skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> that isn't really how evolution works.

Taking this a step further, finding intelligent life out there is simply impossible. The reason our intelligence is unique to only humans on our planet is largely because we defined intelligence as traits that only we possess. We defined it based on our own nature. Finding life out there that would be socially compatible with us is ridiculously unlikely. That life would have had to spring up in an evolutionary environment identical to ours and that's so unlikely that it might as well be impossible.
I have done this for IIT Delhi network, as the normal peer-to-peer transfer protocols used by software like DC++ and oDC were blocked.

The code is at github https://github.com/sravfeyn/SparkDC

The story is at my blog http://divinequantum.blogspot.com/2011/12/spark-automated-fi...
....yeah, that's why you stop sitting, get up, go for a run at lunch time. it's also recommended you get up every so often and walk around a bit (coffee breaks are good for this)
Computer History Museum launches Steve Jobs site
Cheers again Patrick for your ideas and thoughts on VPM, much appreciated !
Hey Jason,

I though the exact same thing, and had even entered my spamtrap email before noticing that it wasn't actually necessary.

(By spamtrap, I just mean an old yahoo account that I never get emails I care about to).

It might be useful to include some text there indicating that you're all done creating your vanity profile now, and by the way if you'd like to sign up for the newsletter, here is how to do so.
Watch the Entire BBC Facebook Special
I loathe that you're being downvoted for this. My first desire after reading this was to share it with my co-workers. Unfortunately, the article's format as a profanity-laced rant makes it completely inappropriate for that purpose. It's a shame that he so effectively limited his audience.
No, we should fire the people who design the curricula, and design better ones.

It doesn't follow from the fact that we're imparting only two useful years worth of knowledge in (say) 4 years of high school that students are only capable of benefiting from 2 years of high school.
I had to register my Apple ID. Apple's site disallows copying and pasting in the password field. I really REALLY hope this isn't a trend, because I use strong passwords for everything, and these 128-bit monsters will make your hands explode if you try to type them in manually.

It blew my mind because a coder had to burn some calories code the site specifically to disable copy/paste. What kind of UX is that?
Immediately, this story looks like link bait. Even the title misses the point of what he's trying to say, true or not.

Even more entertaining is all of the discussions of those who have 'real' degrees and who are 'not like this man'. They believe he must be a ignorant bureaucrat who lucked his way to the top. They believe it's inconceivable that schools are to blame, even though many are sold a bill of goods from schools that degrees set the social classes apart from others and they really are more human than others. While in fact, schools have become one of the most clever profit centers ever created. While there, you are indoctrinated to believe only those going through here are human. So, when you go out to the world, only hire those from here (plug for more school business!)

Remember, some of the most financial successful people in the US, in the world, do not/did not have degrees > Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuck, the list goes on. Although, my personal believe is financial success is not the true success (even stated by Gates recently)

This belief that you must be part of academia to be innovative and this near prejudice of non-academia citizens is appalling.

Learn what this man is saying rather that trying to prove him wrong and self-justifying. Yes, we can count, read, apply studied principles learned from books and media. His point is, are we the principle authors? Are we the ones innovating, improving society by our ideas, helping our fellow man/woman by our work? If not, perhaps something IS missing from our schools. Perhaps that is part of the problem. Let's fix it and make our world a better place.
Maximize Your Space with Shower Panels
NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a cosmic purgatory
If you can help with advice, I will be more than happy to listen :)
"By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. "

Sounds more like a disaster from the rest of the biosphere's POV.
Yes, with a death toll around 50k per year for decades, concentrated in the populous, urban areas, that's about right. If there were a little roadside symbol at the spot for each person who ever died, many areas would look like a forest. I look to self-driving cars to save us from this.
Surely by now you've heard the aphorism "It's who you know and who you blow"?

You can't possibly be implying that most people are in their current jobs because of skill or training?! Bwaahaaahaaahaaah! Such naivete! Where have you been hiding?
Absconditus is talking about higher education, I think.
Most startups are spending money too fast.  Slow it down.
Discovering Your Long Tail Search Terms
The Bones of HTML5 (How Bones Framework uses HTML5)
Betting the farm: Is FarmVille developer Zynga worth $9 billion?
:O so much for the concept of a password vault. I had better security than this when I was manually decrypting/encrypting a .txt file with my passwords with AES256
Gifted kids aren't really any different from the "regular" kids, they just often have a smarter-sounding rationalization for why they don't enjoy math. However, it's really the age-old excuse "When am I even gonna use this?"

I really came to enjoy math / calculus when I was taking a physics class and started to understand the world better through the lens of my new math knowledge. Einstein's theories made so much more sense when you could think about the physical limits imposed by the math. Otherwise I couldn't care less about the Disc method and rotely calculating the volume of objects around an axis...

So to many children, learning math without practical application is like teaching someone a successively harder alphabet/vocab every year without ever writing an essay or delivering a speech... Or like learning how to read music and play harder scales without ever performing a piece.

Effective learning needs a good balance between application (the fun) and mastery of technique (the sweat and tears).
FOAF+SSL!!!!!!!!!!

There exists a rather elegant alternative to passwords for authenticating a user's identity - it's been around for a while but the user barrier is too high: FOAF+SSL.

The idea is you generate an X.509 cert and install it in your browser(s). You then stick the pubkey in a section of your own publicly hosted FOAF file (hosted by yourself or by an FOAF hosting service) - then when you "visit" a site that requires you to authenticate all you have to do is give it the location of your FOAF file, the browser will prompt you to select which cert you have installed that you want to use. (there are cool things you can do with remembering a user too)

This solution is elegant in two ways - no password entry, it uses a cryptographically secure certificate for authorization (much more secure than a password hash), the application in question can also pull/cache YOUR FOAF DATA (name, address, alias, whatever you have in there) so you NEVER HAVE TO FILL OUT A PROFILE FORM AGAIN.

That's effing cool, man. Why don't we see it? Because it's easier to use Facebook Connect and get the same stuff nowadays then it is to try and educate internet users on A) what is a FOAF file? and B) where/how do you generate it and host it when Facebook basically has all of that already (I know, once is personally owned, the other is owned by Facebook but we can't always control the ebb and flow of internet mass consciousness even if something is "more elegant" or "stupidly better").
Both Venus and Mars have good odds of having had liquid water oceans in the past. From what I understand, Venus would possibly be habitable today if it had a carbon cycle and planetary magnetic field to prevent the runaway greenhouse effect.
How to lose 100 pounds in a year
This entry is 4 years old and the pictures haven't been updated yet? Why did you post this?
We are rapidly approaching the day where humans can colonize other worlds. maybe that is how we got here.
Canada withdraws from Kyoto protocol
I agree with the importance of explicit learning.

> Grammar is language; it defines language.

Yet somehow if me says grammatically not correct sentence understand you me quite well. Language evolves by people constantly bending, breaking and rethinking rules of grammar. And language evolves constantly, it's not a static thing. Even contemporary English is very different from what was used 300 years ago.

Maybe we have different understanding of the word "to know"? I "know" my language by having something I could describe by a mental bayesian probability model of the fuzzy structure that is "the language people use". Without any explicit grammar inside. I use both Polish (native) and English via "sounds OK to me = it's correct" heuristic, trained mostly on talking, reading and listening, and to the lesser extent on grammar exercises.
Change is Imminent for Software Systems
It very much depends on your project. Give more details and you will get a much better answer.
A part of me wonders if this isn't a factor of people trying to give more importance to the importance of their roles than is, in fact, justified. The doorknob example from the article is a good one in this respect. Instead of calling it a "doorknob", a complicated, important-sounding analog is used. Who's using it? Someone who feels that doorknobs are not that important, and that putting "doorknob salesman" on their resumé won't look nearly as impressive as "residential access tool marketer".

Human nature, I suppose. Still, it makes the language less useful.
I hope that's stock photography. Working out in a business suit is offensive. I can't even wear my hoodie at the gym without overheating. And I look like that dude on the left.

Just sayin'.

(explicitly I am just sayin' that we need to revisit the expectations of attire if we're going to conflate the notions of work and exercise).
It takes a lot of time, but the calculation was definitely something I had to do in elementary school.

In terms of proofs, they are pretty basic, and I learned that stuff in third grade. I mean, I went in and out of gifted programs, but I think the better question is how long does it take to get people to add integers correctly? Ten years?

I drove myself a lot as a child, and drove enough teachers crazy to have to switch schools about ten times before middle school, but I would be surprised if my experience is no longer strictly atypical for people seeking a world-class education.

Note: I didn't attend an Ivy-League, but I did end up skipping a few grades. All those were after elementary school, so it's likely I was ahead of students at the time -- ahead of average, not ahead of the expectations we should have for first class minds seeking a higher education in an age when this is exceptionally uncommon.
To clarify, Nick Johnson is referring to the original paper on the topic ("Some approaches to best match file searching" by Burkhard and Keller in 1973). It's a common frustration that ACM archives are not freely available to the public.

In the comments, "Sarah" notes that the paper can be found here:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.160...

BTW, Nick's Blog often has gems and is well worth a regular read.
Japanese scientiststs' solution for radioactive soil: Dump it in the sea!
> Taking this a step further, finding intelligent life out there is simply impossible

What? How can you take this position? That's absolutely crazy. Really, you're going to take observations from just a couple of decades and determine that finding something is "impossible"?!

No way. There's absolutely no way that finding intelligent life is impossible.

> The reason our intelligence is unique to only humans on our planet is largely because we defined intelligence as traits that only we possess

Slow down there. Nobody is looking for "human intelligence" on other planets. Maybe that's why you think it's impossible. I'd say dolphins are intelligent. So are some of our computer systems. There's a lot more intelligence that we can recognize that isn't like ours.

> Finding life out there that would be socially compatible with us is ridiculously unlikely.

I agree. That has nothing to do with intelligence though.

> That life would have had to spring up in an evolutionary environment identical to ours and that's so unlikely that it might as well be impossible.

identical? Sure, nearly impossible. But why bother making it identical? Do you need 20.946% O2 in the atmosphere? Nope! There are probably billions of planets in the Milky Way alone that could support Earth-like life, if we extrapolate from the Kepler mission data.

The chances are better than you might think.
Ask HN:What's the price of gasoline in your country? (currency/unit you choose)
I'm putting the numbers into WikiOverland.org, so you'll be able to view the prices in any currency and unit combination you prefer.

In your comment, please state the name of the country first.
Before posting, search to see if your country has already been commented on.
If so, and you want to add more data, or disagree, please reply to the comment for your country so they stay together.

Something like the following would be awesome:

Argentina
Argentinian Pesos per liter

Normal 4.00
Super 4.42
Premium 5.21
Ultra Diesel 3.57
Diesel Euro (low sulfur) 5.48

Thanks!
Phonegap is a framework and can be extended fairly easily to patch in missing functionality. The real limitation is the speed. Everything is slower including loading, screen transitions, responses from button presses, etc. If you're making something very simple that won't suffer from being a slower then Phonegap is a great option. If you need performance you should learn Objective C.
I have the same problem. Once I realized that I was not just stupid and the other person was simply not communicating well, I began to try repeating what they just said back to them in "normal language" to ensure I had understood them correctly.

When I did this, two things happened: people began to think that I was really smart, and I realized that I could usually repeat whatever I wanted and the person would agree with me.
Unlucky numbers in Japan
I agree. I'd rather people graduate high school actually knowing algebra than pretending to know calculus.
Note that this is a person who makes budget decisions. Whenever people tell me math isn't important, I can't help but compare it to spelling/grammar mistakes: a member of the school board would never send out a professional document that had spelling errors, but a math error, hey, what's the problem? It's just the budget.
You can drag the label above the "cut" to make it always visible.
I recommend reading _How to Find a Habitable Planet_.

The first half of the book is about why Earth is habitable, and then it goes to project that against what the search for a similar world requires.

The "snowball earth" scenarios were terrifying (basically, you get an ice ball that is very reflective and thus stays ice, unless you have something like plate tectonics to dirty-up the atmosphere to the point where some insolation can be retained).
Well I mean, how would you define intelligent life that does not possess metacognition at a minimum?
Schneier on Security: Carrier IQ Spyware
I think jerf isn't really phrasing his position in a palatable way, even though he's right. Since he's referencing Lockhart, I'll go with that. The crux of Lockhart's argument is that math is actually really beautiful, intriguing, and exciting, and the legalistic, browbeating manner in which it is currently taught basically takes all the beauty and excitement out of it.

Assuming your high school was like mine, when you learned algebra, trig, and calculus, you were probably taught a few of the whats, some of the hows, but almost none of the whys. It's only in upper-level undergrad and graduate courses that the beauty really starts to be taught in earnest.

You're absolutely right to say that putting kids through years of proofs would probably make them hate math even more. Again, that's largely due to the way proofs are taught, especially at the secondary school level. They're all just a bunch of rules listed one after another, "doing a proof" is basically like explaining all the rules of chess to someone who's never played before, and then asking them to put the board in a particular state, thirty-two moves into a game. It ends up as a bunch of trial-and-error guessing... it's frustrating and it's boring. Sure, there are a few savants or folks whose brains are wired in such a way that it's either easy or interesting, but it's just painful for most folks, because there's no intrigue.

It's not until three or four years into college that most people are exposed to proofs as an intellectually stimulating game, where intuition plays an even bigger role than "looking at a list of rules and deciding which one fits".

But we don't get that in high school. We're not taught how to intuit something and then map the rules to our intuition. In fact, we're usually taught that this is wrong!
Well it seems you have an unfair advantage here :). You have been watching him go through it and taking notes. He is also going to advise you on product, growth, etc. I hope you win this bet, however you must win it by at least 3 folds (maybe 3 times the number of users, or 3 times the revenue) to be able to call it a clean win. Good luck and congrats to you guys (it wasn't just him, obviously. I am sure your support tremendously helped).
Luxury sports cars in costly Japan pile-up
The 15 Most Massively Popular Websites You've Never Heard Of
Bing Becomes Hub Of Microsoft's New Xbox Experience
I just quickly moved through the books first few chapters, but as someone who is self taught, I would have killed to have something like this when I was starting. Its well written, well design, and peeks interest by keeping the exercises fun and concise. Awesome job, you could really put together a series with this as your template.
You should listen to a Geordie for a few minutes. They literally use 'like' as punctuation.
Medical Mirror takes your pulse by analyzing your face
That applies in general, not just in the corporate world. Lazy writing implies lazy thinking.
The abstract of that paper underscores my point that if you've thought about it you can predict better what creates happiness.

I don't agree that only by reading "studies about biases in affective forecasting" can you be good at predicting what makes you happy.

I know if I eat good food with good friends or family I'll be happy. I've never read that in a study, but it works every single time with me. I know plenty of other ways too.
Bunnie is well worth reading. This includes an interesting descriptions of various forms of "counterfeit" parts.

Some other Bunnie stuff that's been mentioned here:

https://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=site:news.ycombinator.co...
Ordered List is a GitHubber
Twitter's 2011 year in review features everything Egypt
SQL is not relational algebra. I think the more mathematic ideas in the article should be viewed in the context of relational alebra and not in the context of SQL.

So, the problems with NULLs is an SQL problem not a relational algebra problem. The 'flip side' is really the flip side of relational algebra and not SQL even though the article is not very clear in keeping the two separate.
How to stumble upon a great business idea
Jessica is clearly 'inspired' by Bob Staake.
Side note: I had no idea that Jean-Louis Gassée was writing financial stuff like this. I always wondered what he wound up doing after Apple and Be.
This is fixed in Firefox 10 IIRC; addons default to compatible (it's preffed off right now, but the plan is to enable it for release).
Unemployment is lower? Bull.
> You mean that people just don’t sort their garbage at all, the company does it for them?

Yes, precisely. The usual caveats apply: no hazardous waste (hazardous chemicals, biohazard waste).

> Is it technically plausible, with decent material recovery levels?

It seems to be, based on Charlottesville's experience. I don't know the recovery levels. That is a good topic for research.

> Don’t the recyclable materials lose value by putting them together with regular garbage?

They do, but my understanding is the lost value is much less than relying on residential pre-sorting of recyclable materials. The idea is not to compare the efficacy of single-stream with a hypothetically perfect human recycler, but with recycling rates in actual practice among residents after decades of attempted recycling education.

I was told by a reporter in Charlottesville that single-stream compares favorably, but I am having trouble finding actual rates for comparison in my quick Googling today. So if you're interested, take my comment as a basis for further research into the issue.
First off, some people have NDAs where they must not store any kind of file in the cloud, nor disclose anything at all (like the load of a server, graphs, the specs of the hardware, the used software, anything related to the company, its clients, its visitors or its services) to any third party.

So, as you may see, there's a point for this.

Also, don't forget that all you want for the replication already exists. You can easily replicate the mongodb data to another machine or back it up and save it somewhere else periodically.

As for giving each machine a unique id, this is a cool idea, but this implies that you have enough resources to set up your own monitoring system to monitor multiple hosts. That implies that you can implement something redundant.
New Achilles Heel In Cancer Cells Discovered By Scientists
There is a huge difference between the two assignments. If you are communicating and supporting your ideas in half the words or slides, then you are not going into enough depth, or you've chosen a topic of lesser complexity. There is a good pedagogical reason that length is mandated. If you are "just filling out paper," to meet the word requirement, you've misunderstood the assignment, and possibly cheated yourself.
Yes, but I'll never trust enough a company to give it all my login infos.
China’s Social Media Revolution
Nice, I checked that out. It looks like you store the encrypted private key in session storage (i.e. a glorified cookie). My main concern would be how to back up that private key. As a technically savvy user, I shouldn't have a problem with that, but I'm not sure how a novice could manage while still keeping everything "Dead Simple". (I suppose a "backup to cloud" option could be arranged somehow.)

Another problem in my particular case is that I have my browser set to clear all cookies upon exit. I'd obviously have to change that, because otherwise I'd lose my private key every time I closed the browser. But that isn't the concern of DSWI I know.

I also checked out BrowserID briefly, but as I understand it that requires all logins to go through a central server. Consequently they need to have a "privacy policy" which "promises" not to track your online behavior. That is not true with a system like DSWI, which avoids any central repository or authentication server.
They could play a Bach piece at 5, or they write stunning prose, or any of the other remarkable things some kids do that apparently don't fall in your bafflingly narrow definition of "gifted"?