skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I was trying to say in the original discussion (and what I'll try to reiterate here) is that the story is relying on a single source: government press releases. This makes me hesitant to believe that I am being presented with the entire story. Have we learned nothing from the past year? It is clearly not farfetched to believe the military would release false information or propagate misinformation. (See anything WikiLeaks has released re:US Military).

As for "The simplest explanation is almost always right", I would tend to agree with you on matters of science. But in the tense and complex political landscape of US foreign policy in the Middle East, the true story is almost certainly going to be far more complex then what will be presented in the news. If your final judge of accuracy is simplicity, then I can fool you easily by telling you a simpler lie then the one you are currently believing.
I know Joseph Sofaer personally and can confirm the details in the blog post. But I agree, it would look shady if you didn't know him.
Warning - this froze my machine and prevented me from exiting or changing work spaces. I ended up having to login via ssh from another machine and force a reboot.
What's the point of this? Using terms like CPM makes no sense in this context. Come back to us when you're making $1129 with a million impressions, buddy.
The anonymity goes both ways: people might avoid bullying, but they can also avoid accountability for bullying. Also, spam is probably a big deal already. And, since there are already hundreds of "Darth Vader" accounts, it doesn't seem like their automatic defenses are very effective.
Ask HN: What laptop should I buy?
Hi. I just moved to Canada for my postgrad and I am looking to buy a new laptop.

- I am a Windows guy, but I run Linux in a VM.

- I will be using it for development.

- It will also be my general purpose / college laptop.

- I want to be able to carry it around for meetups, hackathons, college, or if I feel like working at a coffee place.

What would you suggest based on the above given points? What screen size should I be looking at? I am currently looking into ThinkPads and Dells. Also, will it be worth trying to get one from USA instead, or is the price difference not that huge?

Thanks.
I'm through about 25% of it, but I decided to do all of the exercises in Haskell rather than Scheme. In a way it improves the experience as a whole, thanks to type errors slowly prodding me in the right direction.
Search Crunchbase and Other lists
A better way to search lists.
http://saranyan.com/post/8482213271/searching-crunchbase-and-other-lists
Writing An Hadoop MapReduce Program In Python
I wonder if there are more sources of error than just RAM bit-flipping. The bit could be flipped anywhere it's stored or passing through. If that is the case, the error rate would be orders of magnitude higher.
Fifteen-Year-Old UK Student Wins Microsoft Excel World Championship
Yes, he phrased it badly.

She.
I am wondering if there are any existing NLP techniques that reduce a verbose explanation to simple statements. Not sure.
One bit in one gigabyte of RAM is 1 in 8,589,934,592. Wolfram Alpha estimates there are "over one billion computers" in the world.

Let's be charitable and say that every single one of those is connected to the internet 24x7 and they love microsoft so much that they visit the url every hour, so 24 times a day. To get even more accommodating, let's imagine every single computer in the world has a single bit error occur every hour as well, right before they head to microsoft.com.

In that case you'd expect about 3 hits a day.

I'm sure it can happen, but I'd be surprised if most of the traffic wasn't caused by other things. I can't be the only one who noticed in mic2osoft.com the number 2 is only two keys away from r. It may not be the most common typo in the world, but I bet the odds are a lot higher than 1 in 8.5 billion.

I almost think it's an inside joke, Kaminsky sounded just a wee bit too blown away while he was raving about the presentation last night. Or maybe that was just the booze tallking.
Code from your iPad with Compilr
I think there could be, if the price was right, my initial instinct is that $7 per image is pretty steep.

Uniqueness also may become a factor. Who wants to have games that look exactly the same as everyone else's?

There are also similar sites for 3D assets, such as turbosquid, which is more of a marketplace type idea.
Cracked the viral code. But old-fashioned coupons are what's driving sales.
I do hope this kind of thing doesn't become the new standard. Episodes of "The Guild" and most other online series clock in at 10 minutes and under. At that length, it seems (from present examples) like the stories pretty much have to be fluff.
No particular reason. I'll probably add this at some point since it's pretty helpful.
It's not the traffic that's earning the revenue, it's your property which allows you to charge for the rent. A more sane metric would be to compute your "profit", which is your income, the rent, minus your expenses in renting out the property:

- amortized property deterioration
- administrative time dealing with the tenants
- opportunity costs (the interest/ROI that you could expect the principal to bring
if it was not tied up in your house)

and then you can compare this profit and the fees AirBNB is charging for it against other channels (such as making your own page and driving traffic to it via Adwords).

Just because I'm selling $10'000 diamonds at 50% discount on a website which brings me 1 sale every 100 page-views doesn't mean that each pageview is worth $50.
These articles are based entirely on a paper by Ashkan Soltani, who works closely with the lawyers who filed these cases, and who published his paper on the same day that the first lawsuit was filed.
+1 on thinkpads, I've heard good things about them

( I currently have a Dell that has worked ok, but they feel kinda "cheap", so I'll probably move to either a Thinkpad or a MB(A|P) )
Agreed on this one... just before BF, I haggled with the local appliance places showing them some online offers and ask them to match (equating for taxes and shipping).
It's also easier in relatively liberal and fluid-employment industries like tech (where you can freelance, work for bosses who don't care what you post online, start a company, etc.). If you work a typical Big Company job, for a relatively conservative/straightlaced company, you might not want your current or future bosses Googling for what you say off the clock, even if it's not actually about your job.
PSP Vita Delayed to 2012 for North America
Their explanation of the universal cookie ID issue is rather silly. If you're a client of Kissmetrics, your visitors have a cookie scoped to your domain with the visitor's universal Kissmetrics ID. All of the database segregation in the world won't prevent any two or more Kissmetrics clients from collating visitor data on that universal ID, sent in every header on every pageview. Whether any clients are actually doing that, I have no clue. But claiming that permuting that universal ID into client-specific ones rendered when the clients view data actually protects visitors from said collation is just wrong.

See Wired's screenshot here:
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/epicenter/2011/07/Screen-S...
Regarding copy/pasting, I do agree. Not much of a point in reading if you're just going to do that.

But, I was having a problem with exercise 4 and so copy/pasted it from the webpage (removed line numbers with TextMate's vertical selection easily enough). Received the same error when trying to run it as I did when I typed it myself:

ex4.rb:10:in `+': can't convert Fixnum into String (TypeError)
from ex4.rb:10:in `<main>'

I'm not familiar enough with Ruby to understand why it's doing that... my googling shows similar ruby tutorials with that format, but one site I found suggested using #{variable_name} instead of the " + variable_name + " and that worked just fine for me.

Is this a real error in the book or something weird going on with my computer (OS X Lion w/ Ruby 1.9.2 installed)?

Great book, by the way.
Excellent. I was disappointed to see that the phone I recently purchased (VZW Incredible 2) came with a locked bootloader so I couldn't install a custom rom. I had resigned myself to waiting for a hacker to come up with a solution, but now HTC will do it.
The reason is Zed Shaw. He has a large following here on HN.
>The way the patent worked w/o Google

Okay, we're not talking about a patent, we're talking about a patent licensing agreement, which I don't think either of us have read. And I doubt that it would have given Android users/manufacturers bulletproof protection.
Large-scale Named Entity Recognition in the Cloud
CoEM is an entity-extraction algorithm introduced by Rosie Jones in 2005. In the slide above, the data set was a graph with 2M vertices and 200M edges. A team at CMU applied CoEM using Hadoop and found it took about 7.5 hours. GraphLab on far fewer cores (from 95 to 16 cores) took 30 minutes: 6X less cores, but still 30X faster. The same problem on 32 EC2 machines (with 256 processors) took 80 seconds, or 0.3% of the time it takes to complete the same task in Hadoop!
Use Your Powers for Good: Work at Causes.com
Gnome 3 doesn't force you to use the desktop as icons etc are disabled by default.

The persistent desktop directory is down to your distribution/XDG - check out ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs to remove it.

As for "it thinks I need help mounting network file systems"; Could you clarify what you mean?
Is that illegal now?
lots of overlap with http://scraperwiki.com but lacking open source or APIs. I dig their emphasis on social but I hope they improve the data portion and focus less on the buzz
President John Tyler has a living grandson:

http://www.who2.com/blog/2009/03/wait-john-tylers-grandson-i...
I disagree with you on the notion that CS is a branch of Engineering and not mathematics. It's not that I'm with the view that CS is a branch of mathematics btw.

I'm with Edsger Dijkstra's point that Computer Science is a new emerging paradigm which should be approached with a Zen-like mindset... It depends on the natural sciences, however, take for example: mathematics, information theory...etc and on the other hand it depends on Engineering... Yet it's not an interdisciplinary field for any of the mentioned ones above! It's a field of its own making.

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - Edsger Dijkstra
VC Investment Correlation to the Public Market
25,000 STEM teachers leave the workforce every year
If the report "significantly distorts our technology and business practices," why are they making such significant changes to their technology and business practices as a result?
Oh really.

"Vitriol" in the rose-shaded eye of the beholder aside, methinks absent the WSJ pom-poms we will agree that a much more fundamental reason that people trade is: to make money without having to worry about consequences; and that particularly in light of events over the last decade, the fact that highly-interdependent, dubiously competitive "markets" have sprouted in many sectors means that the costs of mistakes, incompetence, fraud, theft, etc is transferred to you every time you sit on an airplane, go to the gas pump, buy orange juice, blah blah.

As such, one supposes that dependence on many of those markets indeed resulted, as you say, in something other than zero-sum in terms of utility - they resulted in huge losses for some and huge inefficiencies resulting from unquestioning confidence in the supposed "efficiency" and beneficence of "markets".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
Been there, read the book, took the class, missed the first arrow on the CDR diagram on the first exam, TA'd the class, enjoyed the wizard hat. Two thumbs up.
There are certainly many things that I prefer to say anonymously for many reasons. Only one of those reasons is "I want to be an asshole".

To be honest, I generally prefer to be an asshole openly.
I don't think anyone here would disagree with you that we shouldn't solely trust one source, but that's nothing to build an intelligent discussion around.

"I don't believe the story this reporter wrote because I don't trust the source(s)" is a totally valid opinion, but anything further than that is just a "What-if" fest unless someone wants to put forth a specific alternate hypothesis, or question specific facts from the article.

"You shouldn't believe in this story because I don't trust the source(s)" adds a little info (especially with a "here's why"), but in the case of something as complicated as a government is probably just going to cause a flame war, _even if you're right_.
How to Survive the Robot Uprising
I really don't want this to come off as flippant - but: fuck yes. Honestly the most important experience in my computer science "self education". I am still working on SICM. Every year I seem have learned just enough more math/physics to grok another page or two.
That is obviously not the case as Microsoft immediately sold back the Novell patents to Attachmate and so cannot participate in any offensive action.
I didn't quite get the need for anonymity until I was at SXSW and watched danah's opening talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl0VANhnvxk) and talked to her a bit more about it afterward.

I realized how incredibly privileged and rare my situation is that I can live my life fairly openly online with little fear of repercussion.

- As a heterosexual no one questions my sexual orientation online, or will harass me for it. Photos of me with a significant other won't cause an issue with anyone.

- I don't have, nor have I ever had an abusive relationship in which I must distance myself from someone.

- I'm fortunate enough to live in a country that (generally) allows me to do whatever online and I don't need to fear for my life. I am also a native born citizen here and don't have any immigration issues to deal with.

- I don't fear for my job because of what I say online (my work situation is very understanding and isn't nosy). Of course, not everyone works in technology.

- I have no children to protect

- I also feel that I understand the internet rather well and generally have a feeling for the direct repercussions of something that I do.

These (and many other things) aren't true for everyone. I felt silly for not realizing it beforehand, partially because danah had hung out at my house at hackathons and such even, and I just didn't get it until her presentation.
Viral experiment
Can you help me getting to 5.000 downloads today?

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/herograph/id443035193?mt=8
BuzzData's UX designer + front end developer here.

We're definitely working on all this ;) - stay tuned.
A SaaS to manage your cap table
I wouldn't say it was "sloppy". The sourcing is more or less precise. And all of their most gripping stories put the reader "there"...For example, this phenomenal piece about a Texas execution of a likely innocent man:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_...

But in that case, most of the main players had died, and so the reader already knows that he's getting details that come from letters and interviews...but we know that because we know who the main players are in the first place...In the New Yorker piece, all sources have been muddied up, deliberately, so that even if you know that no SEALs were talking, it still seems like this is a comprehensive report. But for all we know, this could be the Navy's public information officer. Or Pres. Obama himself. Neither of which would be considered the best sources for an end-all what-really-happened in-depth article.
I wouldn't recommend HP. I got one and had hardware problems within the first week (wouldn't boot). They fixed it via mail without much fuss, but it was annoying. The mouse keys were also highly un-ergonomic.
IIRC, Mars's global atmospheric pressure is about 25% higher in the southern summer than in the southern winter, due to differential sublimation and condensation of carbon dioxide, from the southern ice cap as well as from the soil at lower latitudes, and southern hemisphere summer temperatures can range all the way above zero celsius -- so there's quite a range of weather conditions to which any briny water would be subjected, especially in the southern hemisphere.

Edit to add, the Martian southern hemisphere seasons are more extreme because the effects of its significant eccentricity and its axial tilt are additive there, while they counteract each other to moderate the seasons in the north.
Google Docs used to be like that, but Wave was capable of character-by-character updates. You would see updates in larger chunks if latency was high enough, but I've participated in several waves where I could see characters appearing one to three at a time.
Well, I'd seen the term 'Continuous Linear System' somewhere and came to this page, where it starts out as:

Consider the continuous linear time-variant system

<equations!>

so, bad.
Abuse of power? What power? You don't have to use Google+ or Facebook. They're convenient, sure, but you'll do just fine without them.

They only have as much power over you as you think they do.
Wi-Fi, Phone Hacking Plane
not yet - but i assure you we'll do it asap!
Watch Final Destination 5 Online
Watch Final Destination 5 Online
When patents attack Android: Google responds Microsoft (update)
Apple to kill off the Magic Mouse, focus on trackpads (Rumour)
Keep playing to see more cool stuff...
If You Need To Raise Money, Get Your Financing Done ASAP
Unless they've improved a lot in the last year or so I'd stay away from both Acer and HP at least. Lenovo Thinkpads or Macbook Pro/Air is probably your best bet (running Windows through bootcamp)
House Committee Approves U.S. Internet Spy Bill: This Week in Online Tyranny
One problem with notability--and there's no easy answer--is that notability has context. To take an example that's relevant to this audience, there are developers and others involved with open source who are considered "notable" within open source communities who have never been mentioned in mainstream media. And certainly not printed media. But they're mentioned in blogs relevant to a narrow audience.

Similar situations happen with respect to geography. Maybe someone has appeared a number of times in a local newspaper and may even be considered notable on a local basis for some activity. Maybe they're a star on their high school football team. Should they be notable in the context of Wikipedia? I dunno. I've read some good debates on the topic and all I know is that it's really hard to think of universal rules.
Richard Hipp on UnQL
I'm glad Google finally just came out and said it, rather than trying to say, what they said previously, which was that MS and Apple were trying to keep the patents from them. A tip for Google, the truth works better, even if it requires a few more sentences to tell it.

On the actual merits though, Google seems to be completely lost in the world of IP tactics. They should have worked to remove all of these patents off the table as cheaply as possible. The available cash that MS+Apple simply dwarfs what Google has. Head to head, if MS+Apple want the patents they'll win them. Trying to win them outright as defensive patents was a stupid attempt.

The fact that their current IP strategy seems to be to buy IP is absurd. Google really needs to start producing significant IP in the mobile space. Their current IP strategy is naive, and likely costly. The fact that they didn't think about this three years ago, when Jobs was on stage talking about patenting everything, up and down, is a firing offense, IMO.
I guess a lot of this comes back to the fact that this was published in the New Yorker. The New Yorker stakes their brand on the quality of their fact-checking, which to me requires less upfront disclosure. If this story was in fact fabricated, the reality of the story would be the smaller controversy, I'd argue. The real controversy would be the immediate destruction of one of America's most prestigious journalism brands.

To wit, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/freelance-jour...

"[New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David] Remnick says he’s satisfied with the accuracy of the account. 'The sources spoke to our fact-checkers,' he said. 'I know who they are. Those are the rules of the road around here. We have the time to do this. There isn’t always time' for publications with shorter deadlines to do the same checking."
If you look at a couple of posts there, you'll notice that name calling exists nevertheless. I challenge you to read the discussion here [1] and check the name calling and ad hominem attacks from (maybe) people with their real names.

Next problem: Asking for legal looking names doesn't solve the problem of anonymity. If I am able to change my name to Bob Smith without hitting a filter (at least for a while) I still can be an asshole without any connection to my 'real name'. The _only_ thing the policy right now _can_ do is prohibiting people from using an obvious pseudonym. I cannot be darklajid, but I can be Bob Smith. Both are not my real names, the former is my handle ~everywhere~ online. One is me, one is crap.

No way around that unless you're going to verify papers/ids, and now feel free to throw "Papiere bitte" references at me.

So the whole 'we need real names' and 'we hope that this improves our community' is crap. But the most idiotic thing is to make exceptions. Forget about the standard samples like 'Lady Gaga' and '50 Cent': We already hat a couple of threads here about people that used their pseudonym, were suspended and (by bullying, rounding up the media, having contacts inside of Google) got an exception.

What? Why? They are allowed to be different, because...? Bottom line: The current rule is

- useless

- arbitrary (I'd like to put this up as 'discriminating', but yeah.. G+ is not a right, yadda yadda)

Ben, suspended on G+ ;)

1: https://plus.google.com/113116318008017777871/posts/VJoZMS8z...