skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It could even be worse than that. The people could just be his friends, or alt accounts (unlikely).

I have heard about this several times and I find it extremely difficult to believe that this is real. Not that I doubt that a superhuman AI could possibly convince people to let it out, but I don't believe that a human, no matter how persuasive, could convince another human over IRC to go against something that they have decided in advance when you know they are purposefully just trying to convince you of something that you don't believe.

The fact that none of the chat logs are released makes me only more incredulous. I would understand if the author wanted to do two or three trials with the same strategy which could be in some way ruined by revealing it ahead of time (which already seems implausible) but at this point there is literally no conceivable reason to keep this a secret other than that it is a sham.
Like most things, it's not an extreme of one or the other. Once you stop reading and start doing, it's not like you can never go back to reading. If you dive into doing right away, that doesn't mean you can't go back and read.

Studying, doing, reviewing is a good feedback loop. You study what you're going to learn in small chunks, spend some time grinding it out and working on it the best you can, then stepping back and reviewing your progress or lack thereof. Then back to reading, either reviewing what you read before, or moving onto the next chunk if you've mastered the previous one.
I do as well, and wish there were more research available on internet advertising

Have you actually looked? It's one of the most actively researched fields in the world at the moment.

Try http://www.iab.net/insights_research to start.

I'm sure a few companies at the top of the pyramid make money

This is absolutely, completely untrue. One of the reasons internet advertising is so popular is because its effectiveness can be proven - advertising companies can show how people exposed to ads buy at a higher rate. The improvement in rate can be calculated exactly, which shows the advertiser exactly how much they should spend.

Take a look at http://www.aimia.com.au/enews/IAB/IAB%20Retail%20Study%20-%2... (skip to roughly half way thorough).

There they promoted a new product in one market exclusively online, and did no promotion in the other market. Sales in the promoted market were 11% higher than the control.

Don't believe it? Try it yourself - I wanted to understand it better, so signed up for an affiliate account and did some Facebook advertising. It worked quite well - I was able to make around $15 for every $1 spent (obviously this was a very specific market segment).
Maybe it's rare, but it's growing. I've used Git/Github on my last few C# projects, and HG/Kiln before that.
Just to throw up a counter example. I spent a ridiculous amount of time in Photoshop using warp when what I really wanted was liquify. 10 minutes of reading could have fixed that.
This is what TerraPower is building: http://www.terrapower.com/Technology/TravelingWaveReactor.as...

Here's Bill Gates' TED talk from February 2010 in which he describes the tech http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html
There are WIN32 binaries linked to from the official GIT site. I mainly use mac but I have had to use the windows binaries a few times in the last few months and everything works fine.
This is exactly what's been burning me about this whole "experiment" since I read about it a few months ago, and went looking (unsuccessfully) for what actually happened in the "tests". I find it hard to see this as anything more than some sort of self-aggrandizing publicity stunt.
Tell HN: BBC Newsnight reports Higgs Boson sighting will be revealed next week
Lengthy piece on BBC Newsnight reporting Higgs sighting at LHC is to be reported next week - any more details?
noelwelsh is responding to donjigweed, not the article.
or depression
Verizon 4G LTE is down, nationwide outage confirmed
Spotify partners with Rolling Stone and Brisbane start-up We Are Hunted
Unit Testing Http Handlers with Auto Mocking and the Testable pattern
Average click through rates on mobile are almost 9 time that on the web (in Australia, anyway) - see Fact #4 on http://www.aimia.com.au/enews/iab/Website/FINAL%20-%20Mobile...
How about, company was acquired by public company, employees were convinced to transition options into a promissory note that would eventually convert to more stock with more value, company folds, employees get sued for value of promissory notes? They tried to sue me for $113,000. We settled for $500 in lawyers fees. Never trust anyone in your company when it comes to this stuff, always get outside legal advise. I've been a millionaire on paper 3 times now?
Google releases list of top 2011 searches
Saw this before. The key words are....annualized and revenue.

They did not report mobile quarterly figures or costs and profits.

But. we can extrapolate:

$2.5 Billion annualized == $625 million quarterly mobile revenue.

Elsewhere in the earnings report:

$10 Billion total quarterly revenue

One of the costs broken out was TAC (Traffic Acquisition Costs,) -- these were $.25 for each $1 of revenue.

Assuming that TAC costs are consistent across mobile and non-mobile that means:

quarterly mobile revenue - TAC == $470 million

ANAICT, Gross margins were 40% of revenue - TAC

quarterly gross mobile profit == $188 million

No figures were given, so let's assume that 50% of mobile comes from Android phones (50 % from iPhones and all other smart phones)

quarterly gross mobile profit from Android == $94 million

No direct expenses/costs were given for mobile, Android development, etc.

If we assume Google has 10 people on the Android team @ $100,000 each, per year (Pay, office, equipment, benefits, etc.) or $.25 million per quarter

That would leave:

Android quarterly profit before taxes == $93.75 million

Obviously, these are just SWAG estimates (and I hope my math and logic are correct) -- but they are an attempt to put in context the headline of this article"

---------

Google announces $2.5 billion in mobile revenue/run rate == $93.75 million Android quarterly profit after taxes (30%)

$93.75 Million quarterly profits from Android is peanuts. Apple earns more selling smart covers.
This should be a default feature on every phone.
Took a look at the Django Cache Machine they mention, at the invalidation scheme (http://jbalogh.me/projects/cache-machine/#cache-manager). It stores a "flush list", linking objects to their originating, cached queries. Interesting, though looks like something that could get out of hand quickly - are they storing the "flush list" itself in the cache (else how do all nodes learn of the invalidation) ? That's interesting, though a little creepy (the list gets very large as they appear to be keying on the SQL itself ?) Then they have the invalidation flow along all the relationships - maybe that's OK, but maybe it leads to a lot of excessive invalidation. Also they have a notion of how to avoid a certain kind of race condition there, caching ``None`` instead of just deleting, but it's not clear to me how that helps - you really need a version ID there if you want to prevent that particular condition (else thread 1 puts None, thread 2 sees None, OK we'll put a new one there, thread 3, which started before all of them, doesn't see the None, puts stale data in).

Really if you're caching SQL queries and such, you really, really should be doing little to no modification of cached data - this library makes it seem "easy" which it's not.
What a beautiful landing page. I like how there's a silent video demoing the product. So much better than a few screenshots.
It's really sad to see
Silicon Valley: Looking for a technical co-founder. Who wants to grab a beer?
My company is sending me to Sacramento for a job. Once I finish what I am tasked to do, I will be heading down to San Francisco/Silicon Valley to take in some sights and get a feel for the region.

I figure why not look for a co-founder while I'm in the area. Who wants to grab lunch and discuss my idea?

I have one other partner working with me on this. Our site is focusing on events of all kinds. My partner and friend has chosen to focus on bands/concerts initially, while I have several other ideas. Facebook events is broken. I aim to fix this and to add a ton of new shiny features.

Where do you come in? We need someone to grease the wheels on this. Both he and I are technical but not enough to ramp this up, quickly. The pesky job is getting in the way as well. Sure, I could go to Elance or vWorker and get some of this done but I think what we really need is someone just as vested in this as we are.

Reach out to me on here. I will be in Sacramento December 11th, possibly heading to San Francisco that night. December 12th I'll be in Silicon Valley most of the day until about 6 when I'll be heading to SFO to head home.
I could. Or I could just look at the thing they already did for me. Much like I could create a bootloader configuration when I install Ubuntu, but that's already done for me.

There are a lot of things we could do on our own. Sometimes we don't have to. Sometimes, some set of people would prefer we did have to, but that doesn't mean we all have to acquiesce to their desires.
My guess is the Americans NIMBYed him right off the continent. I only hope they don't NIH the results once they work out how to produce clean safe reactors over there.
The basic premise is correct. Most people on HN are liable to read too much, and not do enough.

Personally I believe you have to do both for the fastest learning process. The "read, do, reflect" cycle. If you're not actively "doing" then you will read and associate things quite differently. Without doing, you can build up a very strong theoretical knowledge about a subject, but in doing, not realise the correct time to act on that knowledge. It can also lead to analysis paralysis, as you /know/ there is a bigger picture, and you're trying to figure it out - where as the guy who never read, but just learned by doing, never got slowed down by wondering about that bigger picture.

I know people who just do, and never read - they miss out on a lot of shortcuts they could easily learn, or understanding the bigger picture, motivations etc.

Reflection happens quite naturally for most of us here, but you'll often find it works best when you are actively writing ideas down, or communicating them to others. It then fuels going and reading or doing to fill knowledge gaps.

If you're not doing, then the next best thing you can do is mental rehearsal - if you /did/ have to apply this skill/knowledge to a real situation, how would you do it. You can then find yourself self-coaching when you do the activity for real.

As an aside, this is why hobbies are a Good Thing (tm). They allow you to have different sets of associations, so when I'm learning about a new area, I can link an idea to say organising a scuba dive, rather than something like a sprint planning session.
This is true.

And because of the implications of what you just said above. I'll leave it at that.

EDIT: In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have ended the post in that way. Instead, I'll acknowledge that this solution to silly patents is certainly viable. But that at the same time calling it "The best possible thing" seems somewhat narrow in the grand scheme of things. After all, it DOES require people to die to be workable.
23 Tech Superstars Poised To Own 2012
Google Analytics integrates social activities
Dart on WebKit
You are incorrect, the halting problem only proves that you cannot solve it in the general case. A very significant subset of programs can be statically determined; it's easy to prove that "main(){}" halts and that "main(){while(true);}" doesn't. It should be trivially obvious that you could group all programs into "Halts" or "Unknown" with no false positives simply by executing the program for X steps and observing the result.

If this was actually a concern of the programmers, they could design the program carefully to ensure it falls into the Halts category.
There is also positive feedback in markets due to irrational exuberance and herd behaviour.
I did not in any way expect this to be a serious windfall for me. I also didn't mean to imply that this was a windfall for investors (who were merely reimbursed), or anyone but founders (albeit a small one for them).

Also, while IANAL, that paperwork implied that the company was purchased by Google (at least technically), contrary to what Techcrunch said. Part of my reasoning for not wanting to name the company and founders was this exact reason: it's hard to get a full and complete picture of a complex situation from just one person through a couple sentences.
From the stories people are sharing here, it sounds like a lot of startups are "non-profits". ;)
This is something that is creeping me out about the Pi, does the processor exist? I know that is a weird question but if you go to the Broadcom site and search for BCM 2835 it doesn't find anything, if you search for it you can find this page: http://www.broadcom.com/products/BCM2835 but that has no real data on the chip. The great guys at Octopart.com can't find it either.

It supposed to run Linux but without a datasheet for the CPU and its peripheral how does it do that? And what sort of support will Broadcom offer?

The FAQ says "In general, you need to look to see whether the program you want can be compiled for the ARMv6 architecture.", ARM V6 (aka ARM 11) rather than Cortex architecture seems a bit behind kinda.

And the discussions in the forums about details of the chip being redacted in comments here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum?mingleforumaction=viewtopic...

Then we compare the T.I. OMAP 4430 chip (used in the Chumby, Pandaboard, etc) which is the only other ARM chip that can do HD Video and it costs $15/chip in quantity.

As someone who has built this sort of thing in the past I am really wondering if they are going to pull it off or flame out. Clearly I hope they pull it off but am really wondering how.
It's a little different because the weatherman isn't forcing his predictions on you.

The debate takes on a different dimension when you're talking about political policy, when the weatherman passes a law forcing everyone to wear raincoats on days of high chances of precipitation.
Throwing Cold Water on MacRuby for iOS
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/9657547.stm
Company boards can do this from time to time in takeover situations.

Consider: Berkshire-Hathaway bought the entirety of Burlington Northern Santa Fe for a fixed price, negotiated with the BNSF board. They bought it outright and did a merger. They didn't go to each individual shareholder and ask permission. Many shareholders probably weren't even paying attention enough to check in their portfolio.

The alternative is that mergers are impossible and you're stuck with having a 95%-owned subsidiary with its own corporate structure and all the overhead that entails.

(Of course this is prone to abuse. There are laws to protect minority shareholders' rights.)
This has been done for a long time on many sites. The Firefox download is one that comes to mind.

I see this as more of a no-brainer for a software download than a standout example of brilliant UX.
Umm... I don't get it. Care to explain?
Which is why I use hg instead of git.

I totally see where you're coming from, and I personally think hg is great. I just don't want your comment to scare windows developers off. For the record: running git on windows is great.
May be this deserves to be a separate question on HN :)
Gnome 3 is Product of the Year in LinuxJoural Readers' Choice Awards 2011
It comes from not having much experience with haggling and having a good and instinctual distrust of people who use the terms "rockstar" (still lol) or write blogs about ass-kicking.

Best way to get started is to watch "Real Deal" on the History Channel and then try selling your old junk on craigslist.
An Entrepreneur’s Rival in China: The State
Railo is a powerful, open source and (mostly, Adobe) CF compatible engine. Its very fast and feature-rich. If you need to work with CF then definitely have a peek at Railo.

http://www.getrailo.org/
In the kernel tree this is clearly Linus but in other parts of the system it isn't always clear whether or not there even is someone in this role.

In the case of Ubuntu I think this definitely happens, although AFAIK the high-level design discussions & decisions largely happen behind closed doors (happy to be corrected on that point.)

In this case I wouldn't be surprised if there was a requirement/design decision to have the system explicitly remind the user if there were pending package/security updates and also prompting you about available new distro versions. At least, on default Ubuntu systems the motd does these things and has for some time - and it feels to me like a "by design" thing.

Why they rolled it from an update-motd standalone package to a built-in part of the pam module, I have no inkling over, though.
Bootstrap passes NodeJS as #1 most watched GitHub repository
Interestingly, yes. In fact they are clearly stating it:

"It is a Download.com policy not to bundle open source software and we will continue to take pains to ensure this does not happen again."
I really don't think the ASP.NET MVC can be classified as a black sheep. Neither are things like Linq or Entity Framework. Microsoft is still doing a lot of the interesting stuff in-house.
If webmasters wanted a spartan base error they could easily have one though.
> who says fauk-hawke

It rhymes with "Mohawk". "Faux" is the French word for fake, pronounced like "fow". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faux

Except using a French word in the context is pretentious and phoney. Maybe there's a word for that...
> To get started on one of your lingering interests, you probably don’t need to read about it as much as you think. Go. Do it. And learn from there.

before you "do", you have to read how to do (otherwise you wont know where to start, and will most likely end up getting bored and give up ) , do it , and then read how "they" do it.
that one more article could piece together the puzzle you're stuck on. while i agree that learning by doing and breaking stuff is the way to go, reading is just as important to me.
Also, this was the case in plenty of printed technical manuals for any dual platform software.
Thank you for pointing out the primary culprit here--Congress and its lame legislation in this area.

The headline's use of 'legalize' only perpetuates the confusion surrounding Supreme Court decisions. It is the underlying legislation that gives life to the patent claim not the fact that the Court upholds patents that succesfully adhere to a misguided law.

Ambiguous or otherwise weak legislation leaves the court in a no-win situation of shaping public policy via judicial opinions.
Hey joebadmo - thanks for your thoughtful comment! I realize that I have skipped some of that backstory and it makes people read my thoughts on selling/self-promotion with more wariness.

I hope to write more about this in my next post in the series (Why Smart People Suck at Selling) but basically I was a nice, energetic and shy child to the point of being bullied. Part of my shift in thinking was learning to stand up for myself and realizing that I was responsible for getting what I wanted out of life -- and that the best way to do that was to help other people get what THEY want.

Anyways, more on that later. Thanks for your thoughts.
Turn off Lion fullscreen mode in prefs->general.
I think this is a relatively new phenomenon. 20 years ago you had to try hard to find an exhaustive amount of information on any specific topic, and what you did find tended to have been through a few gatekeepers. Now you can fritter away the days reading "useful" information because it's so prolific and readily available almost anywhere you are.
Above The Law Follows NYT: Commenting Available at Writer's Discretion
downvotes?

For providing a factual statement that the word simplistic isn't always perjorative?
Transbacteria have existed for over a billion years, and yet there are still more bacteria than transbacteria (which include us among their ranks). The assumption that a single unboxed transhuman would spell doom for the human race seems unduly alarmist.
This is an extremely foolish title, and the tone of the article is likewise foolish. It's highly unlikely the Supreme Court has not read the amicus briefs, and almost impossible that they will not before passing judgement. These are not 9 people picked off the street and thrown on the bench to judge what the application of law is, and they don't mess around. Reading pretty much any Supreme Court decision will show you how intelligent these nine justices are.

It's popular to condemn the Supreme Court's decisions if you disagree with them, and it seems equally popular to blame them on the Supreme Court's fundamental misunderstanding of <x>. I'm not saying the SCotUS is flawless—hardly, they are made up of people—but it would behoove authors and readers if you started from the base assumption that you are dealing with brilliant jurists. Indeed, that is how lawyers have to prepare.

The lawyers arguing against the patent were likely aware both of the justices' intelligence and their general interpretations of patent law, therefore chose not to tread the path of invalidating medical patents in general. The questions asked by the justices were fair. Not expressing skepticism does not mean there is no skepticism, for one. We don't find that out until the decisions are written.

Whether this was a case where someone should have gone after medical patents in general is up for debate. In particular, it seems unlikely that the Mayo clinic, which probably has its own medical patents, would try to invalidate the concept itself.

If you read some more of the questions and interactions, you'll see that the Supreme Court seems anything but oblivious: they're trying to probe what should and should not be patentable in a field that involves actions and reactions that are all based in chemical fact. If neither they nor the lawyers can provide a satisfactory test to determine this, then all they can do is decide the specifics of this case.

True change in this area really is something where the Court can only do so much. The definitions of patents in general are determined by Congress and its laws. If we want to change them, we have to focus there. SCotUS has merely become our backup because it's been relatively difficult, particularly in the last 40 years or so, to convince Congress to pass laws that are potentially damaging in any way to the bottom lines of businesses.
A recent article in the New York Times called "Generation Sell" also talks about this issue: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-entrepr...

"Well, we’re all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base. We’re all selling something today, because even if we aren’t literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we’re always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted."
You might be interested to hear about the Ticketmaster class action settlement I learned I was a party to in my email this morning.

Lawyers get $16 million, members of the class get coupons on future Ticketmaster purchases.
Why waiting?
This judgement needs to be appealed and she needs to get a %$# lawyer.
At the risk of taking the bait, a cruise missile is powered through its entire flight to the target. A ballistic missile is powered only at the beginning of the flight, and then it arcs unpowered (ballistically) to its target.

A cannonball is not like a cruise missile.