skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's amazing that there are advantages to this. It seems the main one is the observation that intersections have many overloaded functions which combine to explode the complexity of operations that can occur: intersections handle cross traffic between roads, 4 different points of turning from one road to the orthogonal one via left turn, 4 different points of turning to orthogonal via right turn, four points of u-turns, and pedestrian crossing. Whichever maneuver you pick, there are that many other maneuvers that each other car might be involved in at the same time and you have to interact with. That's an insane level of complexity, and the complexity of the whole system affects all the cars coming from each of 4 directions.

The Michigan turn takes roughly half of these, the 4 left turn modalities and 4 u-turn modalities and displaces each of 4 to a location where it only affects a single direction, the oncoming one, although it has the side effect of doubling the number of right hand turns at the main intersection, but these are safer turns than left ones.

A variation on this I have seen on highways and interstates throughout the US is to have a left turn slow down and two-way median turn around lane that is in between the actual roads where one would turn, ensuring that no dangerous left turns take place. The left turn is replaced with a u turn which is even more dangerous due to the lower speed at which one clears oncoming traffic, and there are seldom any pedestrian situations since pedestrians aren't usually found on highways. But it does avoid the otherwise conflict with negotiating the crossing with several other directions at once, to your right cross traffic, left cross traffic, left across-left turn traffic, right across-left turn traffic, and oncoming traffic, reducing all this to having to deal with oncoming traffic only.

And if I had not read this link I never would have thought about all this stuff, so thanks for posting.
Ask HN: indexing the revolution (2)
In my earlier Ask-HN - I sought suggestions to index the Egyptian revolution (tweets, media, articles, posts, etc...)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2212275

I came across Zotero http://www.zotero.org/ which does a decent job in extracting meta info about the different assets (citations).

This solves the issue of centralization (later centralization efforts might be possible).

Now - my question is that all web accessible forms of Zotero data are quite inadequate. I've tried both Omeka and WordPress plugins and didn't feel at home with either.

Anyone has experience with Zotero public interface and/or can share experience with similar efforts?
I can say definitively that I know of at least a dozen people who would otherwise be active contributors to wikipedia if they hadn't had dozens of hours of their work deleted repeatedly.

Not edited or improved, deleted.
Awesome, I'll check out those answers.
The wall of shame itself is written in Python 2.
It seems we've come full circle -- features easier to push out in client software than through modification of server code.
I can confirm that this happens quite often around here. Sometimes, it's fantastic, and alleviates a lot of congestion.

Another odd Pittsburgh-ism that has its own Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_parking_chair I'm not a big fan of this one.
Holographic television - the new 3D?
Doesn't WOT (Web of Trust) attempt to do this?
There is a Greasemonkey script[1] which does blacklisting. It works by sending "-site:example.com" with every search query.
The script does a lot more cleanups like removing link tracking and ads, so if you don't feel like using all the functions, look in the code and check out "RemoveBadLinks()" function. Maybe you want to comment all other public functions in init().

[1] http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/79742
http://dinnerplanner.net

Dinner Planner allows people to plan out their daily meals in an organized and efficient manner, share recipes with friends and even organize your grocery list (automatically). We send out daily reminders to people on what they're cooking for the night.

Tonnes of features are planned including SMS notifications, subscriptions to weekly menus, generate meal ideas based off what ingredients you currently have.

I realize there are other apps out there like this one, but to be totally honest, there aren't many good ones.
I drive through this twice a day:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=42.505215,-83.758199&...

It's a triple roundabout with a highway bridge separating two of them. The internals are arguably simpler but there are more entrances/exits than the magic roundabout.

For bonus points, check out what state this is in.

(I use Bing because last I checked Google still doesn't have a good satellite view of this, despite it being several years old now.)
I don't live in Texas anymore and I don't drive anymore, so I never realized this isn't standard around the US. Weird. I loved turnarounds as an option over yielding lefts. You drive a bit further, but it always felt a bit safer, particularly in large strip malls where you have several points of entry along a frontage road.
You're welcome. You can even clone that and make a wiki for py3k from it if you want. There's a script (in the wiki repo) to parse the wiki into YAML, so reuse of the current content should be easy no matter what format you want.
So long, stock market...?
markmail, osdir. these sites basically mirror yahoo/google groups. Big source of frustration.
I know this is a legit extension from Google.

By why is this extension not marked as Verified author? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbd...

The "nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef" makes it look suspicious as well.
#2 If you don't want to wait for Google: http://www.customizegoogle.com/
Potentially more useful to get you thinking of different mind designs, personify evolution for a moment. It's not general intelligence, but it built you, which is pretty amazing, all with the only goal in "its mind" being to favor genes with more copies in each generation of replication.
How Civilization IV's theme song from 2005 won a 2011 Grammy
I second that suggestion. It would make the extension that much more awesome to not have to block sites on each device. Might also help to lower the noise on Google's end, so they're not seeing multiple blocks on the same domain from the same users, though I'm sure they account for this already.
Will do. It's already on three of our machines, soon to be seven.
The slightly amusing thing is I did actually buy my girlfriend a card this year, however whilst in the shop I had a great solution come to me that would solve a problem, I obviously was not paying full attention as the left hand inside of the card was clearly aimed at a bloke.

My usual excuse is working with a greetings card company as one of our clients its always a busy time of the year

[Shameless plug]
So for those that have forgotten theres a collection of iPhone ecard apps I have been involved in here

Jeego lite (free)
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/jeego-lite/id399428058

Starcards ($0.99)
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/valentine-starcards/id4183077...

Disney Valentines ($0.99)
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/disney-valentines/id416908996
When you're processing online payments, you're rather incompetent if you can't handle UTF-8.
I really often get exactly the answer I need from Yahoo Answers, just to throw that in there...
The hiding functionality doesn't interest me, this feature has been available for ages and ages in GreaseMonkey scripts and the like. But sending the information to Google, with the hope that they will eventually use it for something, interests me greatly.

Unfortunately, i don't and can't use Chrome. If all this does though is send a URL request when a site is blocked, it should be extremely trivial (for someone who is smarter and has more free time than me, probably) to re-implement this in a Firefox-compatible form, right?
In most of Michigan, the roads are enormous, development is sparse, and there are no sidewalks to speak of. It's tied in with the history of the state as a center of auto industry and the first attempts at car-centric planning.

Saying that the "Michigan Left" is the cause isn't exactly correct, but it does allude to the overall nature of the layout.
Any results?
People would do well reading Chomsky's many writings on the subject, rather than reacting to these tiny snippets. Like maybe "Language and Problems of Knowledge: the Managua Lectures" or "Language and Thought".

http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=turing+...

A quick email conversation or off-the-cuff interview is too brief to convey the context. Most of the dismissive comments here don't seem to engage that context in a way that makes me confident that they're informed by it.
As far as I can tell, Wikipedia does not have clear methods (or at least not effective ones) for establishing the notability of things like programming languages, and some editors have failed to use their heads to adapt the guidelines to the situation. The fact that Heather Kuzmich (to save you the trouble of looking up her yet extant Wiki page: She was a contestant on "America's Next Top Model" who suffered from Asperger's) appears to be more notable than Alice ML shows the uneven standards of notability pretty clearly.
If my algorithm is an interpreter and my data is a program to be interpreted, then distinguishing between using a new algorithm and "using the same algorithm on an updated data source" is rather difficult.

Which isn't to say an interpreter is "intelligent" but the criteria of whether you are "using the same algorithm" seems insufficient.
I paid $0, listened to one song decided I didn't like it. If I liked it I would have come back and paid for it. Because the majority of people paid nothing for it doesn't mean lost sales. I never listen to Radiohead, I only downloaded it because of all of the publicity. I always pay/download Trent Reznor's albums when he releases them.
The Great Gatsby - For NES
Would it have made you feel better if he had invoked Einstein's name? It's satire, relax a little.
That link just showed me 30 seconds of some commercial and AFTER told me that I cannot access their contents due to geographical restrictions.
Having a big company behaving like a local one-- listening to the customer's opinions is really nice.

However, this is a feature that Google actually had. Why did you remove it? I accept the Search Wiki was not particuarly a success[1], but the remove option was very nice.

Alas, thanks for listening. I'll be waiting for the server-side option.

1: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-searc...
No they are (or at least were) using Twilio.

Not sure how this makes any sense from a business standpoint at this time, but I guess they must have something up their sleeves.
What do you think of my app's splash page?
CollegeOnly: We Died of Hype
Looks really, REALLY, similar to this article: http://knol.google.com/k/simple-simhashing

Hmmmm...
You are talking about naming conventions, that's something completely different. GMail does not enforce any 'firstname.lastname' patterns.
Maybe try putting more information on your landing page. People would be more likely to sign up if they had more than 5 words to figure out what your startup does.
Why I LOVE My 3D Printer (by Schuyler, age 10)
> Statements like "first 256 code points in Unicode map to Latin-1" make little sense.

That's not true. Latin-1 is both a character set and an encoding, so "the first 256 Unicode code points map to the corresponding Latin-1 characters" is a reasonable statement.

You can also say "the first 128 Unicode code points, when encoded in UTF-8, are equal to the corresponding Latin-1 encoding".
@vaksel man u must just look GREAT:) ask for Jim next time u come in or Frank or Kristen Or Dennis and say I sent u and tell them the issue :)
I always liked the "Aphrodite's butt" interpretation; it makes me smile whenever I see heart-shaped boxes of brown chocolate. :)

Also, here's mine: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281-%28|x|-1%29^2%29^0...
Thank god. Goodbye to: devcomments.com. osdir.com, and mail-archive.com!
The duplicate submission detector appears to be malfunctioning. For example, please see the following:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772650
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218455

Sorry, I realize this is not a feature request, per se, but I didn't know where/how to submit bug reports.
Actual competition between providers is probably the major reason. It's amazing how consumer choice can motivate corporations to invest in infrastructure so they can gain marketshare.
Oh yes! To be fair, they were really bad at the time, like 3~10 a day for a couple of months, I didn't have much choice to complain. It stopped within a week. Now, I think the only weirdness was around new years with the Android wrong-person text bug (whatever that was). My work phone I get maybe 2~3 per month, if that, but I don't even know who to gripe to on that one except resources at work, but it isn't so bad I don't mind so much.
Google Moves Ahead With Its ‘Content Farm’ Campaign
Unarguably marginally better is still unarguably better.

Set and dict comprehensions are pretty rad. Ordered dicts are useful. The new unittest module is great.

Of course, all of these have been back-ported to 2.7, but even if they hadn't, Python 2 is still a very capable language. Don't have dict comprehensions? Well, you can build an equivalent loop without too much difficulty, and you're used to doing that.

So there's not a great value proposition when it comes to moving from Python 2 to Python 3. You're used to working around the warts, and the workarounds aren't that painful. But what about going from 3 to 2? Once you're used to range() being efficient, to dict comprehensions, to a cleaned up stdlib, and to sane Unicode handling? You won't be crippled, but I'm fairly certain you won't find it quite as pleasant.

I believe that's the measure that matters, in the long run. Would the old thing feel worse than the new thing, from the perspective of the new thing? If the answer is, to any degree, unambiguously "yes," then it only makes sense to plan on making that move.
Matt, I don’t understand why Google need to offer blocking as a user option. Any web netizen with some experience can tell at a glance the spammy and low-quality results on a SERP, but Google, with their vast knowledge and experience and their ability to monitor all sorts and aspects of user clicking behaviour, cannot?
Any idea how to go about reporting this? I couldn't find a bug report submission link, so for lack of a better alternative, I reported it in "Feature Requests":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
Internet 'Do Not Track' Bill Introduced In Congress
I feel the same, I think most of VC's badly bias themselves
List of Articles not listed in a List of Articles.
It's sort of funny that Microsoft bought into Apple's no-cutpaste and no-multitasking reality distortion field right before Apple added those features.

It's a perfect example of the "don't follow your competitors" credo.
"Suppose you have a huge number of items that you would like to group together by a fuzzy notion of similarity. Suppose the only tool available to you is a key-value store. Suppose you only have the resources to consider each object once. Never fear, simhashing is here!"
Experts Exchange used to be a scam, showing fake results. But now, they just roll them to the bottom of the page. I don't endorse them or like them, but they've had decent quality answers several times.
Out of curiosity, why not still do it? If you regret it, what in your mind is convincing you it's too late to try?
Ask HN: So I've learnt Ruby, now to choose where to go next?
Hi Guys,

So I've project managed high budget e-commerce builds across different platforms and languages, multiple smaller sites and am a pretty dab hand at SEO to boot, but having the funds to outsource and manage the project myself was just not a feasable option. So a few weeks ago I ordered a few RoR books and decided to get my hands dirty myself. I've found it a steep learning curve I must admit but it's definitely rewarding.

So to get to the point where should I go from here, essentially I am a solo founder and my location in the uk does not lend itself to finding a suitable co founder, there simply isn't a network and given my experience in a previous startup with poor co founders I know all too well how a bad choice can stick with you. I would love to bury my head down, get something out there and apply to the current YC application round but know the preference on team applications. So should I hold back on this round and try to find that elusive co founder or go for broke anyhow?.
The Secret to a Happy Marriage: Do the Dishes, Put Out, Don’t Talk So Much
"It's been raining all day and you find yourself with a sufficiently large pile of items (tweets, blog posts, cat pictures) and a key-value database. New items are arriving every minute and you'd really like a way of finding similar items that already exist in your dataset (either for duplication detection or finding related items). Clearly we don't want to scan our entire existing database of items every time we receive a new item but how do we avoid doing so? Minhashing to the rescue!"
Congrats, you made a splash page! :P
Mark is right to point out that each geographic region has its advantages. Places like Boston may not be known for home runs in the consumer space but because of MIT, it's been known to produce some heavy tech winners (A123 systems, ITA, kiva)

There's also a reason why Google has offices in Seattle, Boston, NYC, and soon, Pittsburgh. Hiring is tough in the valley and there's an abundance of talent elsewhere.

If you want to innovate on web technology, the valley is the place to be. If you want to innovate on business models, content, or heavy technology (to name a few) there are other places where you can thrive.
I kind of can imagine Google watering down terms to that degree: http://www.html5rocks.com/

I do think Google does it more judiciously. Simplification can be a good thing.
the reg process for hackernewsers was too onerous. reach out to us at info@click.st and we'll make sure you get to the right person.
That's illegal. Report them.
Sorry, I didn't mean "you" personally, but "you, the holders of the wikipedia official party line".
Sergei Vassilvitskii (of Yahoo! Research) went over this first class of "COMS 6998-12: Dealing with Massive Data", http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~coms699812/ just a few weeks ago. Very interesting stuff. The class is dealing specifically with large data handling in both parallel processing and streaming techniques.

It looks as if a major component of the class is mathematical distillation of complex problems trading exact matching for acceptable probabilistic bounds. When you are able to do these math tricks you can cut an O(n^2) or worse problem down to O(n log n) or better problem which is the real win.
"I realize there are other apps out there like this one, but to be totally honest, there aren't many good ones."

Thanks for the honesty. ;)
Good luck... But, be sure about the business plan...
devcomments.com. osdir.com, and mail-archive.com
I don't think MS ever bought into it. I think MS realized that what Apple had been saying about Cut/Paste and multi-tasking was true. They're hard problems to solve on a small touch interface.

MS chose to release earlier without those features rather than waiting another 3 - 6 months. They were already far enough behind the market that they probably felt they couldn't wait any longer.
Heh, you're right, it does look pretty similar. I wasn't aware of that article until someone posted it on Disqus comments just now.

The article came out of my reading the data mining slides from the Ullman - Stanford course, maybe there's common terminology? I know I tried to keep it consistent with the wikipedia Jaccard Index.
Posts like this make it all sound so simple.

Of course you don't need a PR Agency if you're good at PR and you're going to do it yourself. Just be prepared to allocate time and resources, and to not lose your head during the occasional shitstorm.
I alluded to that in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218627 . People feel comfortable with Google removing blatant spam: hidden text, cloaking, sneaky JavaScript redirects, etc. People tend to feel less comfortable if they feel like Google is making an editorial decision.

If we get a good signal from this extension, or from offering block links in Google's search results, then it's much more similar Gmail's spam algorithm, where an email is labelled as spam partially because a lot of users say it is, rather than because of some editorial decision on our part.
You have a basic, fundamental misunderstanding of what wikipedia is then.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. - Jimmy Wales

http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/07/28/1351230/Wikipe...
Sure, but what I think he meant was: if one work item is very large, it should be broken down to make sure there's no work hiding in there that got overlooked.
> I'm curious why this issue triggers a
> knee-jerk response of "that's discrimination".

discrimination != sexism, racist, etc

When you decide that two things are different you are discriminating between them, political correctness aside.
For one thing it is easier to implement if it is more limited. This should help the client and server developers. Right now email software often seems to be quite complex.
http://michael-wheeler.org/2011/01/29/leaving-the-cloud/
Or at least an import/export option. But we'll need to see how popular/useful the extension is first.
Friends Plus looks great - I took this promo code: EKR3MAHFJAP4

I'll leave a reply in a bit with my first impressions and suggestions.
Can't read - The light's out.
Is it open to teams currently based in Europe ( but ready to relocate if needed ) ?

edit: found my answer http://getsatisfaction.com/capitalfactory/topics/do_you_have...

The answer is Yes.
It's "whatever programming language is not mainstream paradox" to be precise (and the author of the blog post would agree since he also nominates Haskell, Erlang, and Clojure). Which is obvious. And since "whatever programming language is not mainstream paradox" is a mouthful, "Python paradox" is a much better name. Those unfamiliar with the term can always be directed to PG's article to enjoy.

EDIT: Using "esoteric" languages can also be a good long-term hiring strategy. It's pretty easy to get a place in people's minds as the "go to" company to work with a language. Google did that with Python, Twitter is doing it with Scala, Basho are doing it with Erlang.
Thanks.

I'm planning to discuss a couple of different techniques (using shingling to actually create the set elements from items is the next one) and then demonstrate them on a large dataset.

I'll start including some Python in the follow up ones.
I find this story unlikely, but probably for a pretty uncommon reason. Here's the thing: I heard this question a number of times before (never in an interview; always on the interwebs), but never attempted to solve it and never read a solution. As I was reading this paragraph:

Can I assume that the lights and the switches are correctly
wired according to the National Electric Code of the United
States? That is, that the switches interrupt the hots, not the
neutrals, that the switches are standard-duty switches rated
to interrupt 15 amps of 120 volt alternating current, and so on?

I instantly realized the intended answer. I don't doubt for a second that if that just happened to me, it would also have happened to Feynman (because I blame being a physicist for what just happened), immediately after first thinking of that important signalling word that he was supposedly about to speak.