recurring billing systems (recurly, chargify, etc).

However using those legacy solutions is a SHAME because they are in general quite horrible. They are certainly cheaper, and may seem like the path of least resistance, but they don't do the job well enough for serious companies.

You want something like Recurly, Chargify, Zuora, CheddarGetter, if you are doing either recurring or metered charging of your customers. It will make your life easier and is worth the expense.
Principle of charity
Thanks... I just think there is some old-school anthropomorphism at work here. They're putting a human face on an incomprehensible force, just as the ancients did when creating a god for a natural force that was perhaps equally incomprehensible to them.
Help me understand your definition of "high volume". Based on the conversations we've had with crafters (admittedly, few and people we know at this point) we're talking volume on the scale of 10-20 items. Not 100's or even 1000's.

We will be talking with more crafters before solidifying the model.

Further backing this is the ability that Etsy and other craft selling sites give to their users for indicating a quantity.

As for products, it absolutely depends on the crafter. Items made with a pattern will work great. Knitted items, quilted items, wooden crafts, metal crafts, etc are all good. Even photography. It ultimately boils down to the crafter being able to reproduce an item with consistent quality.
True story, three nights ago at a bar in Saigon:

Friend of mine: Mubarak is sharp. That motherfucker has been hated for a long time, but is still in power... he'll weather this, he'll still be running the country next year.

Me: I don't know dude, the city is literally on fire. Has any revolution ever hit this point and had the leader keep control?

Him: They're rioting. It'll get settled out. Besides, Mubarak's got the military.

Me: Does he? Really?

Him: Well, if you think he'll be out of power, put your money where your mouth is. 100 bucks says, Mubarak is still in power at the end of this year.

Me: I don't know dude, I guess I don't know as much about this as you do...

Him: I don't know much. But I think he's got it. What do you say, 100 bucks?

Me: Well, what's "in power"?

Him: He's still got the title President on December 31st.

Me: In Egypt, not in exile?

Him: In Egypt. He's still president, and in Egypt.

Me: And no foreign occupying army stabilizing - no U.N. peacekeepers or transition force.

Him: That wouldn't happen, America has the securi -- okay, fine, yes, no foreign forces. So the wager is - Mubarak has the title of President on December 31st, is in Egypt, and there's no foreign troops occupying.

Me: Okay, I'm going to go with history here. You can break riots earlier, but once they hit this point it's over...

Him: We'll see. I want that hundred bucks in December.

Me: I'm good for it. You're on.

We shook on it. I'll take him out to a nice dinner with some of the money.
Is this really a pressing problem compared to all the other shit that's going wrong in America? As long as the government feels the need to do this sort of stuff, why not invest in something that's going to be more useful to society than 4G cellular service?
The AP is saying there might be a military coup in progress:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_EGYPT?SITE=AP&...

It seems as thought Mubarak is being pushed aside tonight (indeed, if I play connect the dots it looks like Mubarak is trying to flee and the army is trying to make sure he can't). Looks like there's more than one party who could take power over the next few hours. Whether they can hold on to that is another question entirely.
Advanced sign-in security for your Google account
yeah, that is retarded. getting exercise is good. exerting yourself is good. even learning some kind of self defense is good. but that is just completely retarded.

speaking as someone who DID get in a lot of fights growing up, the "it lets me know I'm still alive" thing is ridiculous; there are so many ways to enjoy life without beating the shit out of someone or having someone beat the shit out of you.

take up martial arts, or rock climbing, or an actual sport.
To clarify, I mean: I agree that the emergence of an open source, free and libre content management system based on a similarly open programming language, operating system and server environment is a fantastic thing for society. It didn't have to be WordPress specifically, that's all, because WordPress is not perfect or unique. It merely fills that role well.
Http://www.myspace.com/gonaxuy
The content of the course is of primary interest. Please see [1].

Non-English-speaking universities have a way of offering their courses in languages other than English.

How many courses do you think are now being offered with similar content in English?

[1] http://soft.vub.ac.be/~tjdhondt/PLE/notes.html
The VP is much better, he is a far more strenuous supporter of US interests in the war on terrorism and for stability in the middle east.

(ie. still hungry for more consultancy payments)
Better grids: Lessons learned from Design for Developers
There is still some confusion for me as to whether it's "production ready." Ryan Dahl said for a long time that it wasn't ready for production, but I haven't heard anything like that recently. In fact, I've heard others proclaim they're using it for larger sites just fine (citing poor SSL support as one of the primary drawbacks). I also remember Ryan saying that the memory management within V8 caused a lot of the bugs they were dealing with. So what's the real status of the project in terms of putting it into production?
Open Source Hardware definition v.1.0 released
Here's a problem I foresee: These groupon style sites do their business because these vendors make money due to the volume. Whether its return customers, or small margins adding together, or whatever, the whole reason vendors get involved is volume. So one question: will indy craftsfolk be able to handle the volume? If they get 1000 orders for their handmade leather wallet, seems like people will start to get pissed after month 2 of waiting.
What proportion of those jobs are below minimum wage post-doc positions?

The unemployment rate for panhandlers is also very low, very few of them face redundancy
I posted this as a question on SO as well: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4959487/best-way-to-captu...

Just in case someone comes across this later on Google.
I would like to see what the 37signals office looks like after a year.
I concede to your first point. Not sure where the second part is coming from.
Thanks, ok that answers a lot of questions, one though I still have is if you are buying all of the necessary USPS boxes before hand and just filling those yourself?
The effect of sites like Twitter and Facebook in organizing opposition to repressive governments across the world is very relevant to hackers and startups.

A startup may also have to consider how to react when a foreign government starts demanding restrictions on the startup's services within a particular country, if the users are destabilizing that foreign government's position.
So I totally want this to actually happen. However, they gloss over all of the actually hard parts. Cool, DEKA's built a sweet anthropomorphic robotic arm. I have no doubt that part works. But you don't just jump to running a human study from that: first, you do it in non-human primates and show that they can effective control the arm with the implant. Then you show that they can interpret feedback from the arm stimulated into their brain. Then you show that the implant is stable and immunologically accepted over a long period of time (warning: deep, hard unsolved problem). Then you show that they continuously integrate it into their body representation (not necessarily hinted by the prior control study). Then you cautiously do a human surgery and see if they can control it, and the brain doesn't reject the implant after a year. Then five patients. Then apply for FDA approval, expedited or otherwise.

AFAIK there's never been an implant study done using the Luke arm. Therefore we've never tried to build control models from cortical activity for it. That's a hard problem in and of itself. Jumping straight to a 5-person human study is insane. Furthermore, the idea that human patients are going to get intracortical feedback from the arm is crazytalk. It's just not happening. Electrical stimulation cooks the brain and causes seizures, and optical stimulation requires gene therapy (!) and has all kinds of long-term problems right now.

TL;DR: awesome I hope it works. They'll bring a needed device to market and solve about 10-15 of the hard problems of brain-machine interfacing for us at the same time!
XKCD.com Alexa Tarffic Rank - Coincidence?
this is really just a wrapper .keypress() with the char codes mapped... so to bind an event handler to a single keypress, you're adding 3kb of js for something jQuery already provides an interface for. placet cuique suum.
Having worked in two disparate offices; a Capital One debt recovery phone bank and Electronic Arts; both of which follow the Zappos model, I'd say that if it doesn't get in the way of production be it code or money collection then why waste time on non-productive issues. To me this is much the same as insisting on suits for programmers...
So P(jobless|PhD) = 0.017, whereas P(jobless) = 0.066

According to Baye's Theorem, the P(PhD|jobless) = P(jobless|PhD)*P(PhD)/P(jobless)

Where according to [1], P(PhD) = 0.01 (for all PhDs) so assuming roughly half are science, P(PhD) = 0.005, and we get

P(PhD|jobless) = 0.0013, or 0.13%, which means that roughly 1 out of every 1000 jobless people has a PhD.

[1]http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTable?_bm=y&-geo_...
The Egyptian people already rejected the transparent figure-head proposal (the "I won't run for re-election" promise). I don't think anyone expects them to accept anything that doesn't carry the promise of a free and fair election.

That said, the Vice President came up through the military which, as we've been told, is very well-respected. I don't see any reason why the people would distrust what would essentially be an Egyptian Military stewardship.

Perhaps they should be wary of that. And perhaps they will be. But it seems reasonable to expect they'd be willing to give it a shot. The military has done right by them thus far.
Downloaded some freeware software, then became very confused by the purchase page.

http://www.atlantis-interactive.co.uk/purchase/default.aspx
Are VCs and Angels Biased Against Female Entrepreneurs?
WikiLeaks crippled by ex-associates, sources say
Off topic:

I just wanted to thank you, this was the second post I read this morning because it looked interesting and you didn't disappoint. The way you master the English language is astounding and I only wish I was able to wield words as well as you.
Where exactly is the option to enable this? I can't seem to find it in my google accounts page - is it being rolled out gradually?
No disrespect intended but, I think you are lacking a fundamental understanding of machine learning, genetic algorithms, neural networks and AI in general.

I was introduced to Watson when I took a sub-project from IBM related to Watson, I had no idea what it was untill taking the contract, at which point I was introduced to Watson and it is an impressive feat, it is with out a doubt the state of the art in NLP AI. Sufficient to say, AI algorithms differ from the static and rigged structures that most developers write for business apps, web or mobile apps (even the good developers that decouple stuff), the scale of difference is orders of magnitude.

In many cases machines learning has the ability to generate new code based on learning and build new connections and new algorithms to deal with learned problems. Applications literally generate new and novel applications and then connect themselves to these new nodes.

This is not stuff usually broached when you just need to credit a line in an account payable or get the sales volume for last month. There is a huge gap between the code used to write business applications and the structures used in AI.

This is not meant as a critique of you or anyone in general, and is not intend to belittle business app, mobile or web developers but rather to help inform people that, those who have not worked in the field of AI, that their understanding of software development has little relevance when applied to the field of AI. It is literally a different world where the concepts are totally foreign to a non-AI developer.
And how will we know that Watson actually feels fear, or will we just get someone else saying "Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior" response?

Anyway, the answer to this type of conundrum is simple and well-known:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

Of course it should be noted that we aren't there yet for Watson. Even in the restricted domain of a game show, when Watson fails, it does so with a different mode, compared to humans, so we can identify that it isn't actually a human.
absolutely agree. We not talking volumes of 1000's though. We're on the scale of 10-20. something your average crafter can accomplish (depending on the item of course) in a few days.

I don't know that we will put limits though. I mean, someone could print off 1000 paper bookmarks pretty easily.

In the end, our rating / award system should help drive sellers to not over commit. It's something we will have to deal with.

You're the 2nd or 3rd person to assume we're talking Groupon scale. I think we need to do a better job of indicating the scale we're targeting. :)
If Mubarak returns to power before the end of the year does your friend win?
An idea for getting rid of the hashbang problem
I've been playing around with this idea for a while, and given this week's context, I figured I might as well throw it out there. My main questions for HN are: (a) is this a good idea, (b) do you see any big pitfalls I'm overlooking, and (c) how might we get this to happen?
Affordable tablets, intelligent computers, commercial space travel... it's so great to live in the future.

Now, won't somebody please design a viable successor to the Concorde?
What I meant was, that if this was happening in the US or a european country where most HNers live, then the relevance of the civil rights issues might be seen as more immediate.

This was more aimed at the community in general, "you" was meant to refer to the reader. Obviously I don't know where you (jcsalterego) live. Sorry for not being more clear.
...but then a new service came along and replaced it for me

What's the new service?
I worked at DEKA for a while. Although I didn't work on the Luke arm, I got to see a few demos. It's my understanding that the control system is very loosely coupled to the user inputs. I think it's an expansion of the control mechanism for the iBot, which took input from hundreds of sensors but could be controlled with just a joystick and a single button. The Luke arm currently is controlled by pressure sensors in the shoes and on the chest, so you wiggle your toes and flex your muscles to command the arm. It also has very impressive force feedback. But other input mechanisms and feedback systems could be implemented, including direct mental manipulation.

Edit: here's a good demo video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4X_l2XOz8g
Those who would be frustrated just wont enable it. But it's not as inconvenient as you make it out to be; you still only have to remember one password, since the second is dynamically generated.
According to the official blog post ( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-secu... ), this will be rolled out over the next two days.
If someone did a study on these, I'd love to see the effect of posting a meaningless seal. That is, a logo which was made up to LOOK like some official seal, but which is not actually issued by any organization.

My guess is that the effect on conversion rate would be rather similar. After all, who actually knows what TRUSTe is?
Ask HN: Browser push? Does this exist?
Before you all jump on me for not reading HN (yes, I know there's a browser push story on HN right now) let me clarify what I mean by "browser push."

I want to be able to push a message to my chrome browser. I think it's stupid that to receive Gmail notifications I have to have Gmail open in a tab. I don't want to have to install app-specific extensions (Gmail checker in chrome for example.) I want to be able to install 1 extension (Like a growl/chrome mashup) which allows any website to push updates to my browser w/o me having a tab open to that site. For example, w/o Gmail open, Gmail could push an update to all my devices (it already does this to my Nexus) telling me I have a new email. The extension I have in mind would have a standard way of pushing certain bits of data (Notifications vs popups vs a webpage vs another extension message)

Does such a extension exist? If not, why the hell not?
> If Mubarak returns to power before the end of the year does your friend win?

If he's got the title of President, there's no foreign troops stabilizing (that's the only way I could see Mubarak keeping power - if the U.N. sent peacekeepers or something), and he's in Egypt, then I suppose so yes.
What Are All These Rumors Regarding Apple and RFID About?
One of the nice things about Appcelerator, as opposed to Corona, is that it's open source and they have guides (iOS: http://guides.appcelerator.com/en/module_ios.html, Android: http://developer.appcelerator.com/guides/en/module_android.h...) for extending the framework with native code. So, when you hit that inevitable wall, you can drop to native code and make it work on both platforms. I find the speed of development in Appcelerator quickly outweighs the drawbacks.

That said, if you're developing a game, Corona is the better option. It's far more efficient in terms of FPS.