skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In this video [1], he explains what happened "somewhere along the way". TL;DW: He failed at being a successful comic by telling the same jokes for 15 years, then got inspired by and emulated George Carlin, threw everything away and started over.

His story is not only inspiring, it transcends comedy. The idea that a mixed but passionate reaction is better than a lukewarm one applies to startups as well as entertainment.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R37zkizucPU
My most recent order from Amazon UK had three leaflets: a voucher for Naked Wines, a voucher for Ocada and something else that I can't remember. Most orders I get from Amazon have at least one leaflet, it's the same for other online retailers, such as Play.com.
Agreed, thank you. "Supercomputer" is a continually moving goal-post that basically means "more computing power than you can achieve with personal computers." Supercomputers push the limits of the performance that we can achieve. If you can fit it inside of a PC case, then you're not pushing the limits of the kind of performance we can achieve.
Let's not forget to also be pissed at the "fourth estate" which offered not a single whit of criticism of Obama's ridiculous statements throughout the primary and presidential campaigns, and instead acted solely as his cheerleaders.
The line about everyone who bought the first VU album started a band is usually attributed to Brian Eno. I wouldn't say they were a precursor to punk so much as to all things indie. The Stooges were the biggest precursor to punk. John Cale, the avant-garde genius from the Velvets, did produce the Stooges, but that was after Lou Reed had kicked him out. I've never been a huge VU fan musically though I like them fine, but there's no denying they were sui generis and everything art-cool in rock music since can be traced back to them. (I was a huge fan of Cale's 1970s solo albums though. Do you know them? Equal parts exquisite and menacing.)

Pixies... why sorry? I admit I never got them though - not then and not since. I need more melody and song structure than that, and the ironic-detached thing only gets me so far.

Re Cobain, he may have said that, but it isn't true. Nevermind is classic because he pulled off what no one else had and blended the indie-noise thing with classic pop songwriting. I think that was genius and his tragedy was being embedded in a subculture that didn't respect that. There's a documentary floating around online (edit: at http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/kurt_cobain_about_a_s...) in which he says that his original idea for a band was Black Sabbath crossed with bubblegum and that no one else got it. In that subculture (which I remember well, and the pretentious twattage that went with it) it was de rigeur to piss all over the pop side; that was how you established your cred. It was also a limiting move: it's why the music from that period isn't anywhere close to the level of the Ramones or Pistols or many others. (I suppose we disagree here.) Anyway, Cobain put them together and millions of people loved it and he never lived that down. Nor alas did he ever do it again.

Re the Pixies - have you seen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEPi5EQjEpw? David Sanborn, yuppy purveyor of intolerable smooth-jazz, somehow had the coolest musical thing going on TV in the late 80s. It was canceled after he had the Residents perform with Conway Twitty!
I would imagine only if you were fluent in it. I bet these cabbies have to lice And breathe this information. You need not just a pile of facts, but the bigger picture: it has to be instinctive.

I am not am expert.
Thanks, that sounds great. I will watch it later.
MPEG Plus or Patent Pool Lite? MPEG Mulls Royalty-Free Proposals
This is just from my experience, I have tried many gems which allow managing tasks, dooby (https://github.com/rafmagana/dooby) is one that comes to mind. It takes almost a second to list my tasks, Now, I know that it's not much. But, the percieved slowness has made me avoid this. That's the reason I didn't put it in a gem.

Just for comparison, I did create a gem initially, but it was taking 0.5 s when compared to the 0.05s without the gem infrastructure. As someone mentioned the 'hub' gem does this too. You can find more info at: https://gist.github.com/284823
Division worksheets and lessons for kids
For me this computer provided one of those rare aha! moments. I finally got what all the fuss about Cellular Automata (CA) and Conway's 'Game of Life' (GoL) is all about. I'm aware that the GoL has been proved to be Turing Complete too, but then in the case of WireWorld CA, seeing is believing.

It is said "a picture is worth a thousand words", in this case, a picture [1] is worth a tome [2].

[1] http://www.quinapalus.com/wires11.html

[2] http://www.wolframscience.com/thebook.html

(psst...NKS copies are available for $1-2 and are excellent bed risers! ;)
The Internet is a Teleportation Device for Our Minds
It depends. Do you ever want to be able to rely on Amazon Web Services as a piece of your business infrastructure at any point in the rest of your life? You're putting that in jeopardy by using EC2 for illegal purposes; Amazon could well ban you from the service if a copyright holder outs you.

Presumably my business would use an account under the business name.
Facebook's spam filtering assumes friends won't spam friends. Not the case. Friends spam friends constantly! Why can't they just filter it as "from friends", "from others", then "spam"? Then make the navigation between those folders stick out more.

The way Facebook does it now would make sense if this were still 2004. These days even your Facebook friends aren't really your friends. People with thousands of Facebook friends can't possibly have real, meaningful relationships with all of them. Most people I know just collect friends I'm Facebook like trophies. I get tons of requests from strangers myself. My point is that in times like these when your "friends" aren't really friends, Facebook spam filtering should be implemented like any other email spam filter.

Edit: My phone buzzed just 2 seconds after I posted this comment. What was the alert? A spammy Facebook message from one of my friends.
How to get over your ex Boyfriend
"How to get over your ex Boyfriend" You still miss your ex boyfriend and you asked how you can cope or what you can do after the break up as you’re still missing him and love him so much.
I agree! Science never surprises us; all it does is reinforce our prejudices and common sense, so what's the point of funding it? We already know everything it would tell us.
You appear to be right. My mistake.
Just like DMCA complaints have shut down other internet service providers, like Comcast? Ultimately, in the US, ISPs are not responsible for their users' activity. "Common carrier" and all that. When you open an exit node, you become an ISP.
Often there are multiple options for what the thing you are making must accomplish (though some may be more valuable than others). I have found this fact liberating with regards to novel writing in particular, a case in which I personally would abhor a precise spec.

I do generally prefer very precise specs for engineering projects, of course.
> And who will supposedly buy all these good those factories make? The 1%ers?

Yeah, pretty much. Human wants are unlimited. (To quote Boethius, "If free-handed Plenty should dispense riches from her cornucopia as plentiful as the sands cast up by the storm-wracked sea, or as the stars that shine in heaven - men still would not stop their miserable complaints.")

Have you read Chase's 'Plutonomy' papers from a few years ago? Fearsome reading.
Obfuscating Code
Personal respect for the artist notwithstanding, this is not a replicable model for others. He makes it up in volume.

This is not a general solution.
I have used taskwarrior for some time, as @tmcw already mentioned, one of the reasons I use this, is because it is more hackable. The other reason is that it doesn't need you to learn hundreds of switches to efficiently use it. All you need to know is: 't -a' adds a task 't -l' lists them and finally 't -e' opens vi to allow you to edit the whole tasks file.

t -a whatever the task is without single quotes :) :weekend +++

Another neat thing about this is that it allows you to do stuff on multiple tasks at once.

t -d awse,foob #deletes the tasks with those ids
t -t aswe,foob :some-tag :another-tag #adds those two tags on those two tasks

If you know ruby, you can tweak this as you like to make it work with your own special rules, and that's the most important thing to me. No one likes a task manager built by others, everyone has something which they do differently. And because it's built in ruby, I hope this is easier to personalize.
Two relevant papers (a few links away from the oreilly.com article)

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1826825

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/DAED_a_00114
Maybe not, but it could replace low-wage jobs in developed countries.

Imagine a 24-hour fast-food restaurant that employs several people at minimum wage. A robot could work all 3 shifts around the clock nonstop, not require much space, and be "trained" in new types of food preparation with an instantaneous software upgrade.

My economics professor once said he'd heard that if minimum wage got up to $20/hour, it would be cheaper for McD's to use robots. This is changing the other side of the equation.
Once upon a time we were all farmers. Why not tech workers, designers and graphics people?
An integral part of the torrenting process is getting a list of IP addresses from the tracker so you can connect to each IP and start downloading the data. You can log those IP addresses to a database instead of downloading that data.
Depends on who you ask: http://www.helifreak.com/
I know exactly what you mean here. I also sometimes have trouble tolerating cringe-comedy situations although seemingly not as bad as you.

I actually used to get very uncomfortable while watching some Shakespearian comedy-of-errors plays. The type where the audience knows something that the actors don't. Makes me want to shout at them which is I guess the point however I feel like it is not an enjoyable type of anxiety.

Perhaps it is the engineer/nerdy part of us but I really don't enjoy watching people make mistakes.
A deluded person who defines their self worth by having uncommon knowledge of computer technology. There are countless of these people. So, asking the question of who is a hacker is like asking who is a super hero. Why do I say deluded? Most people who fit this category don't understand that the knowledge is only uncommon in their small universe as there are whole industries which built the technologies they 'hack.'
Actually it's usually 6.
Your Usenet provider certainly knows what you're downloading. The reason you don't care is because someone sued some Usenet provider in the early 90s, and Usenet providers were deemed "common carriers", not liable for the content they carry. Since downloading copyrighted content is apparently not illegal, it all works out.
I think his use of the word "torrent" (which he admittedly does not fully understand) was a proxy for "watch this video without paying for it." I doubt he understands seeding--and even if he does, you can simply turn seeding off.

BTW, to whoever downvoted enneff's reply: this seems senseless. I asked for a polite explanation, he gave one, and it's an interesting point of view (even though many of us may disagree with it).
Correction: automation can replace doctors and researchers (which principally work with their mind).

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/090402-robot...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/131697.stm
Old revisions of Gigabyte motherboards unloaded on Amazon at Xmas time
Oh please.

If we didn't have all the automation we have today, our lives would suck.

The only ones threatedned by automation are those who are unwilling to get a different job.
I knew this was a ruse when I read the bio's at the bottom of the page. I had a good laugh at this one:

"Suren Ter (me)
I’m a producer of the site. Like a movie producer, I made the site."

Then several sentences later:

"Me? I don’t do code, I don’t do research, I don’t do design — I do sites. Drop me a message if you’d like."
Sounds like it's time to send them a DMCA notice.
Because 3 sigma doesn't mean 99% chance they've found it; it means that, if it doesn't exist, there's a 1% chance of obtaining the results they did. Common statistical misconception.

Consider a situation where they test 1000 hypotheses, only 100 of which are actually true. Of the 900 false hypotheses, 9 will, by chance, achieve a 3 sigma "99% chance of being right" result. And hence something like 8.3% of the hypotheses tested as "true" will be false positives -- not 1%.
That's not how statistics works. Your statement is the converse of happened, not the contraposive.
Foursquare Still Matters Says CEO
Sorry, you may have just not heard me before:

> I'm just not aware of many Ruby developers interested in taking Apple's C example and implementing it in Ruby.

I don't find it difficult; I find it more difficult than a simple POST.
"if you want to "take it away" with you" -> it needs to be a mobile app.
Why hacks don't make great products - A critique of Twitter 4 for IOS
There will always be unknown things and things to achieve! There is still nuclear fusion, computer brain interface, genetic engineering, inhabiting other planets. Figuring out how universe works, if there are other realities, etc.

My personal thoughts are that communism is merely the next step after capitalism (after discovering fusion and fabricating nanotechnology), however I don't think/hope it will play out as it had before in Russia.
The problem is that a law like you suggest is unenforceable. I It would be more effective to reduce the power of the central federal government.
Best part of this for me is that I can now actually pay to watch something outside of the US from an artist I like. If you don't live outside the US or UK you probably don't realize how rare that is.
Might I add the hospitals probably paid millions of dollars for these systems.

And in many cases, those systems were required in order to support the requirements for Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement. There is typically an entire department dedicated to producing the reports that the government requires.
Node.js SDK for Windows Azure on Github
Hmm, I don't actually think chebyshev applies (in a meaningful way) in this context. 3.5 sigmas refers to the probability of the observation being significant, not the average mass of the higgs. Or did I misunderstand what you meant?

As an aside, there is a typo in the parent's link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev_inequality
It's worse when your users find these and are all mad because the computer did exactly what they told them to.
A balance of power between multiple branches and levels of government, and aka oversight, can mitigate that.
Not perfect, but neither is nonregulation.
in case it's not obvious, the typing is not just one long session. if you look towards the end of the first part, you can see his git logs spanning over a month. the speed of the output was to span exactly 15 minutes for the youtube video.

the recorder/editor is custom made by the author and is running in dosbox.
The article says this offers encouragement to adults wanting to learn later in life. Bullocks. The article simply shows that any claims about the brain's plasticity being "frozen" after a certain age were incorrect (or overstated). I'm sure "old" people have been learning "The Knowledge" successfully for years now. They weren't worried about inaccurate claims of low brain plasticity ... they had a test to study for.

We already had the "encouragement" because people have been passing the test. We didn't need to wait for the scientists to catch up. The finding did not uncover any new ability ... it merely helped explain a capability we should have already observed in terms of increased grey matter.
Chrismas messages
Buby-Extending PortSwigger Burp Suite through JRuby #Tools #Infosec
Buby is a mashup of JRuby with the popular commercial web security testing tool Burp Suite from PortSwigger. Burp is driven from and tied to JRuby with a Java extension using the BurpExtender API. This extension aims to add Ruby scriptability to Burp Suite with an interface comparable to the Burp’s pure Java extension interface.
The ambisonic recording is decoded by reproducing the sound pressure field where the listener is sitting. Roughly speaking, the more speakers you have for playback, the larger your "sweet spot" (where the field is approximately correct) is. So the decoder has to know where each speaker is in relation to the listener. Idealy, the listener won't be able to tell that the sound is coming from the direction of any specific speaker, because the entire sound pressure field will be recreated around their head. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonic_decoding
It looks like it works just fine then.
Developing with HTML, CSS and JS makes it cooler. This way, more people could simply use what they know and start writing applications. This is no different from writing a web page, but has more capabilities too. Unfortunately, there sure are some issues ... :)

- Parashuram
How is the action of manufactured drug more natural a process than a cotton gin ginning cotton?
Did you intentionally personify Hindsight Bias here? If so, well done, and I got the joke. lol. http://lesswrong.com/lw/il/hindsight_bias/
For those interested, a tangentially related article, "Faux Friendship"[1] by Willian Deresiewicz, is one of my all-time-favourite online articles, which I urge everyone to read.

It's long, but worth it.

[1]: http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/
Truly fantastic approach. Just downloading the video, and happy to pay $5.
Conflict of interest how? Isn't their more of a conflict of interest when a drug developer is paying the fees of the drug tester?
Free task management apps in Android Market
I couldn't agree with this article more. Due to the awkwardness around not accepting a friend invite, my Facebook consists of just about everyone I've ever known in my life. It is convenient to have an easy channel to track someone down if you need to talk to them but the wall has become completely unusable to me. The combination of 1) having too many people that I don't have real relationships with on Facebook 2) many of my friends' postings of very low value things (ex. I'm eating an apple right now) 3) the increased usage of auto-updates (ex. I'm listening to 'Rihanna'), Facebook has turned into a wasteland of posts where about 1 / 500 updates are actually useful to me and finding that 1 is no longer worth it. I know the natural response to this is that I should be organizing my friends better but I'm not sure that this is a solution, because I have certain friends that will post 'low value' updates and then post something very 'high value' (value meaning somehow interesting to me). So the first problem for Facebook is trying to figure out how to cherry pick the good posts to show me and this in itself is incredibly difficult. But the problem gets exponentially harder as I add more friends (which will continue to happen to avoid awkward moments in the real world) assuming that I only have time to read X number of updates. In other words if on average every friend has 1 / 100 high value updates, the chance of Facebook getting it right and getting that high value update into the 100 updates I read every day gets lower as I add more friends and there is more noise to filter. It seems to me that there may be a bell curve to the usefulness of Facebook based on your friend count - in the beginning it is marginally useful when you only have a few friends, it becomes very useful when you have some magical conservative number of friends and then it becomes again marginally useful as your friend count gets very high. The problem is that keeping your friend count at that magical number and not progressing past that is very difficult.
Ladies VS Ricky Bahl
For the view-source impaired, the direct URL is http://traffic.libsyn.com/wtfpod/WTF_-_EPISODE_111_LOUIS_CK....
Graham & Coase: when big companies are a good idea
> Those factories only exists if they have a market for the goods they produce.

You can worry about the computers taking over, or worry about humanity collapsing under the weight of resource crises. I know which I'd prefer. Someone's going to have to build all those wind farms, and retrieve scarce resources from landfill, and I'd rather it wasn't me.
Application Idea - Local History
Good piece. It is not far off from the things people like danah boyd have been saying. The exchange of personal information is a unit of social currency. If you treat it like it has no value, then it becomes of no value. Editorial effort, on the other hand, both adds value and also signals value.
Can't we get updated definitions for peerblock which will blacklist their crawling ip?
Unfortunately I don't know any AI researchers who have done work in the past 5 decades. Would you care to share what would happen?

In all honesty I have no idea. Would they laugh and say that "no way AI needs another 20 years"? Or would they say it's only a few years until everyone working with their hands is out of work? Kudos on the pretentious reply btw.
The C#/Xaml stuff is for WPF and Silverlight developers. HTML5/JS is the obvious choice for everyone else.
Sorry, I was thinking of "time" in terms of salary or wages, which are obviously costs.

Now I understand that "time" can also mean time-to-market, and I see how that can turn into an opportunity cost. Thanks!

The former is like "spent time", but the latter is like "lost time".
The difference is that one is knowledge, and another is a mechanism. Someone has to build and produce a cotton gin, to infringe on a patent. On the contrary one only has to learn about the correlation and now doing anything with this knowledge is "patent infringement" ?
You can't patent the fact that a cotton gin works, nor can you patent the use of a cotton gin. You can only patent the design of the gin itself.

With drugs, you should only be able to patent the design of the drug itself, and probably also the method of synthesizing the drug. You should not be able to patent the idea of using aspirin to treat headaches.
Why is he down-voted?

He didn't want to join paypal, fair enough.

He didn't know he could pay with paypal without joining it, now he knows it.

Other HN-ers might see this post, realize they don't need paypal, and go back to buy the video.

IMO this shouldn't be down-voted.

p.s. I know I could have just upvoted it instead of writing this useless post (Which I'd understand if you downvote me by the way), but I thought my point would be clearer with a message rather than a battle of upvote/downvote.
IBM setting out to build an electronic brain
Part of Doug's persona is an utter lack of self-respect or self-worth. I think his unapologetic lack of genuine insight into some of the issues he discusses portrays an universal and uncompromising policy of total honestly which is very powerful.

Much of his performances involve veering sharply from some relatively considered insight into the human condition to some completely unnecessarily graphic tirade against a trivial aspect of his everyday life, with absolutely no break between them. In many ways it's as much performance art as it is standup, he has a more fundamentalist attitude towards attacking sacred cows than any other comedian I can think of.

Also I'd add that his more recent work is considerably improved on a lot of his slightly more incoherent stuff from earlier in his career. His "No Refunds" DVD from 2007 is a lot more focused and better paced. Check it out.
Microsoft did this for the Kinect: Two companies (3DVision and PrimeSense) both had RGB Depth cameras. They signed a deal with PrimeSense, and then bought 3DV and shut them down.
Xbox 360 4GB Review - Best Resources and Deals
Apple accused of feeding intellectual property to 'patent troll'