skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Coincidentally, John Dvorak was just pick pocketed in Madrid: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380787,00.asp
Apple iPhone knocked off top of tree as it trails 5 budget rivals in UK
I'd love to see something like the ICFP contest (in its better years), made shorter somehow. The 2006 one was especially awesome.
I attended this as a junior, 17 years ago. For a kid from Kansas public schools, it was mind-blowing. Definitely influenced my life.
How to think like a computer scientist - using Python
We’ve accomplished this without spending a single dime on advertising.

Interesting, taptaptap, interesting. Let's see here:

1) Multi-thousand dollar, multi-day giveaways and promotions that require you to follow and retweet.

http://taptaptap.com/blog/win-the-ultimate-10000-canon-5d-
mark-ii-camera-rig/

http://taptaptap.com/blog/laser-engraved-ipads/

2) Lisa Bettany making seven appearances on This Week in Tech, and in surely all of which plugging Camera+, a channel not everybody has.

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

3) Getting pulled from the App Store and subsequent free publicity, again, fairly risky and unreliable for getting covered.

That's some road to take not to require advertising to get the word out about your app. It's technically TRUE that you didn't buy ads, per se, but it's not like this success, especially in relation to point 1, was free, as your opening seems to imply. Put another way, your marketing expenditures aren't zero.
Thanks for your initial work on this! :)
Ah, I see. I can definitely understand that.

Still not crazy about it as yet one more connector for mass-manufactured devices, though.
Yeah, this has been my experience as well. Even cheap Firewire audio interfaces are light-years better than their USB counterparts.

I still use a USB 2.0 MIDI controller and the latency is absolutely killer. Press a key, a beat later, see the note appear on piano roll...
Designer of Google Images Launches Search Engine for Hotel Rooms
A friend of mine had his brand new iPhone 4 snatched on the subway here a few weeks back. It's a real eye opener. You just hold it out there. If you aren't ready for someone to take it, it's trivial to grab it out of your hands and jump out of the doors while they close.
Remind HN: space shuttle Discovery has its last launch at 4:50 ET today
I didn't up or down vote you, but meta-edits about downvotes seem to either get downvoted to oblivion because of perceived whining or upvoted a lot out of a perceived injustice to the downvote. Also I think your comment is rather condescending. "You think Windows sucks? How about you build something better?"
I am a 7 out of 10 sure I will be there.
Starting a startup vs Working for a startup
Their developers are in San Francisco according to his ad at 37signals
It is interesting to see that his wife is defending him... Is she being supportive or is it just about the money?
I'm pretty involved in the ruby community, and I've generally seen an increase in people talking about using it. Also with the Rails 3 release, lots of people were waiting to do one big massive upgrade of both Ruby and Rails at the same time. It's been long enough now that lots of people have moved their projects over.

Like I said, I have no numbers, so fundamentally it is just a guess.
It would be nice to see Amazon provide an official EC2 AMI for this release.
I don't know of PG banning a script. He never banned mine, but I never let mine run uncontrolled.

But no, I'm doing this "by hand" now. My memory makes it easy to spot duplicates, my work flow makes it fast to create the text.

When I care. I'm starting to care less, and letting lots of repeats, duplicates and re-hashes go unremarked. For example, suddenly there are lotsof items about networking. They should all be tied together, but I really can't be bothered.

HN is potentially a brilliant resource, but it's being squandered. Saddens me a little, but having been mauled for experimenting with a way that might have improved it, I'm reluctant to bother again.
I prefer Norvig's advice:

"Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others."

http://norvig.com/21-days.html
I've struggled with this very issue for a long time.

I named my site RunFatBoy.net back in 2006. It was an emotionally charged phrase for me, evoking memories dating back to gym class in Junior high.

Fast forward five year later, and the title still seems to divide my users. Some feel offended, others convey it as some sort of self-deprecating humor, a few have had it evoke the same emotional memories that I have..

With so many of the common words/phrases already taken, it's hard to find something that is a win across the board.
At one of the colleges I attended, they shutdown the school's course registration/student management system from midnight to about 7 am every day. It was incredibly frustrating at times.
The problem is that the whole event was orchestrated to showcase IBM. Jeopardy didn't offer an open call. There's been no series of open competitions in Jeopardy-style trivia, as there was with gradually-improving chess computers.

Instead, IBM wanted a forum to show off its multi-million-dollar QA technology, and approached Jeopardy. (They may have also, though I haven't seen definitive information either way, offered Jeopardy promotional payments.) IBM then spent 3+ years optimizing for the Jeopardy domain. (In the Reddit QA, the Watson team answered: "At this point, all Watson can do is play Jeopardy and provide responses in the Jeopardy format.")

And in the matches, Watson dominated on one dimension of Jeopardy play – quickly pressing a button after a light goes off – that's the least interesting technical challenge. (Yes, it's an important part of any champion's skills, but a machine would have won that button-pressing competition 50 years ago, so it obscures rather than highlights any other 'breakthroughs' Watson may represent.)

While impressive in several dimensions, and drawn from much deeper research by IBM, the only thing we can say for sure about Watson is that it was a "Horse for the Course" in Jeopardy. And unfortunately, no other computer horses were invited to play, and offered the same prizes (in money and fame).

I suspect, now that the pattern has been set, we'll see leaner teams showing they can do as well or better than Watson with far less funding/hardware, over the next few years. Still, in the popular imagination, these efforts will live in the shadow of Watson, when a fair competitive process might have given them a chance to upstage Watson.
Only added after I watched it go up and down twice. So it's not just the meta-whining, apparently several people found it highly offensive on content alone, and I was mystified as to why.

Thanks for the outside input regarding the Windows comparison, I don't think that's quite the same as this, though. The people talking down Watson aren't saying it sucks as much as they're saying it's trivial. Vista sucked but nobody would have called it trivial or inconsequential.
>Being able to exploit one says nothing about the other.

data parallelism is a partial case of instruction level parallelism - N instances of the same instruction run for different pieces of data. A very frequent case in high performance computing or enterprise data crunching tasks supposedly targeted by the Itanic
Was LZO available at the time?
Also, is it offensive slang in some other language?

A site I worked on (unintentionally) chose a name that means "lazy idiot" in some cultures. Oddly enough it seemed to do more good than harm. It's a bit ironic because the site was a productivity tool.
This may be true, but I think it's a bit rich to accuse Google and Bing of "censorship" when they undoubtedly send him huge volumes of traffic in natural search results whilst (perhaps) opting not to take his money.

That's also assuming they're not taking his money based purely on his website's reputation, which I find doubtful given his obvious flair for generating [relatively] cheap PR by getting SuperBowl ads banned.
Thanks.

Look, it's the nature of text-only that doesn't capture very much of a person's "state". In order to do that with any sort of fidelity, a considerably longer post is required. Of course something short like that could be interpreted as snarky, or it could be interpreted in the spirit in which is was offered, a playful one. I understand, everything here on HN is dead serious and so trying to make a joke will go over like a lead balloon.

I guess what I find disturbing is that if people were to take that comment from a different point of view, giving me the benefit of the doubt (like the original poster was granted), I think people would not be so quick to rush to be offended.

I also don't know if all HN folks know about letmegooglethatforyou.com and I think it's kinda fun and playful.

Lastly, pg is not God, and invoking his name as if he has the "last word" is, I think, not helpful. I appreciate his opinion, but that's all it is. And he ain't perfect, as he will instantly admit. (As I will instantly admit!)

Now, I will go back to being my serious self, because, you know, everything on HN is serious! Laughing is not allowed. Apparently...
I believe that was the whole point of the 'Back to the Mac' introduction to Lion from a few months ago--bringing iOS back to the Mac.
Don't think it matters. The information has never really been locked away, and the value added by the university environment (personal contact with top lecturers, working closely with like minded students, formal qualification, the chance to meet all sorts of cool people) is still enough to draw students.

It's a dry old world if you only focus on access to the material.
Tablet-zine "The Daily" headed to Android sooner than expected [video]
15 hours (claimed) with the regular 9 cell battery. Not too shabby.
If you have a working website, posting the URL will also probably help. :-)
Colin Percival is working on it. http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2010-12-20-FreeBSD-on-EC2-FA...
Feels like a paper newspaper. Filled with amazing information that you take the time to read. However, when you want to recall any of it, it's too late since it's already in some landfill somewhere.

I think it is up to the community to create pages outside HN that compile the information and take it one step further. After all, it needs to provide additional value to those who have already read the articles individually.
agree, dont think any name could pass every one. but if it fails a few, you know you have a bad name.

the hardest is probably "Meaningful – customers 'get it'". google, apple, etc dont say anything about what the company does. microsoft passes that test.

but take a few YC companies: dropbox, dailybooth, indinero, airbnb, reddit, hirehive, 1000memories, fanvibe, those all pass.

but plenty dont and are still awesome: heroku, hipmunk, lanyrd, rapportive, 280 north, divvyshot, all those have some problems but hasn't prevented them from success.
I'm assuming that, given the article is from '05, attitudes there have changed a bit (one would hope).
That's also present on countless window managers for X11 (Linux, BSD).

What both Macs and Windows seem to lack is a modifier for holding to drag windows: most X11 window managers let you hold Alt to drag windows, regardless of where you click. That would have saved me from several situations in Windows where the titlebar of a window is out of the viewable area, and I therefore could not move the window.
I don't know about this particular case, but as somebody who served in the military, I always find it odd when folks talk about military member's civil rights.

Do they realize that the military can and will take lives? That simple things like your smoking habits can get people killed? That you give up all sorts of things when you put the uniform on?

Don't get me wrong -- I didn't like any of that. And I was in the infantry, which is much more about military discipline and foundational stuff. I think a lot of folks look at the military and think of guys living in dorms and doing jobs that involve pushing a lot of buttons. In that case, those folks begin to look a lot like anybody else going to work. So we expect them to have a similar work and legal environment as the rest of us.

Like I said, I'm not trying to pass judgment on Manning in this comment or try to figure out what the appropriate type of incarceration would be for him. I just find people's attitudes towards the military very -- weird.
I think it's more than just saving which programs are open in a session - based on the line "In fact, whenever you quit and relaunch an app, Resume opens it precisely the way you left it.", it's also saving program state a la iOS.
Getting More out of Top
Quickly pressing a button after a light goes off is pretty unimpressive. Figuring out the answer to the question and measuring your confidence in order to decide whether to press the button is impressive.

Agree on your suspicion. Simply quartering the cost of memory and copying the approach from the paper with some home-grown improvements will get people ahead of IBM and probably inside IBM's decision loop so they're permanently ahead. But plowing something the first time is often the hardest. These weren't dumb people working on this thing for 3+ years.
It's copper for now. I haven't found any confirmation of this, but I believe Intel's strategy for optical is to have the lasers and light detectors built into the cable itself, so that the plug connection is still completely electrical.
In Chrome DevTools, during runtime $ should always be jQuery (assuming its on the page). This isn't the case in Firebug AFAIK.

I believe in both tools, at a breakpoint, $ will be the getElementById shortcut that's baked into the console API. Kind of a bummer, we're trying to work around this.

You can always do `$ = jQuery;` to redefine it and you'll be good.
Not being tortured is a human right.

Full stop. This isn't about whether the punishment for losing your rifle is excessive, this is a black and white issue. Punishment before trial == wrong. Torture == wrong. Both are against the constitution.

And I bet nobody even gets in trouble for this.
I think your automated script was very helpful. I would urge you to bring it back. Particularly now that I distinctly feel that duplicates have been on the rise. By duplicate I do not mean the exact url are resubmitted but articles or announcements that have a huge overlap in content.
The problem is that parallelism, and performance at this level in general, is not the kind of problem that you can solve by adding additional layers of abstraction. I can only speak to FOS, and not the other projects, but the idea behind it is to optimize the stack all the way down. My guess is that if you tried to run the Erlang VM on a 1000-core cpu, it would run into Linux scalability issues, regardless of how parallel Erlang is. Instead, we need to think about the base primitives of how we interact with the hardware, and potentially redesign them in a way that let us fully utilize the hardware.
It's 1.1 mb, which works out to less than five seconds for most people. I suppose they do leave it out to keep FF more lean, but that doesn't mean it Mozilla can't have an official web development add on.
Part of 'the "Toronto" problem' is simply the format of the challenge. In Jeopardy, Watson can give at most one response, in that particular situation exactly one. In a medical diagnosis situation, Watson's responses wouldn't be so constrained. He could give a list of 20 possibilities, with confidence margins for each one, and even as far as a list of possible additional tests designed to favor one possible diagnosis over another. This sort of information, utilized by a competent doctor, has a far, far smaller potential for disaster than the "what is a lobotomy?" scenarios that people are scared of.
Ah, thanks for the heads up.

I asked because I'm the Product Manager of PostageApp, and we specialize on those sorts of emails. Let me know if you'd be interested in giving our app a whirl, it takes the headaches of deliverability out of your hair. :)
They are adequate in IE8, but that's about all. The IE8 Dev Tools have some useful features (like easy cache clearing), but it doesn't seem like Microsoft had made much of an effort to make them user friendly or complete.
How Do People Feel About Retargeting?
Ah. Very cool (sorta?) Thanks, good luck with it!
You're looking for an argument and a rant and that's not my intent. Nobody said anything about torture being okay.
I'm not sure if it mature enough yet but this freezing of a accounts is a reason why I'm interested in bitcoin.
I have my honeymoon coming up in 8 weeks and wasnt sure if AirBNB was a good idea for that(?)

You've convinced me to at least give it a serious consideration. Unfortunately i've never seriously used AirBNB before.

Any advice?
No. There was no corporate memory at all.
How did you manage to set yourself up with a consultancy gig?
The Fun Factor in Stickers
Stickers are wonderful in their uses. They are excellent for advertisement in a fun manner.
According to the papers cited about alcoholism and happiness, you are not affected by the behavior of your coworkers. For smokers, they only claim that coworkers influence each others' behavior within small firms, which makes sense because people are more likely to be friends anyway and there is more pressure to smoke socially. Even then, the confidence interval is huge; they claim smoking cessation by a coworker decreases your chances of smoking by 34% but with a 95% CI between 5% and 56%.
I haven't read the papers, and maybe they explain this, but I wonder what happens when more than one of your friends stops smoking; surely they can't decrease your chances of smoking by 34% each.
> They are not free to choose, for instance, to not do business based on certain characteristics

All they'll do is come up with excuses and drain our energy. Getting dragged through a legal battle is not fun. The most effective action here is to make as many people stop doing business with them as possible.

I wonder if it would be possible to set up as many accounts as viable in the name of members of the association to receive donations for a unified fund. That would substantially increase their administrative overhead.

Asymmetrical warfare is great.
Oddly enough, I performed this analysis earlier in the week. I quickly realized it would be random because there's only a tiny number of items getting votes at any point. Total points depends on submission quality more than anything else.

Hmm, it does tell us one thing: there seems to be enough people voting on the new page regardless of day of week.
Yes, I have a couple on the side of the monitor I'm typing this on and they always seem wrong to me once I get something plugged in (after one or two failed attempts, of course).

Also doesn't help when the lighting's not so good and you have a USB logo embossed in black plastic on a black plug with the manufacturer's logo embossed in the same way on the other side. Trial-and-error probably isn't as bad as squinting at it trying to figure out which side is "up"...
First, it's debatable whether you can sell, sign away, or give away your own human rights.

Second, lots of people (especially less educated kids), often don't realize what they're signing up for when then enroll in the military. They're often lied to by recruiters, and are brainwashed by their families and the culture around them, who worship the military.

Third, even if Manning had knowingly and willingly agreed to be tortured by the US government, that does not excuse the torture.
Nice false dichotomy.
CSS3 Progress Bars
Luckily there's no shortage of other creative thefts in much of Europe.

Here's a story how my girlfriend and travel partner got covered in sludge as part of an elaborate diversion to steal her backpack with over $2,000 worth of stuff.

http://shazow.posterous.com/find-yourself-covered-in-slime-y...

Think this is worth posting to HN as a submission?
Thank you for the explanation. It would be awesome if that gets "fixed". :)
Http://www.egymob.tk/index.html
Previously, only OS X Server was allowed to be virtualized (on Apple hardware). I wonder if Apple is going to open it up to everyone.
Yeah, and I'm really don't like the special treatment for "enemy combatants" as well. Does the right to life, liberty and happiness apply to all mankind or just to people the US government is not currently scared of?
I agree that there's a large rise in duplication of story, without necessarily a duplication of URL. Many more people, many more feeds, one feed has a story, the others all pick it up, suddenly it everywhere, and several are submitted.

Not sure what the "right" solution is. I'm still thinking about it.

And thanks for the support. It's appreciated.
I think there's some confusion about this project, since the article doesn't go into to much detail about what it actually is, apart from some high-level technical highlights. My understanding (which is potentially outdated) is that Angstrom is a collaboration effort between different groups who are trying to combine their separate research into a larger project.

For the criticism that the project will "fail", I think there's some merit. Will this produce the next computation system that the world uses? Probably not. Will this push the boundaries of engineering and improve on the state of the art? Almost certainly. And due to its scale, and the fact that Angstrom was created by combining multiple separate projects, there's also room for individual projects or ideas to succeed even if others don't.

My background is that I worked on the FOS project, which is the part that is most related to the title of this post. If you were looking for more technical meat, I encourage you to check out the project page:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/carbon/?page_id=39
> Psychologists used to think that O.K. plateaus marked the upper bounds of innate ability. [BUT...!] focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented and getting immediate feedback on their performance.

See also carol dweck "deliberate practice" stuff.

Usain Bolt, fastest man in the world, incredible to watch his effortless victory, naturally gifted, also hit a plateau:

> Like many promising runners, Bolt had come out of nowhere, burned brightly for a few years — setting a number of junior records — then appeared to have burned out. http://www.esquire.com/features/usain-bolt-bio-0410-3
Engadget seems to think the MBP will support both at least in theory: Intel will eventually bake the optical transceivers into the cables themselves.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/24/intel-thunderbolt-a-close...
For a company with ambition, the Random and Meaningful criteria are pretty terrible guidelines.

A great company builds its name rather than letting the name build the company. There's a reason Amazon passed on books.com.
Ayn Rand's Superman: child killer William Hickman
We thought, 'Let's just do one of these ads that we know will get rejected,'" he says. They shot the whole commercial in 25 minutes. When CBS refused it, Biderman's company posted it all over YouTube and the Web, tagging it as the "banned Super Bowl commercial."

--

Kudos to you, Mr Biderman
That's pretty significant!
I plugged a USB cable into an Ethernet port many times! Not intentionally, obviously, but I did it because the USB plug has just the right width to fit snugly in an Ethernet port. It’s easy to do when you are not looking. You should try it, it even feels sort of right in a very wrong way.

There is no kludgery involved when plugging USB cables into Ethernet ports. They just fit perfectly.
Come to think of it - I'm locked out because I use Linux all day and there is not a good data collector on Linux!
This is an unfortunate case of people adopting technical terms for PR purposes. When we (FOS) say "OS", we mean that when you write a program for FOS, you think about it as if you are writing it for a single computer. It doesn't matter if that computer has multiple processors in it, or even if those processors are in different boxes and are only connected by ethernet.