skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fair enough Re: differences between Python & PowerShell syntax.

I don't entirely agree with you on the REPL point, because I use Python in a REPL all the time (esp. with ipython.)

However, I agree with the rest. Although you could always define additional statements (ala print in Python 2.x), it could get messy very fast.
I don't want it to kill dollars. I just want it to kill paypal. I've already got a system where one tiny error will cause me to have all my money frozen. I'll take absolutely anything that's even slightly better. Bitcoin is looking pretty good for that right now.

If some fiat currencies happened to get called out by an alternative that can't be inflated in order to hand out banker bonuses, that's just lagniappe.
Cloud Hosted Minecraft servers
Hey Guys,

We're launching a new startup. Hosted minecraft.

Let us know what you think. We were playing this around the office and with friends and found it horribly frustrating. Over time we ended up building custom tools to manage the servers and figured, this is something other people would probably enjoy.

So here it is!

www.hostedminecraft.net
Graphene optical modulators could lead to ultrafast communications
The figure I've heard is 1.25-1.5x base salary.
The first real script I wrote that accomplished anything was a script that spammed a small forum I'd been a member of for years. It wasn't malicious, just a toy at the behest of a more experienced friend. The idea was that it'd teach me about HTTP and screen scraping. It sure did. It's been incremental steps all along the way to where I am now.

Basically everything I've written has been done before by someone better than me, but who cares? It's not about WHAT you code, the benefit comes from the process of doing.
Thanks for the link. The game released 2 days before mine and I was curious how that game was doing.
Microsoft sells "points" 80 points equals $1 USD. It isn't really a currency. You can't trade it to dollars and you can only give them to other people via gift cards.
Skyhook Wireless v. Google Case Yields E-Mail Insight
Thanks for pointing that out Mike, I've corrected the title.

You're right too, when I started development I'd just bought the iPad and there weren't a lot of quality games on the device. Especially games that weren't just scaled up iPhone games.

My reasoning was if I could get a decent game out in 3 months, even though there were less devices, I would have less competition for attention on the iPad.
Depends on what you're doing there. But yes, cost per head is not 100% compensation. If you've got multiple employees @ a start-up making $180,000 per year there's an issue.

//Now, if they've re-mortgaged their house and are eating $180k per annum in equity / stock instead of salary, then it could be an almost-fair-number.
MicroVentures Melds Venture Capital and Peer to Peer Lending
That's cool, but not quite what I was thinking of. A cat's tail seems to have a mind of its own, and I thought it would be cool if that could be hooked up to person's moods the way the ears are.
I used to work with someone from China and, like you say above, she viewed the government as the same kind of benevolent infrastructure provider as I do mine. I think its overambitious to expect someone to completely turn their back on their view of their country in a few months after they have spent 20+ years of their lives in what they see to be a functioning society. It took two hundred plus years after the Enlightenment for all of our oh so Great Countries to finally rid themselves of kings and colonial rule.

As cabalamat says, I don't think there is anything more you can do to teach someone from China about Western values than having them completely immersed in our civilization. Some of our values must be crossing the waters, mustn't they? - if they really are self evidently superior?

I think collaboration is the best we can do - with the scientists and business men themselves, the people that actually matter, who's opinions people over there respect, not through the government. This kind of ban on collaboration hurts that.

There is nothing secret in science anyway. The US governments secrets on the other hand... - I would cynically agree there is always concern there. Both by US people themselves and the Chinese government:)
CEOs say California worst place to do business, Texas best
It could, but what do they have to sell? Nothing yet, right? So far from the press I've read, MS can't get updates out smoothly yet. I think Palm, and now HP, take a different approach than MS. After all, HP builds its own hardware and MS does licenses.
embarrass myself how?
MicroVentures Funds First Three Deals
That's a bummer. I wonder if it's because of the laws around games in Australia.
Will we ever find out what happened to Flip Video?
One thing that makes me prefer Readability (or in my case the Readability Redux Chrome extension[1]) is that it's able to stitch together multiple-page articles into one page. It makes reading articles on sites like The Register and Ars Technica much more bearable. I'd love it if Readable gained this feature. (Safari Reader mode also does this, using code from the old Readability.)

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jggheggpdocamneaac...
equipping China with the skilled professionals it needs to produce the weapons of war to threaten the free world.

Do you think they really need technology? They have a population of plus one billion, and the strongest industrial capacity in the world plus just enough oil reserves. If they wanted to go to war, they could already very well do so as is and cause a really big bloody mess.

Look at Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan. All of us mistakenly believed the US's "superior technology" would make those missions a cakewalk. Technology doesn't win wars. People do. People we can reach.

And its not Germany vs France at the opening of WWII anymore. China already have machine guns, tanks and nukes (the horror if either "side" ever used one in anger). Diplomacy through cultural exchange is the best option we've got to prevent a cold war style escalation - and luckily the openness of both our cultures is the end goal we want to achieve anyway, right?

(apologies to all for the walls of text!)
In my reply (pushed down), this is the math I was talking about: HP claims to have 88,000 retail locations

>>>Let’s do some math with that. If every one of those stores sold only one of our products every day during one year, that’d be 365 sales times 88,000 -- or thirty-two million and one-hundred and twenty thousand. Isn’t that incredible? Just one sale per store per day for one year.

I wasn't even getting into the whole desktop thing, just how webOS could like spread big in their tablets, phones, and printers.

(BTW that quote is me writing it the way Todd Bradley should have stated it in his dull presentation.)
I have a 15" currently - but I think I might make my next one a 13", for portability.

Lightweight means a lot to me - and if it's got great options for a high resolution and large external monitor then I'm happy. Hell, with DisplayLink technology nowadays, multiple external displays with a laptop is entirely feasible.

http://www.displaylink.com/
Thanks again. Twitter sign in has been added for now.
Is it me or has Facebook been down for too long?
10" eee pc, 15" macbook pro.
it is you. Everything seems fine
I sent you some money to cover your hosting for a while longer.

Since you're discussing medical issues, I'd use Google Keyword Tool to look up exactly what people are searching for in relation to the topics you're discussing. Use the most searched for phrases in the titles and bodies of your posts.

Get a Twitter account for each blog you run and use one of the Wordpress plugins that auto-tweets your new posts. Use appropriate hashtags.

You should also install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin on all your blogs. It generates a robots.txt and sitemap.xml.gz which maps out all the content on your site. This helps search engines find it all and index it properly.
Your criticism is logically backwards. Transfer of money is not just a message. It is a message, plus some other things that make it also a transfer of money. You can't reduce it to just a message being passed. It is a message, it is not just a message.
7 Secrets Steve Job's Authorized Biography Could Reveal
Only partially. You only need to know N blocks after a transaction to be N-certain a it is valid - that it's included in a block at all and propagated through the network implies the transaction is valid. If it weren't, other clients wouldn't accept the block.

You can never technically be completely certain a transaction isn't fake. You could be looking at a non-standard branch of the network, and you have no way of knowing it. So randomize your connections, wait for a few more blocks at reasonable difficulties, and you can be sure enough without having to work from the origin.

And (again, not 100% certain) I think you only need to store the hashes of each block to prove the chain is valid, and demonstrate a certain amount of work has been done (the difficulty of each). Each block solution builds only on the previous hash. That's just relatively tiny numbers, the entire list of block solutions would likely fit within 5MB with room to spare.
>I think frameworks help young developers become better by the day.

I think you're confusing better code with better programmer. A good programmer can come up with solutions to complex problems. Good code is focused on the end result: maintainability, clarity, security, efficiency. A good programmer ships good code. But good code doesn't have to come from a good programmer for all the reasons you mentioned.

You do not learn how to be a good programmer by writing glue code.
Right now it's a 13" macbook pro. If I had an external screen or two at my home desk, which I have been putting off, I could definitely go even smaller.

I have done 15" in the past but it's not portable enough for me.
It's been tried before a few times and hasn't worked for a simple reason: people don't generally deal with other people who don't speak their language. Think about it: how many times has this ever been a problem for you? Or anyone you know?

The hard thing in the translation business is scaling up demand (there are tons of translators in most language pairs so pricing is really competitive and it is hard for a middleman to make money). And if you somehow manage to get a lot of business you then have to manage the HR side of keeping a lot of people working efficiently at scale while making sure you're still getting great quality.

Both of these are difficult problems, especially since there isn't an obvious technical way to lower customer acquisition costs enough to compete with independent translators. That said, if you can find a solution to the first problem (reliably getting business) you can monetize it much more easily than by solving the second, if only because anyone who already has translation business at scale will be reluctant to screw with the organizational processes that are making them money in a cutthroat market.
14.4" ThinkPad T410
Porsche 911 Speedster 2011 New 911 Series
The Speedster's chassis components are identical to the 2011 GTS. Porsche 911 Speedster New 911 Series
from the article

Android phones must adhere to a "compatibility" standard determined by Google. In an e-mail on Aug. 6, 2010, Dan Morrill, a manager in the Android group, noted in passing that it was obvious to the phone makers that "we are using compatibility as a club to make them do things we want."

Whether that club is an anticompetitive weapon is an issue in the court case.
Please enlighten me, in the LevelDB page it said:

> Only a single process (possibly multi-threaded) can access a particular database at a time.

But I presume Chrome is multiprocess by nature?
Ive certainly heard of people who would use it, but there would be a lot of concerns around privacy and security of information. I personally think gmail has most of the market here by providing automated translations, the big companies who want something better (and are willing to pay for it) probably use their existing translation partners....

Although...honestly...id you can solve the privacy issue and make an experience where someone sends an email and selects the new language, and the person receiving the email doesnt even see it until the translation is complete...it could seem very seemless and accurate, people might love it. I would, if i needed it.
> There are a lot of abstractions that make programming simpler; complex is rarely better.

I think the point is that, getting tangled up in that complexity, and then coming out on the other side successfully is a process that all programmers must go through to become "good". To programmers who have only used frameworks and wrote glue code, they miss out on the fundamental process that makes one truly good.
pomodoro technique

Work in small chucks with define goals and time periods. For me I would say something like. "Get X done in 15 minutes". Set an alarm for it and at the end of it set another goal. On a sheet of paper or in Evernote, document what you accomplished in this time frame.

Before you take a break, take a look notes as to what you actually accomplished and take note of any roadblocks. Often times I find that I do the run into the same wall if I don't analyze and make the necessary adjustments.

Remember to take breaks. after a few successful task. 10 or 15 minutes. I generally try to work in 2 or 3 hour chunks of time before taking a break.
yep...id agree, its fine :-)
Widespread paranoia is an effect of the ever-increasing empowering effect of technology putting greater and greater destructive power into smaller and smaller numbers of hands. Science fiction has been predicting the rise of terrorism for a long time. I tend to agree that we are currently overreacting to the problem (at least in terms of actions taken within the US), but in a somewhat longer term it is not hard to imagine that it will be necessary to step things up even more. And other arguments can be made, and I would make some of them. But the argument that we can't help but progressively step up our levels of "paranoia" about terrorism over the next century is a good, solid one with lots of sensible things to say about it.
This is super interesting. RSS has gotten really slow and bad, and a few years ago FriendFeed started to push for improvements with the Simple Update Protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Update_Protocol).

The world should move to a standardized JSON-based, OAuth compliant API, but unfortunately having two big, competing players like FB and Twitter means that things will probably partition into camps. It'll be interesting to see what happens when new websites start publishing content: will they define their own new standard or clone FB/Twitter?
I wouldn't myself. I usually buy a new laptop every year. While I'm not a fan of big evil corps, the thing is HP and Dell top models are very often offered at 30-40% discount.

Plus I'm not a fan of nVidia video cards. I believe the quality of their picture is way inferior to AMD and Matrox.
Yeah, but a relevant measure of complexity is not that easy to come by. And by what measure do you judge which is more 'valid'? For example, AIC, BIC etc. may have a strong effect on which model 'wins'.

You are right of course, but I'm wary of making claims based on inferences from model comparisons without stating such limitations.
Absolutely not. Yet that's what I'm doing locally, effectively. And for my particular case, it's working.

That's the kind of tool that git is.
If you found that interesting, check out Pov-Ray. It does the same thing with 3D. Doesn't output any kind of vector format (that I know of), but the scenes are all described in a Turing-Complete language like that.
I've got a Sony VAIO Z, 13.1" @ 1920x1080. It takes a bit getting used to, but it's great to have a high-res screen for coding and also not have to lug around a huge, heavy machine.
I love this reaction. Signing up for an account with them now after seeing how seriously they monitor security.
The title is a bit of a double entendre. At first reading, I thought the claim was that (once again), Organization X had killed RSS (figuratively). As it turns out, Facebook and Twitter have, quite literally, killed RSS within the scope of their own systems by removing it from key locations.

In my view, RSS was never the right tool for this application anyway. Social networks are naturally conversational in nature, but you're only a part of the conversation while you're there.

In the economy of my attention, both Facebook and Twitter occupy a different position than the RSS feeds I follow. Facebook and Twitter are there for when I want them, but my RSS feed is the kind of thing where I try to at least review every headline. I don't want to miss anything in my RSS reader, but I'm perfectly content to miss out on large portions of what occurs on Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter is probably closer in function to RSS -- for me, anyway -- than Facebook, in that I rely on it for "pushed" information that I rarely respond to (think service outages and status updates). This could, theoretically, have been fulfilled by RSS, but for some reason, I never made use of RSS that way.

I think one of the reasons for this (Twitter as a popular info-push medium) is that you can respond easily through Twitter, even if I only do it on rare occasions. Status blogs provided an avenue for response, but you often had to have an account on every blog... Ugh. Twitter is also great because you don't have to dig through the service website; you simply search Twitter for their company name and follow.

Facebook, on the other hand, is purely entertainment for me. I use it to keep up with friends and converse in a time-shifted manner. I cannot imagine collecting RSS feeds from Facebook streams.

Based my usage patterns, I don't see this as "killing" RSS for me in a general sense. Maybe I'm a dying breed though.
I'm happy enough with my productivity on 13 inch, I probably spend most of the time remote using it as is with occasionally plugging in a external monitor. One advantage for me is it forces me to think about my apps usability on a smaller screen as opposed to 1080p at home where its very easy to fit everything in.
Someone probably did a focus group and found out people got 47% more warm-fuzzies from the word "promise".
This is true. The feeds still work, they just hid them from plain sight.
Already exists: put fingers on keyboard; think of what you want to type; allow brain to move fingers.
Hacker/Founder Looking For A Room In San Francisco
Howdy, I am moving up to San Francisco from San Diego in June, and wondering if any fellow hackers and/or startup entrepreneurs have a free room, or are also looking for a place. Want to be somewhere in downtown San Francisco, SOMA, Russian Hill, Marina, etc. I am building my startup, and will have office space at RocketSpace in SOMA. Looking to pay anywhere from $900 to $1200. Thanks.
Everyone on the panel is quite senior -- the comments have the flavor of "darn young researchers these days." It might be interesting to hear from AI researchers under 40 about this.

Second, on the question of statistics and language; there's an excellent Fernando Pereira essay which addresses, among other things, Chomsky's old opposition to statistical theories: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~pereira/papers/rsoc.pdf
Call me crazy, but I use my memory. I also use RSA fobs for the important/big stuff.
This is hilarious. How did this come about?
Still tugging along on my first generation Asus EEE PC. It's 7.1". Tiny and slow compared to what's out there now, but it does the job I need it to do.
What is the investor expectation on runway for a seed round like attachments.me did? 12-18 months?
Why Not All Earnings Are Equal; Microsoft Has the Wal-Mart Disease
13" MacBook, but have been happy in the past with a 12" G4 PowerBook.

Next portable will likely be the 11' MacBook Air, as I'm really impressed with all the reviews evoking the spirit of the 12" PowerBook... but fast.
Since no one else has mentioned it:

http://pash.sourceforge.net/

There's been a (partial) port of PowerShell to Linux/Mono out there for a few years; maybe having the language spec will allow the project to go a bit further.
get in touch with some details about your team. might have a project for you...
As much as I enjoy Feynman's writings, I'm rather surprised at the significance people attach to that old anecdote. It was just his short experience with one class, and we don't even know which university it was. I wouldn't assume the situation depicted there is representative of Brazilian advanced education in the 60s. In any case, it certainly doesn't match my experience in the 90s (I majored in CS at a Brazilian university). For instance, my exams would typically involve writing and analysing algorithms, solving mathematical problems and proving theorems. If you memorized the textbook without understanding it you wouldn't pass a single class.
And thus become even more walled gardens (a proprietary API doesn't count as "open").

The pendulum is still swinging towards "closed", but I sense it's about to swing back.
I have no interest in ever directly using Twitter and there's not enough content on there for me to bother with any workarounds. I currently use RSS for the one Twitter feed I bother to follow and if they ever really do get rid of RSS for their site, I'll just stop using even that. Not that much of a loss.

My habits are such that if you don't offer RSS feeds of information I want, I probably won't ever get your information or go to your site. You're not going to sucker me into "visiting regularly", just because you don't offer an RSS feed. I'll just move on and get what I want somewhere else.
I recently went from a 14.1" to a 15.4"

The 14 was much more comfortable to use on a plane (I flew much more often back when I bought it), but I rarely fly any more.

What I have done a lot of lately is take "working vacations" where my laptop becomes my only computer for a couple of weeks while my son and I decamp to my folks' farm on his breaks from school. I love that my job makes that possible, but doing it with the 14" laptop got old after awhile.

My son uses a 10" netbook -- more because it's a good fit for his 8yo hands than for portability. He's still a bit small to type well on a full-sized keyboard.

(I voted both of my laptops, not his)
Yes, measure of model complexity is a problem.

A solution is to use a program for a Turing machine as the model. The length of the program represents the complexity (which measures the choices that form the program). There's different formulations of a turing machine (different languages for programming one), but since any turing machine can be simulated by any other turing machine with a program, the length of that program becomes the error (that represents the difference in complexity introduced by your selection of some specific Turing machine). If you are comparing models using the same turing machine, then this constant difference doesn't matter. a-b = (a+x) - (b+x)

One practical solution is that more data swamps minor differences between the specification language used to describe models. More data is better.
Online networking - is it possible?
Not entirely clear if you are asking for what it is, or what we'd like it to be. I have a asus 1000he, and I think the ideal is 11-12" (i.e. just a hair larger). I'm considering upgrading to a Thinkpad x220 later this year, but I'm hoping someone comes out a non-overpriced SSD model with higher res screen (i.e. linux macbook air).
Thanks. Those were really good points to consider.

Would you mind giving out your contact? I would love to pick your mind on something like this :)
Computer A is closer to 9 (8.9) but connected to a 22" 1920x1080 screen. Computer B is 13" crappy 1366x768 dual-headed with a 22" 1920x1080.

Computer C is connected to a 12" IBM 3151, but I only use it for the anachronistic aspects.