skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They were, you're right. The office will change over time as we settle in. It's already a lot more lively than those pictures showed. We have plants and fresh flowers and art and books and some other things starting to make their way into the space. Time takes care of the personality.
You are assuming that the current Egyptian leadership is a single actor, executing a single plan. You are assuming that all the interests are aligned, even after all the pressure, the cracks, the jumbling. Considering the situation in Egypt, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

This is far from over.
If You Love Nature, Move to the City
Did you know that MySpace, on a per user basis, is twice as profitable as Facebook?

One of the problems these companies will face, having coasted on not focusing on revenue for so long, is how to find ways to generate revenue without alienating your user base.

It's a very tricky question, and done wrong, can do some serious damage to your site (I'm looking at you, Digg)
Remember though, the country is in a state of emergency (As it has been for the last 30 years). I am not sure those rules apply in a state of emergency.
* Unlike Facebook, twitter provides me a real value.

* They not even started yet serious monetization efforts.

* $10B or not is just a function of how devalued USD currency is and at which stage of the bubble we are ($50B for Facebook, $6B for Groupon).
I second this -- although my experience/knowledge is a couple of decades out of date. If they want you enough, you may receive an offer approaching or even exceeding parity with the one from your "fall back".
In Depth with Meetup.com’s Sponsored Groups
At this point I'm not sure any of these investors are valuing twitter as a company based on revenues, this is just strategic or "greater fool theory" investing. These companies just think they will be able to sell these shares at a higher price then they bought them to some greater fool later on.
Direct link --- http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/can-big-cabl...
I use the Google Checkout recurring payments. I think it is still in beta, but it hasn't failed me yet.
You left out the part where Robespierre appointed himself executioner and had hundreds of people publicly beheaded for no good reason. Shortly afterwards, every institution in France, other than the military, collapsed and Napoleon invented the modern dictatorship and failed to conquer Europe.

I guess I'm saying, I hope the Egyptian revolution doesn't end up being as messy.
To seem to me like a person, Watson would need more than intelligence, it would need, well... personality.

Watson will answer questions put to it for as long as the power is on. But it will never do anything else. It has no other desires, no motives, no interests. Its planning skills are limited to game strategy. Its conversational skills are limited to preprogrammed social niceties which probably don't extend beyond the context of the game.

You can make a decent case that it's intelligent --- but it's an intelligent machine. You'd have to add all of the above, and probably more, in order to get something that you could interact with even on-line as a person.

[EDIT: I don't mean to deny the possibility of a machine that I would feel comfortable calling a person --- but I saw the Watson demo run, and I haven't seen one yet.]
Paypal Adaptive Payments for chained payments which allows splitting of proceeds at a percentage between one or more partners. When it works most of the time it's great, but there is no recurring API forcing you to use preapprovals and those have a lot of restrictions and caveats. Amazon FPS is only other provider I'm aware of that provides similar functionality.
Part 3 contains the most interesting technical details. They really milked the absolute max out of the Playstation through a combination of pre-calculating visual occlusion and a custom (Lisp, of course!) programming language that was designed to make use of the hardware directly.
> artificial general intelligence is perfectly possible (we do, after all, have a working example)

It depends what is meant by 'general'. Would we say that humans have 'general' physical capability? Well, we can do quite a few things, yes, but there are plenty of things various animals and machines can do that we cannot, and there are certainly plenty of further things conceivably possible. Why would not informational machines -- intelligence -- be like that?

Have we developed a general physical machine yet? What would that mean?

Human 'intelligence' is just one small example. It is not really special, and not a general measure of anything. So although AI will certainly improve, saying there is a particular threshold that will be passed is sort-of problematic (which does seem to fit the history of AI).
How come Drupal gets no love in the 'how I can help' area?
Which nobody has stated was there aim. There's a big misconception that somehow security firms should strive to have absolutely perfect security, which is completely wrong.

Putting words in my mouth. No one said anything about perfect security.

Security firms should aim for the most appropriate level of security to protect their information assets based on a reasonable approach. As should everyone else.

And they did not do this.

That an Internet-facing web app was broken into and an email server for receiving and sending email to and from the Internet means that they have to be connected to the Internet to work.

Of course. It does not follow that breaking into the web server should compromise the mail server, or vice-versa. You're really losing me there. What you're saying is that they saved what was likely a small amount of money in exchange for a large amount of security. (All of the corporate emails.) I wouldn't want security work from a company as short sighted as that.

If these systems contained information assets that were sufficiently sensitive to the point of considering post-compromise lateral movement then they probably shouldn't be connected to the Internet.

I bet I could find a company that could set up an email server that couldn't be compromised just because the web server was compromised.
Wouldn't communicating an "untrue statement of fact" that certain people are leaders of an allegedly law-breaking group to government officials or other people constitute defamation (assuming that their reputations were harmed as a result)?
Touche. I'm thinking way too much like a programmer. Thanks for posting that link, it's a good reminder of how different people are.
I think my comment was poorly worded. I just meant, that its quicker to start using the device than a laptop say booting Windows 7.

Of course, i realise that the iPad can take time to 'get ready' too, but it was a very generic comparison.
Register a domain for your Posterous
Ha, yeah. Apostol definitely was a bit painful at first. But it felt like deriving calculus helped me learn better and remember it longer than more rote methods.
That's only a problem if you are using JIT compilation. Otherwise a VM (whose executable doesn't change) would just handle the runtime stuff, which is mostly going to be game logic and not super-high-performance stuff (like rendering or audio).
Doesn't work for me?
linusrocks-at-gmail-dot-com btw
Maybe they should give it the answer "The specifications for a machine to beat you at Jeopardy."
"Zappos wants people to be comfortable where they work, and 37signals wants people to work wherever they are comfortable."

What a great way to summarise the difference between the two.
It occurs to me, that this information may be a coup. Imagine that Mubarak's original intention to address the protesters tonight was to propose some compromise other than his immediate stepping down. An opposing party could use the opportunity to force a step down. According to the USA today article, the military addressed the people "all of your demands will be met tonight". Was this really the instruction of Mubarak to the military? Or could it be the instruction coming from the opposition. By spreading a rumor that Mubarak will step down through official channels and generating real expectation for that to happen tonight a strategic coup could be set. Because tonight, if Mubarak doesn't step down, because of the expectation, it would stir the protester's riot past the boiling point. It would force the riots to the next stage of civil decent requiring military action against or for the people. At that point, absolutely the only way to appease the riots would be the forced removal of Mubarak.

It would be certainly interesting if that were really the case, and Mubarak now faced the realization that despite it not being originally his intent tonight--must step down from position.
My understanding that this is the beginning of their DeepQA product line, my assumption is that the research and portions of the technology will be used for business insight and analytical to answer what if type questions.

,Just to be clear I don't work for IBM, and I do not know their intentions for the project, but I do take projects from IBM and have taken projects related to Watson, but I do not know their plans to monetize Watson, the former is just pure speculation on my part.
I did. But if something hard crashes, then it's a fair assumption you're going to have to take it to somewhere where they can fix it. My point is that, if you ignore the out-in-the-wilderness scenario, iPad support is probably friendlier than most PC support for normal people.

If you take your dell laptop back to PC World, don't expect much.
I agree. This is a dangerous sort of argument, to believe something - particularly something so core to human behavior - simply because it is convenient and satisfying.

In fact, this type of justification is at the root of many of the terrible things that have happened in the world - from slavery to genocide.

Are you a terrible person? Maybe not, but only because it doesn't feel right.
Yes, and by that logic, will also surely be smoking, drinking, smoking up, and whatever else they've made after school specials about. Human trafficking? Overly-leveraged options speculation?

My point here is just, unlike a lot of parents, I'm pretty well situated to control my kids use of the Internet.
It'd be nice if i could use my own 2 factor, e.g. if i had a securid or something similar to do. I'm not all that excited to have to open my phone to get to an app to get my passcode out.
Wikipedia lists over 40 revolutions in the 20th century[0] and 10 in the 21st[1]. This was not the first nor will be the last that happen in your lifetime.

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, so far the Egyptians have only managed to throw out one dictator to be replaced by another (or maybe a military council).

I hope the Egyptians keep up the momentum and one day soon have free and fair elections. Until then I fear it will just be business as usual for the corrupt and powerful.

---

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:20th-century_revolutio...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:21st-century_revolutio...

EDIT: Formatting.
I never really felt safe on the Internet, but wow
Bayes' theorem states that P(A|B) = P(B|A) * P(A) / P(B), so in this case it says P(PhD|jobless) = P(jobless|PhD) * P(PhD) / P(jobless). It seems that you stated it incorrectly but used the correct version in the computation (the incorrect gives 0.2244).
I assume you enter the second password once per browser session, not once "per computer." For people who use incognito mode heavily or clear their cookies on shutdown this will mean using the second password every time, but something tells me those people are of the type who want to be using two-factor auth all the time anyway.
Any government, including their own, for that matter.
I will certainly hit memory limits if I try to analyze the Google N-grams. Did you install redis locally?

I would most probably go with http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/ if I was going to parse through TBs of data.
http://www.math.sjsu.edu/~swann/mcsqrd.html
Yes, it's #26 on the list.
do they still have the dreadful "security question"?
What development board to use
I'm unaware of free options that work wonderfully. Or paid, but I haven't tried as many of those.

Gmail is online only, though yes, it's very good. I need offline, and I have 7 active accounts; Gmail online isn't a complete solution by any means.

Apple Mail has poor / nonexisting IMAP subscription, and few power-user tools, though it's my favorite desktop client so far. Fast with thousands of emails and 7 accounts, accurate searches across tons of data, integration with OSX's Address Book, and the worst plugin API in existence: existing, but entirely undocumented.

Thunderbird is a load of crap. I really, truly want to like it, but it always leaves a bitter taste, despite being one of the better clients overall. It continually chews on nothing until I kill it, preventing any updates to the account it's spinning on. It slows to a crawl on a mere few-thousand emails. Is far slower to retrieve and display data than Mail (easily 5x slower in the best case). Hinges privacy / security decisions on the wrong data (I had spam recently with a display "from" of "Apple.com" - Thunderbird decided it was actually from Apple, and displayed all the images, despite coming from another source and being in my spam box). Doesn't integrate with OSX's address book, and its existing address book is simply a joke, an insult to their users.

Mutt / Sup I intend to look into more fully, but have a high learning curve (the Vims of email clients), and I want / need HTML email and don't recall if they handle such things well.

What other free ones would you suggest I try? I need OSX and Windows software, I'd love efficient tagging support, and intend to move to certificates for signatures / encryption (and every system I've encountered is beyond an inflexible-PITA for certificates, almost all the way to totally ineffective).
Well HAL 9000, while cold and calculating seems to be scared when he's being turned off. So I'm not sure I agree there are no emotions. Who knows, maybe things like emotion just appear as side effects of the simulation once it becomes complex enough.
It seems apparent that everybody is striving to emulate Tony. I would also venture that their hiring process filters for people amenable to that culture. Could be a distinction without a difference, but some of those "streamers tucked into the dropped ceiling" look a little forced.
It's definitely apples-to-oranges.

If you're a phone/email CSR, you might enjoy being in a slightly more stimulating environment because you're daily job duties are less stimulating and more mundane.

If you're working on software, you might enjoy the options of quite space, cleanliness. For a company like 37signals, where design takes such a focus, having a nicely designed and organized space might help inspire the company's output. Also, 37s had previously blogged about holding events in their office, so their physical presence must gel with their online image.
Archaeologists love Google Earth
Prototype array camera could make your pictures better, phones thinner
I own this book, and I use it occasionally, but it really requires the right audience.

Firstly, it has several parts. Some of these are historical, philosophical, or otherwise interesting to a general audience, but some of them are technical (I would put most of pages 157-729, nearly 60% of the book, in this category).

For people that are interested in mathematics, but do not have a fairly extensive background (I would estimate 2-3 courses beyond the calculus series), these technical sections are probably not very useful (and certainly not entertaining).

For people (like me), who are still pursuing an education in mathematics, I would say this book is indispensable. It gives a great overview of individual branches of mathematics, including fairly rigorous explanations of important results and conjectures.

The exposition portions of the book are good, but don't warrant the high price of the book on their own. Overall, though, it is a tremendous reference.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the folks who write the articles are all outstanding mathematicians - many of them Fields medalists or other award winners. That makes for some very good reading.
Shameless but on-topic plug: If you have content that needs to be displayed within both apps you could check out the flexible CMS my startup just created for mobile applications: http://storageroomapp.com.

We are currently testing the system, let me know if I should invite you to the beta.
Why does everyone hang on Rebekah's every word? Quora has incredible engineering talent, but design remains a weakness that clearly hinders growth of the business:

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/quora-raises-quest...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870395400457609...
I am aware and I agree; I wasn't drawing a border.
I really like that 37S chose actual chalkboards.
But in his defense, as of 1224 EST the AP link reads:

CIA Director Peon Panetta says U.S. intelligence indicates that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is on his way out.

Which is amusing.
This isn't responsive. You've only answered my question to the extent of defining "same" as the opposite of "other", which is not a lot of progress. So again, what makes this "other" chap "other", and why should anyone care about satisfying that criterion?
How to make people new to programming stop asking me questions?
>his biography

I was talking about two different people in my comment.
To get an idea how terrible PhoneGap can work in practice, check out the O'Reilly iPad app. The performance just isn't there for some applications.
works for me. pops-up "save as pdf" after submitting the email.
Is 'Eat Real Food' Unthinkable?
Ask HN: My startup may fail soon, help me figure out how to land on my feet
If my startup fails, I am in a pretty bad situation job-wise. My degree is in the humanities and my job experience is random and unimpressive (coffee shop, bars, crappy office work) -- with gaps working odd jobs while travelling. The last 2 years is completely blank because I was working on my startup.

Should my startup fail, I'll be left with big debts and no desire to go back to crappy temp jobs or bar work. Fortunately I have no dependants, other than those I owe money to.

I am a pretty good self-taught programmer. Strong web programming skills and knowledge, decent database skills, ok linux sysadmin knowledge, love everything to do with CS. Fast learner, love getting stuff done and working hard.

I am late 20's and live in London.

My plan B at the moment is waiting until I run out of money, then getting a temp job, whilst applying to every Python/Ruby/PHP job I can find. Alternatively, I could try easing in to the elance/rentacoder thing, maybe spending half my time on that and half on trying to keep the startup dream alive. I've also considered quickly learning C#, as I hear it is good for getting jobs, and it sounds like a decent language.
The algorithm is RFC4226+TOTP: http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/
If you have a TOTP device that lets you set the key, then you can use that instead of your phone.
Isn't anonymous less an organized group with leaders and more a bunch of people who hang out and occasionally someone says "hey, it would be cool if we all did <thing>" and whoever is listening joins in?

This idea is repeated so often, I suspect that there's a group of people somewhere that wants that particular message to be repeated and believed. If I were manipulating a group like Anonymous from behind the scenes, that's exactly what I'd want the net at large to think.

On the other hands, if Anonymous were really as decentralized as implied in this meme, I should think everyone would want the media to think there was a shadowy conspiracy inolved -- if nothing then just for the LULZ.

My best guess is that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Anonymous is somewhat decentralized, but there is also a core group (are core groups) that started a self-perpetuating process toward some end. This core group is a little worried that things are a little out of hand, so they are now covering their tracks using the same social-media manipulation techniques used to start Anonymous itself.
What proportion of those jobs are below minimum wage post-doc positions?

Probably not very many. Typical postdoc pay is $40-60k/year depending on where the job is located ($40k in Urbana-Champaigne, $60k NYC or Chicago).

That's about 2-4x lower than what the postdoc could get in the outside world, but it's a far cry from minimum wage.
not that friendly. i applied to their special branded merchant account and was denied due to low volume.
I think it's the orders of magnitude out bit that people object to.

Twitter is obviously fun and useful for some, eg journalists who want to pad their celeb gossip news story out with "X tweeted Y", etc

But is it really worth $10bn to humanity? Nope.

Is it really ever going to be worth anything close to that based on revenue? Again, nope.
Snag great investors at first OAF Philly (apply deadline next Fri)
Mark Suster: Do You Need a Powerpoint Deck For a VC Meeting?
The number isn't too important past a certain point. He's going to live a comfortable life wherever he goes.
If you have constant return (e.g. 5%) this will show up as a linear growth function on a log scale. It will be exponential on a normal scale, which over time gets very steep. Using a log scale allows you to compare the growth rates of different investments in a consistent way.
This video is a must Jimdo ♥ Kanban
How One Startup Got Lucky With Big Time VC
A last minute addition to 500 startups new accelerator, Dave McClure's gut and leaving it all behind for the dream.
The US does not have a state secrets law the way the UK and others do. If I find a piece of paper on the street, post a scan of it on the chans, then find out it was classified, what law have I broken? If you're going to say The Espionage Act, I don't agree. My understanding is that the prohibition on distribution covers only people who have previously agreed to respect classification.
It's being rolled out over the next few days. Hopefully it will be enabled for you soon.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-secu...
I agree with you up to a point.

And here's that point:

"Before the release of the data, and while this was going on, those on the list were unaware of what was occurring. Just as a reasonable person isn't threatened until they become aware of the stalking, threats, etc in real life."

People did become aware of it before the release, which is why the exploits of his servers happened, and why Anonymous got butthurt and went on a crusade.

He was dropping hints and threats in IRC, national media, and in email, that he was doing this stuff. He also "leaked" via his fake persona some of the kinds of information he was gathering to his victims so in order to drum up more publicity and to scare them into action. And, it now turns out, he planned to do a lot more than that.

I don't have a problem with him idly browsing facebook or twitter, though I have to question the mental stability of someone that spends all their time voluntarily reading and logging the incoherent ramblings of teenagers all day and trying to build a conspiracy out of it.

The legal issue is that he was threatening people with exposure, via major media outlets. When seeing this stuff, anyone who ever happened to drop in on the IRC channels had to think, "Crap. When is the FBI gonna show up to question me because I made a joke about Egypt on IRC?" You and I both know the government are wholly incompetent at dealing with issues on the Internet, and they try to make up for that incompetence by being extremely heavy-handed in execution of their misguided policies. I'd be scared as hell if I thought someone, apparently trusted by the government, was going to "reveal" my involvement in some wacky Internet conspiracy to the FBI.