skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All the more ironic that the next item in my feed reader is, "The Problem Began When the Invention of the Spear Reduced the Price of Food":

http://cafehayek.com/2011/05/the-problem-began-when-the-inve...

How fitting to this discussion.
Western Digital Launches 2.5 TB and 3 TB 3.5" Hard Drives
Heh not sure if you followed my profile and found my blog, but that's exactly why I am looking for an alternative. It really improved when they added Markdown support[1], but Common Lisp isn't a supported language. Also, embedded gists display horribly on aggregated blogs.

Thanks for the tip.

[1] http://blog.posterous.com/announcing-markdown-support
Or "Zeitgeist" and "Schadenfreude" for that matter.
Samsung Develops 64Gb MLC NAND Flash at 20nm
Poverty is not an academic problem. It's a human problem. There will always be poverty. It can't be solved. To solve poverty you must solve human greed.
Comparing Wages Across the U.S. (Interactive map)
AMD discusses "Heterogeneous Computing"
I hope translate may be reconsidered. It's made navigating the worldwide web -- without shoving everything through the Translate web page interface -- more than just more convenient; it's made doing so possible/practical, for the first time.

I think this may be an instance of "baby with the bathwater". (In other words, there's a cultural mission/service here that deserved continued support, even if it takes some more neurons devoted to beating the abuse.)
Great article. As developers, many of us fall into the trap of build build build. As smarter developers (and businessmen), we should create a cycle where we fail quickly, learn, and get up.
could it be you were younger?

to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld (badly) you get to a certain age and don't take on any new friends. that's it you're full
Multicore Garbage Collection with Local Heaps for Haskell
Mining for optimal assembly sequences
This is the plan I have, but I couldn't find it on their website yesterday. I didn't look too hard, but I'm pretty sure it's going as well.
It wasn't that by the end they didn't understand the problem, but rather that by just attacking "build a human powered plane that can do <x>" they were not making progress. Realizing that in order to "make a human powered plane that can do <x>" they needed a lot more data and their development method wasn't getting them that, they changed to "make a human power plane in such a way that I can get a lot more data quickly". I'd assert that realizing that the problem is getting data too slow as opposed to "working" too slow is not one that's immediately apparent to most humans.
Strangely appropriate is today's XKCD: http://xkcd.com/904/
AMD Announces Two New G Series APU For Embedded Systems
your argument about code navigation in emacs is inaccurate, though "M-x rgrep" is used heavily. at least there are gtags. and now there is auto-complete. For C/C++/Obj-C, clang+auto-complete stand there.
'Come Get Some' – Party with Nvidia and Duke Nukem
I agree that this is an issue with the lack of comment scores. If I see something I strongly agree with, I'm more inclined to reply with a "Yeah I totally agree" if I don't know what the score is than if I see it already has 100 points.

For what it's worth, my original comment to which you replied has 25 points.
Microsoft kinect driven powerpoint
Buy an AMD GPU (or two) and get a free copy of DiRT 3
You don't get to start a paragraph with "So" when the previous sentence began with "Estimating that". That is nothing to base a conclusion on.

Regardless it's funny and sad to see MS acting like a common patent troll. Sure they need revenue but they have resources to produce stuff.
tesseract is a cli OCR program. In the Archlinux community repo there is also, ocrad, cuneiform and gocr. I have not used these.
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-05-27
Perhaps in a perfect world, we won't need jobs or money. But in our current state/world, we (everyone in the world) still need jobs and money for limited resources to survive like energy, clean water, food, stable infrastructure, materials and people's time. And everybody is competing for those right now, hence worldwide inflation and companies/governments reducing jobs to stay afloat.
Ballmer's greatest failure was not giving Windows Mobile the attention it needed. I might even call it a critical failure. That was Microsoft's core competency and somehow the opportunity was completely blown. If Microsoft put the same commitment in Windows Mobile that it put into Xbox we wouldn't be talking about Android right now.

Everything else under Ballmer's watch is arguably fine. Windows 7 is a great OS. Microsoft has great developer tools for desktop and web. The Xbox has conquered the living room. You could say Microsoft is still missing the whole software as a service thing, but it is positioned to capitalize on it better than Apple and Apple is doing great. It just needed to be a part of the mobile revolution and all would have been forgiven.

EDIT: I also submit a comparison between NASDAQ and MSFT. MSFT more or less tracks the NASDAQ during both the Gates years and the Ballmer years.

http://www.google.com//finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1...
Electric steering, too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_steering#Electric_systems

Several years ago, a friend bought a BMW M6 the year they came out. A few days later, he noticed when the tires were pointed straight forward, the steering wheel was not centered. He took it to the shop, and they told them "that's a software bug".
Emacs 23 does not come with ELPA installed. The next version of Emacs (24) is going to have a package manager included by default (it is based on ELPA) that will allow you to use Marmalade. If you are using Emacs 23 (which you probably are if you installed from your distro's package manager) then you should use ELPA. If you installed Emacs from a nightly build then you can use Marmalade.
NCSU Researchers Boost Mult-Core Performance By 40%
Here's a different take at this, that even comes with a screencast (linked in the README):

https://github.com/remi/clide

It's distributed with NuGet.
This I think is the wisest comment I've read here. We live in an age where many people earnestly believe they can reengineer society. They identify aspects of human nature which they don't like and think it's open to reeducation. There is such a thing as human nature. Tabula rasa is a myth.
Life is hard to live in a place where life is hard to live.

There is some push to discuss "food deserts" as a social problem subject to sociopolitical solutions. Thing is, a desert is what it is because there is little there to sustain life - and the prime way to deal with that, short of either imposing expensive infrastructure or accepting grinding bare-sustenance living, is MOVE: don't be there. Ditto these urban "food deserts" (or "banking deserts", or ...): the solution isn't trying to impose an infrastructure on a system which has a natural resistance thereto, and will require enormous costs with little payback, the solution is to recognize "this is a bad place to exist in" and get out. Yes, it can be hard to move for many reasons; which is cumulatively harder - leaving, or staying?

If you're going to commute 2 hours every day, you've already proven you can move. And people do! There are plenty of towns and cities (Detroit a good current example) where people finally realized "this isn't working, I'm outta here" and left, leaving the systemic structural problems behind.

My recurring conclusion on the issue: the problem isn't opportunity, the problem is people not acting on opportunity. You can't force them to, and if they won't then nothing will change for them.
Rumor: Apple testing new MacBook Air powered by same A5 processor as iPad 2
>In the case of language, observing and reporting statistical probabilities in written/spoken language output does very little to explain the cognitive systems used in acquiring and using language.

Unless, of course, those cognitive systems are nothing more than some statistical probabilistic mechanism. I don't know anything about the field, but the article was interesting to me in that it seemed to at least partly argue that. I know, for me at least, I'll frequently produce a sentence and then repeat it to myself a few times to see if it "sounds right." Now, I don't know what is happening to determine that, but perhaps I'm comparing it to some statistical probabilistic model I have in my head?

> Even one statistical anomaly serves to show that statistical learning is NOT the entire picture when it comes to language development.

1) Does it? Maybe it shows the specific statistical probabilistic model in question is wrong. Consider, as Chomsky did, a model which predicts zero probability for a novel sentence. Clearly, as you say, one anomalous novel sentence is all it takes to disprove such a model. But what about other models which can handle them? The "anomaly" may not be an anomaly anymore.

2) Do you have some anomaly in mind which shows statistical probabilistic models don't work?

-----

The article was very interesting to me, but I don't know anything about the field. I guess my main question boils down to: Is it possible that language acquisition and production is nothing more inside our heads than a simple statistical probabilistic model?
I think you're missing the point, though. When you have a centralized site, one of the problems that we've seen with Facebook is the issue of being "host-safe". There's too much financial incentive to do something with that data, and no other viable business model has been proposed. A site which promises to solve Facebook's privacy issues can't make those promises while serving up Javascript decryption code. It's too easy for the host to inject a simple line of code which pulls the pin number and sends it back to the host, which can then decrypt everything. They could do this with a single page load, and then never do it again, so that you would have to catch the malfeasance that one time. It's a case of misplaced trust, simply because things are "encrypted".

They could get around this via an open source browser plugin so that it can be peer-reviewed, or (more desirably) the functionality can be integrated into browsers via the HTML5 spec.

There's no such thing as an Appleseed binary, btw, it's written in a scripted language.
That's true. We should also teach how to present a valid, explanatory counterargument instead of thoughtless one liner.
As this article points out, the price of Android for handset makers is free - the cost is somewhat more. If Google charged for Android they those costs might in fact cause Google to lose money on Android.

On the flip side, the Android ecosystem is so vulnerable in regards to intellectual property claims (don't forget Oracle and Apple are in the price/cost equation, too) that Microsoft's WP7 makes a great deal of sense. Particularly in light of Google's ability to just walk away from Android, it would be foolish to count on it as a consistent source of revenue.
Note that a lot of this work evolved into HaLVM and HaNS http://halvm.org
Well honestly, I don't have a problem with prisoners being made to work under certain reasonable conditions. Heck, I'm from Australia, a country which wouldn't even exist if it weren't for prisoners being made to work. And I think a prison where everybody is kept occupied is probably a better place than a prison where nobody has anything to do except work out and gossip.

Making 'em farm gold in a MMORPG, on the other hand, comes across as silly.
I think one reason it's news is because people have predicted that Adobe CS and Office will never be on the Mac App Store. If there's a competing store that does offer such titles a few big titles like that are enough to give it some steam. And it's Amazon so they already have steam.
Netted: Improve And Organize Your Bookmarks
It means Amazon has failed at properly marketing their software download center thing, I'd say ;)
"Ah, but now you're not following the instructions provided by swank clojure which says to use marmalade (which is an elpa extension/replacement/clone/additional repository?)"

They seem to have changed the instructions again. The folks developing swank-clojure seem to keep changing their install strategy. Boo on them. Near as I can tell, installing from ELPA, installing swank-clojure through Leiningen, running swank-clojure through Leiningen, and calling 'M-x slime-connect' should still work.

"But elpa is not included in emacs 23 on Gentoo."

Holy crap, I just checked this and you're right. (The Gentoo package maintainers seem to have a problem with letting other package managers compete with their precious portage however, so I'm not surprised.) In this case, I'd suggest that the Gentoo devs should be the ones to warn you.

"Obviously my problems could be from a lack of experience with Emacs, but I hate that using a text editor is so hard."

I don't know what to tell you. The problems you listed aren't your fault and they're Emacs' I'd blame the package maintainers in the Gentoo episode but the Clojure stuff is because the Clojure developers still can't decide how they want their stuff to work. I can't blame them much for that. Experience would help, but I doubt that I have that much more than you. I've had similar episodes installing plugins for Eclipse.
These are things in PHP which make me sad
Since when has science been reasonable? :)

In situations like this, I tend to speak in theoretical absolutes. A computer that "could - like humans - learn to produce infinite, novel, contextual, and meaningful grammatical utterances" isn't even on the timeline right now, but it's the theoretical goal in showing that we understand language acquisition (ontogenetic development), evolution (phylogenetic development), and production.

Just because that goals seems unattainable doesn't, to me, mean that we need to aim any lower. Now, this is premised on my belief that mimicking phenomena with statistical learning is not as intellectually satisfying as understanding the underlying cognitive systems, but that's not believed by everyone.
technology doesn't take jobs away. humans can repurpose, roombas can't.
I've seen prisoners, or perhaps folks sentenced to community service, picking up trash along country roads in orange vests under supervision. Is there any difference between that and a chain gang apart from the chain?
The EMACS package for TECO on ITS isn't an ancestor of modern GNU emacs, which began as a rewrite (based on Gosling's Unix emacs) in 1984. They are both "emacs" in the sense that they are modeless screen editors that share the same default keystrokes.

Really GNU emacs is related to ITS emacs in the same way that vim is to BSD vi: it's a cleaner and much more powerful reimagining of the original that shares some interface details but no implementation.
Work on PlayStation 4 underway, may include fewer custom parts
Google has a license to the the Lodsys patents, so if developers are using some API for in-app purchased supplied by Google as part of Android I'd expect them to be protected the same way Apple developers are protected by Apple's license.
Wow, you should be embarrassed. Read the rest of the comments and see my real reply to the original article - posted 10 minutes before yours.

It's also hilarious that this comment commits the very fallacy you seek to expose!
Great point. But if this is true the implication is that we are already limited by our natural ability to delay gratification? Furthermore, will we inherit this ability on our children. So they will be constrained too?
maybe the brain is nothing more than a particularly flexible "neural net"

now that I found quite funny :)

(yeah, most likely it is just that)
Can't agree more. The thing I miss when going to the home page of a blog or QA site is finding well organized content by topic. Something manually curated by the owner(s). Content by tags does such a lousy job because it's the lowest level. Unless you only use 5-10 tags people aren't going to find interesting content on their own unless they come in off search for a specific query. Though, as someone mentioned, showing related articles would help this visitor.
If that was true, then why did humans evolve to speak at all? Why, if speech is simply a reaction to statistics we are tracking and behaviours that have been rewarded, would the first utterances have been made? And how do we make completely novel utterances that attempt to express our otherwise abstract thoughts?
Somewhat less cynical advice that I'll give to young people: Go to college, at least for a little while, and get a part-time job or an internship. Companies will hire a college student with little to no experience, but not a college graduate with little to no experience.

Many people only figure this out when it's too late.
So can we change this? I think we can. It starts with recognizing the problem for what it is and doing what we can to teach kids from impoverished backgrounds not just how to read and write but how to become upwardly mobile in their networking

I'm pretty sure the problem is more complex than just lack of awareness of the importance of a certain approach to networking... and I'm someone who has been down this path - having grown up "dirt poor" in rural southeast NC, and having escaped to a solidly middle-class lifestyle. But I absolutely agree that this is one component of helping people escape poverty, and I'd definitely like to see (and perhaps participate in) some sort of initiative to help raise awareness of this point, especially among younger folks.

Some sort of program, directed at high-school kids, that teaches skills specifically related to networking, economics, entrepreneurship, and all the "stuff" needed to advance economically, would be - IMO - tremendously beneficial.

That said, I believe the point that solson made about mindsets does stand. I grew up with plenty of people who were as poor as I was, and I was willing to make certain sacrifices, and commit to doing things in order to raise my standard of living... many of my peers weren't, and they still live in the sticks and they're still poor. And I honestly don't believe that I'm necessarily (smarter|more talented|more insightful|whatever) than most of them. But I had a different attitude and different ambitions, and - to my mind - that was the single biggest difference.

Edit:

As an aside, though, I'll throw this out... some of my friends who are still "poorer" than me in the financial sense, may actually be happier. I, for example, have never married or had kids, because I was too busy working and trying to make a better life for myself. And now that I'm working on a startup, I work more than ever and have basically quit worrying about dating or anything for a while... OTOH, my friends back home have wives and kids to come home to, play with, go out with, etc. But I have more money. So who's really better off? I would say that's a real grey area. <shrug />
I was inclinded towards that view myself, based on the date: 1992 was when the US DoD was still pushing Ada pretty darn hard. I personally found the story hard to believe, but I have no experience with DSP assembly.
"standard" regex syntax for emacs would make me really happy.
"God" did not appear in the quotation.

Some questions are metaphysical, not because they are complex, but because they are ill-posed and not subject to falsifiable experimentation of observation.

BTW, a lot of real-world phenomena, like some large events of history or sociology or macroeconomics, fall into the same category of scientific unapproachability, due to practical limitations of our civilization and any plausible future civilization.
Forced prison labor is somehow perceived as "okay" in the USA because it's documented and in the light and some people can say "OH THE PRISONERS DESERVE IT, THEY SHOULD PAY US".

Well I think it is okay and... a

Aw fuck, why the hell am I arguing about politics on the internet again?
I wish I had had this 10 years ago when I worked in the field.

Fantastic!
I agree there's an irony here (Microsoft getting paid for each handset while Google doesn't get anything). But in the end Google still has the more lucrative position.

Because Google is still pretty well embedded into Android. So Google's still serving ads and getting all kinds of information on an ongoing basis. That's worth way more than $5 per phone

(I realize people can use other search engines with Android but it falls under the IE6 rule of "most people won't change the defaults")

So the reason Microsoft should still bother with Windows Phone 7 is that ongoing revenue stream.
Am a Dutch student currently studying in the UK, and many of these differences are true indeed, and possibly even larger between Dutch and English people than between Germans and the English.

'Thanks', and 'please', are used in Dutch only when there is much to thank for (saving someones life, or at least possessions or the like). While in English they are part of almost any question or exchange, no matter how trivial.

Another one is 'how are you doing', which in Dutch is used to express concern/interest between close friends, or towards a stranger looking extremely distressed. While the English use it almost instead of the neutral 'Hi' between people who met once before. At first it made me wonder whether I looked alright (yes I shaved and showered, and all :).

So yes, they take getting used to, and a common mistake for Dutch/German people probably is (it was for me) thinking that they are meant as strongly as one is used to. But it does not take long to get used to.

Call it a cultural bias, but I slightly prefer the Dutch/German way, as it takes up less time, makes it more straightforward to find out what people think (fewer understatements as well), and does not deflate the meaning of the terms used as much...

(strangely enough the English don't use different terms or pronunciations when there is more to thank for, than the usual, making it hard to judge the extent of gratefulness / problems, etc)...

Anyway, at home they think I am very polite now, thanks :)
Awesome! Thanks! It's all about trying new things.
Didn't expect this would get to HN so soon! I'm the author, let me know if you have any questions.
AMD's future just leaked all over the net
I agree that MSFT might still want to bother with Windows 7, but maybe they should give it away as well in order to drive traffic to Bing?
PCPer v4.0 Giveaway: ASUS GeForce GTX 570 DirectCU II
Where is the existing evidence? And what evidence in modern science can possibly look into the future and make a prediction about something that right now is so far beyond our grasp?

Statistical learning explains a lot. I'm a huge fan of it. Skinner's Behaviourism also explained a lot in psychology. But, just as in the case of behaviourism, I fear that statistical learning has/will hit a wall at which its explanations become futile and overly simplified.

My personal belief is that, at that wall, we'll see that human language instincts and evolved language-specific mechanisms will be what we are looking for.
Emacs beats every other editor. Yes, including Vim both because you have a Vim clone inside Emacs and because once you start pushing the limits of Vim, just like the developer of Slim-Vim, you'll find yourself implementing Emacs. Vim's editing model is great - and that's what I use - but it ain't Emacs.

Emacs has its warts, but it's your best choice if you want a serious editor.

Bashing an editor because its support for programming languages whose programmers have chosen other platforms, is not fair. Comparing Emacs to Eclipse or Netbeans when it comes to Java development is not fair, just like comparing Eclipse or Netbeans to Emacs when it comes to Common Lisp development is not fair either.

Using a general-purpose editor instead of a specialized tools means that everything you learn will serve you in every other editing task.

If you are not serious about editing text, then you will be

But, truth to be told, Emacs isn't even an editor: it is an Emacs Lisp interpreter which by default runs a program to edit text.
(2009). Best talk I've ever heard.