skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few years back, one skill I realized that I have is that I can recognize people at a distance. I recognize them by the way they walk, the way they dress, their height and a couple of other cues that I can't really explain. As long as I have met the person a few times, I can pick them out even when they are in a crowd and it takes only a second or so for me to realize that I know the person. I may not remember the person immediately or place him, but I will be sure that I know him. I've had a few false positives here and there but never a false negative. This is in complete constrast to noticing things around me. I could walk past a shop multiple times and not see it, not realize that a picture has been moved, not realize that my friend got a new phone etc. All these things come as suprise for me, but never with people.
I don't consciously observe or study how people walk, dress etc but apparently my brain processes it all. I can't explain it, I just know.

I read about a year back that a person's gait can be used for biometric identification (something which I wondered about because its seems to be the primary way I recognize people). The article linked to a pdf that showed an attempt at designing a system that recognized people from their gait. It was incredibly difficult and complicated because you needed a lot of sensors to measure, bunch of high level math to process and prone to failure because the gait would change if you were carrying a heavy bag, walking on a slippery floor etc. Yet, the brain is capable of doing all this and adjust to situations all in a fraction of a second. It was the first time that I was seriously blown away by how incredible the brain is.
Rosie Jones Twitter Bikini Pics
And it is running on some magically free Windows version? And since this is rather a piece to counter console-gaming for "trve" PC gaming, then why support a console game by buying it in the first place? And how is this "hacker news" worthy?
The unpleasant implication of slowpoke's "model" (and it's really just recycled Stallman nonsense) is that they'd really do it for the love of the art, and to hell with such ephemeral things as "eating".

Guess they have to get a job or something.
Gentoo spirit, without long compiling time.
It's still true now; IE6 still has a decent number of users especially in the corporate world and no CSS solution is as simple and direct as tables even today.
Nat'l Center for Atmospheric Research picks IBM for supercomputing center
Very good observation. Netcraft is not measuring internal corporate servers. It can only measure what it can reach -- publicly accessible domains.

Would be interesting to know just how many of those exist.
A web video company that is most likely a hoax
Making and selling handmade products does not guarantee happiness or success (see http://nyti.ms/srgRtu). I think in the vast majority of cases, 'doing it by hand' is probably not the answer.

What's inspiring about this guy is that he's succeeding by serving a vibrant professional market. The chefs who drop a grand on a couple of his knives are using them in the kitchen to make money. They want the best tools for the job, and everyone wins. It's product/market fit.

So kudos to him.

But don't get so inspired you drop everything to build the most beautiful product in the world believing people will buy it _because_ of how hard you worked on it or how awesome it is.
I clicked through and thought the same. It reminded me of a page with a "Skip intro..." flash type thing.
Tim Gowers, fields medallist and the person who started the first polymath project just wrote a couple of blog posts (the latter including suggestions from the former) on a new model of math publishing. They are highly detailed and well thought out and also talk about things one might not understand unless one works in academia.

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/how-might-we-get-to-...

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/a-more-modest-propos...
In a similar vain:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGMj7o6AwnM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM0VnL30rDc
Nope no analogy. If I expect a machine to understand a language, then it had better be able to determine weather or not a document written in that language is valid. It doesn't matter if it is a programming language or a mark up language. Permissive modes are great for accepting the work of others, but when learning how to write that language in the first place a strict interpretation is best. That way you can focus on getting it right.
We'd hope so. We're not trying to advertise to you -- only tell you about something that we think you'd like.
Perhaps starting with modifying our views that tell us since 2000 bottles is negligible it's ok to do?
I've had the same objection. Now I run installs from the server edition. You can add stuff afterwards.
An office suite most certainly should be installed by default in a distro aimed at ordinary users. That you'd think otherwise is stunning.
Think Like a Water Drop: Part 2
> I don't totally get the thought that handmade is always better.

This. I live in a 3rd world country (Brazil) and see a lot of truth in what you say. This film talks about art, not about consistent production of quality.

Take a man with passion, resources, intelligence and immense dedication and he will produce a work of high quality; doesn't matter if it is shoes, painting, engineering, suits or knives.

But it just doesn't scale. You won't find many more people with the same skills. You won't be able to produce as much as 15 robots in Germany. And you also need an extremely up-scale market for your product (NY food scene, in this case). And you also need very efficient marketing (in this case a photographer to introduce him to the chefs community).

Bottom line: this guy is like a panda living in a extremely rare and delicate niche environment. Once the NY food scene vanishes he is toast. Find someone in India or China willing to do the same for 1/10 th of the price and he is toast. Have smarter knife making robots in Germany and he is toast. Any tiny little perturbation can get him out of the market.

There's a reason why industrial revolution succeeded. There's a reason why families of hundreds of years of pottery makers in India are going extinct (lighter, cheaper and uglier plastic bowls). There's a reason why my wife's father gave up on beautiful handmade carpentry. The reason is that ugly but cheap and good enough is what almost everyone wants.
The Stop Online Piracy Act: A Blacklist by Any Other Name Is Still a Blacklist
Women Own 1% of the World's Property
Ah, wonderful. I hope I can get in soon. I've been waiting forever. Congrats to them for finally getting public.
Tinkercad Raises $1 Million, Aims To Popularize 3D Printing
I think they just took a screenshot of some video game from the 90s. Duke Nukem? Doom?

Seriously does this kind of image do anything for the scientists or is this just PR?
World's hardest probability problem: the red-haired girl named Florida
I ran Debian unstable on my desktop for a number of years and the experience sounds pretty comparable. For the most part I just got working bleeding edge packages with minor quality control. Occasionally you would get some breakage (which was usually mentioned in apt-listbugs before upgrade anyway), and the nice thing about debian was I could either pin the package to the current more stable version, or if I had already upgraded I could just grab the previous package off of the debian snapshot mirrors.
Square Adds Sir Richard Branson As An Investor, International Expansion In 2012
Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found on SUV
Are computers getting Greener?
The Consumerization of Business Software
Sir Richard Branson invests in Square
Hmm, I don't really think so. Arch packages are distributed as pre-compiled binaries (not counting AUR), and the emphasis is on simplicity (not customization or performance). I've found I can get Arch up and running satisfactorily in about an hour.

The intersection of Gentoo and Arch is that they both require more configuration than your average Debian-based distro, and they both have rolling release models, but in my opinion that's about it.
Although I'm personally all for open distribution of crawl data like this and all of my personal websites are CC-licensed, isn't there something to be said for the copyright status of the pages in the crawl file?

The crawl file presumably contains the contents of websites and so the owners of those websites could assert that Common Crawl Foundation is distributing their work without permission or license.

There are all sorts of republishing/splog 'opportunities' with this crawl data that goes beyond the original expected use.

Surprisingly, I couldn't see anything about this covered in the FAQs
Very cool! I just put in an application to create a novice python course. If I like the experience of creating a course, I hope to make more.
At least with Fedora 15, the install DVD's default option of "Desktop" install does indeed install Office tools, Graphics/Image editors, etc.

On the bright side, the installer (again, for 15) offers a "Minimal" option in the same dialog box, which skips Gnome/XWindows/OpenOffice/etc. With Ubuntu I recall having to search for a special minimal installer ISO.
I thought BankSimple was a great brand, because it tells you what it is and fits well with the current zeitgeist.

What is "BankSimple?" A way to bank that's simple. Sounds interesting! Everyone hates how complicated banking is, right? Let's go to the website to find out more.

What is "Simple?" Who knows. A website that has something to do with banking--or so I'm told--with yet another web 2.0 one-word "brand", a really uninspiring one too. Hey, I wonder what's on Reddit.
I think you're not considering enough ways in which one technology can be superior to another.

Ruby wins for the web not because it is faster _at executing code_, but because the combination of Ruby and Rails is faster _at iterating new features_; the optimization which has led it to win is performance of programmers, not code.

Likewise, Windows is inferior to Unix as an OS design -- but it is vastly superior to (non-MacOS) Unix in the time it takes to get a semi-technical user from a machine still in the box to a machine which can do the things most users care about (browse the web, edit documents, and so on).

In the long run, which matters more? Machines are getting faster much more quickly than programmers or users are getting smarter...
Does someone know exactly what they are? If we deposit money with them, how do we know we will get our money back? What does it mean when they say: "we're not a bank, but we deposit your money in FDIC-insured funds"?

I'm all for introducing new types of banking entities, and I'm willing to even try this company out, but in the age of post-Madoff and personally having my identity stolen, how do I know who these guys are, and that they will protect my money and my information?
"Mudge" Zatko shaking up DARPA's security software routine
How to Make (and Sustain) a Good First Impression Every Time
50 Visionary Examples of Creative Photography #7
Keep working on it, it is a lot of fun!
It's a prisoner's dilemma. The Android ecosystem and all its inhabitants would do best if everyone kept the proprietary customizations to a minimum. But any one manufacturer can stand out from the crowd by doing stuff like custom skins. Which means that someone inevitably will. So everyone has to follow suit, and everyone ends up being worse off because the end result is a difficult-to-support, fragmented ecosystem.
Big Data gets a venture fund of its own
Honestly, I don't understand this rebranding. Are they making things other than banking simple? I love the idea of making banking more simple and easier, and that's why I thought their previous name, BankSimple, was better. Can someone help me understand this?
Something about using String.Format for internal IDs sketches me out. Is this a common practice, or do developers use URL builders instead?
(SpiderOak / Nimbus.io cofounder here)

Note that this is just an announcement and invite site to show the pricing at $0.06/GB. Nimbus.io will have public git repositories, "developed collaboratively in the open" before we ever charge money to use the service. (And this is a wholly different project than the SpiderOak backup/sync software.)

FYI, you can see the git repos for the prototype we built of this awhile back, when we called it our storage "DIY API". https://spideroak.com/diy/ Note that the code and the rest of the information on that page is way out of date since it was an early design and prototype.

I'm not sure erasure coding vs. replication is a simple change for other distributed storage projects. It effects the whole architecture. We researched pretty heavily before building. If it had been simple to modify any of the alternatives, this project wouldn't exist. I'm more than happy to be proven wrong though!

* Edited for pricing info.
CSS Awards – 10 Colorful Web Designs to Inspire You
Whatever Simple is, I suspect it doesn't have to comply with every single state's regulations on exactly what can call itself a bank.
Handmade / custom knives are quite popular among collectors and enthusiasts. They're expensive, you can't chuck them in the kitchen sink until the next morning or the carbon steel will start to rust, but they are just awesome to use, and I expect they'll be appreciated for generations to come.

Just for a reality check, let's say a top-quality, handmade, 8" chef's knife runs about $500. Most people consider an $80 mass-produced piece from Henckel or Wusthof to be rather extravagant...
I wonder if there were issues with calling themselves BankX when they are not regulated as a bank. Edit to add, there are definite laws against this in some states, for instance CT (I'm not sure if this would apply in this case, but it's indicative of what is out there):

"No partnership, common law trust or association, or individual using a trade name, shall use, either as a part of its name or as a prefix or suffix thereto or as a designation of the business carried on by it, the word "bank", "banking", "banker", "bankers", "trust" or "savings", "

http://www.cga.ct.gov/2011/pub/chap620.htm#Sec35-2.htm
I think it is not mass production that is the issue, but the short lifespan of the things we use. If every tool, every building, every mechanism - electronic or otherwise - lasted forever, or even just ten times as long, our economy and society would undergo radical changes as have never been seen before. (Sorry for what is both an obvious observation and a complete departure from the OP, but I have had this thought stuck in my mind for a while)
Last year I went to a Software Craftsmanship gathering in Chicago. It was a great experience.

http://scna.softwarecraftsmanship.org/
.NET is strongly typed so using String.Format in the manner this example does is safe, as long as the values you're inserting are integers or guids or such.
Maybe things like healthcare and benefits?
Quantifying Reputation and Journalism
So merely battering a piece of metal (that other cleverer people have spent 200 years designing the alloys of) into shape is craftsmanship.

While creating a piece of software - a functional machine out of pure thought - is somehow just grunt work?
> What does it mean when they say: "we're not a bank, but we deposit your money in FDIC-insured funds"?

it means that "simple"/"banksimple" is not a bank itself. you deposit your funds through their interface into actual banks while simple provides an interface to track and visualize your money. thats my understanding, at least. they definitely can't bill themselves as a bank when they aren't one.
Mint, Square, Ally. I think the naming convention fits other examples of successful startups in this space.
I have a feeling there are jurisdictions where they would be regulated if they used the name BankSimple and took peoples' money.
Handmade is not better as a rule, but I think we have arrived at a place in society where 'handmade' has a connotation of great effort invested for quality. In other words, the fact that it is not made on an assembly line suggests that cost savings were not an important part of production, hopefully leading to a superior product.
The thing that struck me about this film, is that he's not wearing safety goggles. Stupid move.
While I think this may be true at first, if they gain any critical mass, the "Bank" in BankSimple would become redundant and wasteful.

I think it is good and forward looking to rebrand it Simple before launch so that becomes synonymous with banking. Imagine if Google was instead called GoogleSearch? Google became synonymous for Search and therefore the Search portion of their name is superfluous.

I for one applaud this move and think the branding is nice, clean, and, of course, simple ;)
I think GP meant that they hide that info even in their headers, such that you can't just see what's in Server:.
Heh, they must have smelled the current anti-bank sentiment (switch day, etc.) and decided to brand themselves as non-bank as possible.

"Are we a bank?

No."

I wonder how much the domain cost?
US weapons 'full of fake Chinese parts'
Neither Windows nor OS X comes with an office suite installed by default. It wouldn't be unprecedented if a linux distro were to come without one.
Samsung eyes Amazon, B&N with $249 (with contract) Galaxy Tab 7.0
nano is easier than vim to use, so why everyone bother to learn vim then ?

Ease to use is not the only thing mater for everyone, and having something powerful, more customizable, more understandable, those kind of things mater to some persons.
Stack Overflow Needs Mentors
Fluke 179 Multimeter
Like how the "bank" in "Bank of America" is redundant and wasteful?

To clarify, I don't really care either way- I'm sure they had other reasons for dropping the "Bank" from their name, especially since they're not really a bank.
If you have access to the code that is storing your data, you have the option to host it yourself or pay someone else to host it with the same client.

That's certainly true in 'regular' open source economics.

But storage is somewhat unique in that the significant cost factor is not the price of alternative proprietary software but the hardware costs of the storage medium itself - and those are constant regardless of the license structure the software layer is using.

Additionally, scales of economy come into play to such an extent that the costs of hosting this kind of storage myself will be wildly more expensive than a volume player like Amazon who operates entire datacenters (this argument goes beyond just the op-ex/cap-ex tradeoff)
I don't see how a parity based implementation can work in a meaningful way across multiple datacenters. You certainly couldn't rebuild if you lost an entire datacenter due to disaster. Replication is the only way here.

So any comparison to S3 in that regard is meaningless - Nimbus can't achieve that level of durability, correct?

Additionally, if you're just doing parity across multiple chassis in a single datacenter and lost a couple racks do to a power outage it would seem the network would likely shit the bed trying to rebuild, potentially bringing the whole system down. Have you guys worked through nastier failure cases that architectures like S3 can avoid?
Also, I live in Eastern Europe. I don't know anyone who currently does anything like this and would accept trainees.

I do have a long-term plan of starting a small workshop of some kind though.
No more redundant than Bank of America or Citibank...
Go-Go-Go, School to Change Its Name to Steve Jobs
I think the major funding agencies are aware of the problem and the potential, and are working on solutions in their own way (for example, the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure's DataNet program, http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503141). But major cultural change in the way scientific research is conducted just isn't going to happen overnight.
Coincidentally I noticed that both Simple and Square do not mention anything (anymore) about who they are. No about page, no team page, no nothing. Especially with companies that are all about your money, I'd at least like to know who's running the shop.

Since it's pretty much the standard for startups to tell about themselves on their web site, this must have been a deliberate choice. What advantage does it have – especially in the case of Square and Simple – not to show who you are?
Completely off topic.

I wanted to contact you about USSM (see your comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3025521 ). Could you please send me an e-mail (pick it from my web site), I'd like to know if you still have that compilation error with the latest USSM.

Wild guess about the cause: I forgot to include some dependencies in the makefile. In the meantime, I'll try to reproduce the problem.
The Strobe Team is Moving to Facebook
Isn't it considered good security-research practice and just "good manners" to notify the company beforehand and give them a chance to fix the problem before going public and pulling stunts like publicly abusing it, making sure they are publicly humiliated with their pants down?

Judging from the article, he did neither - so don't run crying about "that's so rude".
Anti-Bullying
Bullying can happen anywhere: face-to-face, by text messages or on the web. It is not limited by age, gender, or education level. It is not a phase.
To add to that, 3. Scientists (particularly academics) should focus on a smaller number of solid, flushed-out papers rather than seeking out the minimum publishable unit. The latter seems to be a byproduct of the tenure process (IMO) and just adds noise.
I'm torn between "This guy clearly enjoys his work, bully for him." and "The handmade movement is an extravagantly wasteful alternative to a factory in China to give rich white people an opportunity to demonstrate their social superiority over people who use functionally equivalent objects produced in an efficient fashion." (c.f. organic food, fair trade coffee, etc etc. This topic makes me positively Marxist. There was a time when only wealthy folks could afford goods. Capitalism happened and now everyone can afford goods. This really discomfits some people, so they get very creative at inventing reasons why the goods they are using today are the right goods and the goods they were using ten years ago are now the wrong goods since poor people now have access to them.)
> Currently, science is funded based on individual results.

Yeah, there's a direct tension between the move over the past few decades towards very competitive grant funding (10% funding rates, short grant terms, much fewer long-term, large block grants for centers), and a goal of having everyone share everything altruistically. If you purposely set up science funding so that it encourages cutthroat competition, people are going to have to behave like cutthroat competitors, and those who try not to will (on average) lose to those who do.
I'm not sure I understand the proposition now.

Who is the relationship with?

As in... who has my money?

I read it as them hiding that from you for simplicity... you get this one interface and customer service which is wonderful, but to achieve this they are the proxy to your bank?

So... do they set up the bank accounts, or do you? Do you have the ability to go straight to your bank, or does Simple preclude that ability?

In this text:

> Simple is not a bank. Simple replaces your bank. We build the services and support you need to manage, understand, and automate your everyday spending and saving. Meanwhile, we integrate with chartered banks who manage your deposits in FDIC-insured products. We take care of you, our partner banks take care of your money, and jointly, we’ve designed a better financial experience.

I come out confused. Who has the money, can I go straight to them to get it?

That's the missing bit of clarity that would make me feel the love (trust).