skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Answer your "What is your shoe size?" security question...
I think "libertarian" is close but not quite right (unless you are coming from Chomsky's viewpoint, which is a niche within a niche, at least as far as US libertarian thinking is concerned).

If you take libertarianism to mean "allow anything that is consensual and does not involve externalities", then proprietary software as implemented today is totally fine. The user consents to an agreement that amounts to "I'll give you the output of my compiler, but I'm not going to give you the input. Also, you have to promise not to redistribute it."

Of course, setting up the details of that arrangement for every creative work would be a huge hassle, and copyright is an attempt (in my opinion a failed one) to streamline it. One way to envision copyright in a libertarian framework is a legal presupposition that when I tell you a "creative secret" (copyrighted work), you'll keep it secret (won't redistribute) unless I give you explicit permission (a license).

*Edit: to elaborate on why I think copyright is a failed streamlining of the above framework, I'll just give one example. If I broadcast my "creative secret" out loud (or over the EM spectrum) then I can't reasonably expect it to be secret. The people who listen to it and hear my "secret" have never formed a consensual agreement with me. Thus, copyright as it stands gets twisted into "you can't participate in public communications without promising to pretend that various things you hear are owned secrets"
Pentacene is synthesized from benzene, and the primary source for benzene is currently petroleum. It doesn't have to be, but benzene has always been a relatively cheap "garbage" byproduct of other products (first coke, then petroleum fuels). It is unlikely that over the long term extraction of fossil fuels would be a cost-efficient means of deriving chemicals that are now heavily subsidized by the primary products; bacterial synthesis would probably much more practical. That is to say one shouldn't dismiss non-fuel petrochemicals simply because the current cheapest source is petroleum -- it won't always be unless the demand for petrochemical fuels (or coal/coke) remains high. Ironically, then, things that are now petrochemicals could spell the end of the petrochemical industry if they contribute to a reduction in demand for fuel.
Luckily, business isn't a field where only the young make an impact: Colonel Sanders started KFC at 65, Henry Ford started Ford Motor Company at 34...most entrepreneurs aren't 25.

Also, consider architecture: most architects don't hit their prime until 50. But yeah, life is short, so don't waste too much time.
This really hits home for me.

I could have written this, except that I can already see 30 a ways back there in the rear view mirror.

I have just two things that I think are very important to say about this.

1) Don't worry about the fact that you're 30. That line about artists in their 30s or 40s is BS. There is no magical age at which you have to have produced your magnum opus. Never let the desire to "do something great" prevent you from doing the work. In fact, that's most likely what is keeping you FROM doing your great work. As someone who suffers from the same "idea addiction," I can say that one of the reasons people like us always chase new ideas is that we are trying to have our great moment, and are always afraid that if we buckle down and commit to one of our ideas, it might not be that Great Work, and we'll end up missing the next great idea when it comes along. So, we are always looking for the Best Possible Thing, and we don't get down to the work that really has to happen.

2) Even superstars have to do the dishes. We hear so much about the famous artists, businessmen, inventors, musicians, whatever, but all we hear about are their glories. It's boring to talk about all the days of the long grind, just plugging away to make the donuts. For every eureka moment, there are hundreds of hours of everyday work.
I'm 40 years old, and I've produced, in my estimation, one "amazing art." It's a magazine I started and ran for eight years. In retrospect, I feel like it was a non-stop party, but if I really think about it, the only reason it succeeded was that I had no choice but to slug it out and put in the 90-hour weeks of boring copy editing, ad sales, bookkeeping, etc. It's because at the time, it was the ONLY IDEA I HAD.
Now that I have dozens of ideas at any given time, ironically, I get none of them done.
Don't try to create a Great Work. Pick something you enjoy and have fun making, and just make the hell out of it. If you're lucky, it might even be "amazing art."
For a browser that seems to be built with security and privacy as top priorities, it seems to be missing some obvious features. How do you allow first-party scripts and cookies while still blocking third-party scripts and cookies? Does it support surrogate scripts like NoScript does, to deal with sites that actively try not to work when you block ads and tracking scripts? Where's the AdBlock-style blacklist?
Top new social media tools of 2011
I doubt they announce it. With these kind of things that will spread virally, you only need to "infect" a small population for it to spread.
On the other hand, a lot of new research (including possibly ground-breaking theoretical results) are only possible now that we have access to large data.

We might be initially processing the large data using relatively simple techniques, but on the reduced data, we can now run more sophisticated methods that actually work because the underlying data comes from a huge number of samples.

As but one example, in computer vision, the concept of "attributes" -- automatically labeling objects using descriptive words instead of categorical ones, i.e., "this thing is like..." rather than "this thing is..." -- has opened the door to a number of exciting advances. One is the concept of "zero-shot learning": automatically recognizing an object that you've never seen an instance of before simply via a description. For example, one could recognize beavers as "small, four-legged furry rodents with big teeth and a flat tail", without having ever seen a beaver before. The training data for this classifier need not include beavers, but only images which match the individual attributes, not necessarily all in the same image -- small, four-legged, furry, rodent, big teeth, flat tail.

This kind of thing was not really possible before, because there just wasn't enough data to train reliable classifiers for each attribute in any kind of automated way.

Finally, as I alluded to at the beginning, these individual attribute classifiers are often relatively simple algorithms, such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Yet, the 2nd-stage algorithms that use the attribute values to do something useful, such as the zero-shot learning application described above, are often much more involved/advanced techniques.
i think that the personal value of art is making it and the importance it has to you. you can't hand down the judgment of how "good" your art is to somebody else, or in fact judge it at all. the only thing it will lead to is making yourself feel bad. the beauty is in making, not wanting.
I think what the title meant is not "Your hard drive is too big. Period." but rather "Your hard drive is too big, you won't need so much space, so why don't you go for less space but much more speed, for the same price?".
The Recording Industry Likes to Make Me Look Like an Asshole
I've had this same problem and I finally put a stop to it this year. I actually took one of my abandoned projects and used the code for a new venture.

I always had this problem when I worked a corporate job. Mostly because I wasn't hungry for success. I always had that steady paycheck coming in and I could abandon my new project when I ran into the slightest difficulty.

I quit last year with 2+ years salary and I've been working on the same two projects since.
> Im not sure if it is easy enough to extract firefox history from its sqlite3 db

install http://code.google.com/p/sqlite-manager/ point it to history file in you profile directory

> It would also be cool to switch

there is sync built in. anyone know a good library for accessing? pref python.

edit: when i say i want a library i mean a client library for accessing data stored on sync server. want to build a page that displays my bookmarks.
I'd say that any command that can make something physical happen in the real world has a whole different set of security concerns than we've faced before. So its a serious concern.

But on the off chance that anyone missed the inside joke: http://xkcd.com/149/
Would it be economical to manufacture a GPU with 100's, 1,000's or even 10,000's of processing elements, but with much lower clock (say, 100MHz)?

Cores are physically quite small; a lower clock rate reduces power issues) and I suspect that it would also increase yeild rates (perhaps by using a thicker structures with a finer process, e.g. 45nm on a 32nm process).

One barrier may be that practitioners have few techniques for such massive parallelism (catch 22). OTOH, it seems certain than manufacturers would have done their sums, and worked out they can deliver greater performance with their present number/clock tradeoff.
Hey, as a 40-year-old, let me just say you're doing it right.

The cool thing about being 19 is you could fuck up totally for, like, five years and still be young enough to start completely over.

Bravo on learning to focus, bravo on chasing a girl around the West Coast, and bravo on following your gut.

Keep it up, the 40-year-old you will thank 19-year-old you for it one day.
Now it's time to bring the idea beyond code

Exactly! Try versioning data with ChronicDB:

http://chronicdb.com
What you could do is ask them for a bunch of random measurements, this is what i usually do when buying someone a gift, i just ask for shoe, clothes, ring, jeans size and like favorite color etc
Exactly. I've spent about $1600 so far on this PC, I have 6 hard drives and about 7 TB of disk space (plus 2x1TB external drives). One of those drives is an SSD, so all my programs launch fast and the documents I'm working with all open and compile quickly.
Reminds me of http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=i...
Await and Defer in Coffeescript core
Have you thought about finding a co-founder?

edit: I'm being voted down? I was dead serious, a co-founder could help keep him on track, as could he them.
It's going to take about 40-50 years to reproduce what humans can do in a restaurant today with robots. More likely, the food preparation process will be altered to allow for easier automation. With the exception of a supervisor/engineer (that position won't be automated for at least another 100 years) - I think we'll see a fully automated fast food restaurant in about 20-25 years - though some elements of the restaurant business (Cleaning, French Fries, Order taking) - will likely be automated sooner - there will be demonstration restaurants with 50% automation in about 10 years.

[note: And yes, I do realize that the above predictions will require radical advancements in automation that are not easy to predict - call me an optimist. :-) ]
Stream webcam w/ Javascript, NodeJS, Android, Opera Mobile, Web Sockets & HTML5
Unnecessarily trollish.

A 1TB, 7200RPM drive costs like 100 bucks nowadays. At that price being able to store large amounts of crap is hardly a giant waste. Half the folks I know have burned that much money on collecting cases for their iPhones. For that matter, it might not even be necessary. Me, I've got a couple big disks, because my test data sets alone consume nearly a terabyte.

Second, I agree that having an SSD can be really beneficial. Which is why I got one. But that doesn't imply that the presence of a 1TB drive is harmful. It's absolutely OK to have both. Even a good idea, since they have different strengths. SSDs certainly have great bandwidth and latency, but price per gig is another metric that's worth considering.

For that matter, if most the work you're doing is CPU-bound and the software you work on already compiles in a second or two, there's a chance that an SSD doesn't really provide much value anyway. Booting might take longer, but any reduction in boot time below how long it takes to get my morning coffee is meaningless.
It will work with std::array.
Amazing art is rare at any age. It is better and healthier to focus on improving your eye and your craft.

I find encouragement in the quote by the painter of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa", Katsushika Hokusai:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai

"From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life.

I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention.

At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow.

If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature.

At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.

May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie."
That was one of the major hallmarks, I seem to recall, of OpenBSD - though we all remember it for security right now.
Apparently different brands also size things differently. A size 6 from Banana Republic would be a size 8 at GAP. People go to the expensive store and feel better because they bought a smaller size.
>>Today I need to get serious. No, drastic. Like a heroin addict going to rehab. This is my intervention. No more new ideas, no more domain names, no more client work, no more hypotheticals, no more I’ll do it tomorrow, no more wasted time. ”By the way, what have you ever done that’s so great?” I’ll have to get back to you.
<<

You can still have lots of new ideas but no matter how many ideas you have you should have one and only one project that you are committed to at a time and make sure you finish it no matter how long it takes.

One must realize that most ideas have a very similar chance of succeeding (slim to none) no matter how great they may seem at first and that one of the best ways to increase the chances for an idea to succeed is to commit to it.

Meanwhile, while you are working on your main idea you will probably realize that a lot of the pieces you are building (at least in software) you will be able to re-use for some of your other ideas.
Searchcode now supports regex code search
I don't see why you assume nothing as "wonderful" (which is a dubious perspective--I've used Mac OS quite a bit and it definitely isn't wonderful) could not have been created by the open source community. Look, for example, at KDE 4.7. It is much better than Mac OS (or, more accurately, worth is subjective so your whole argument about "wonderful Mac OS" is silly) and is open source.

Most users who are not programmers don't prefer anything--they use whatever the nice salesman at Best Buy or their slightly tech-savvy relative got them to use. On top of that, both Windows and Mac are infinitely more heavily marketed than Linux.

Proprietary software is always evil because it arbitrarily limits what you can do with something you've "bought". Almost everyone here hates DRM; proprietary software is basically software with DRM even if it isn't built in explicitly.

There is nothing wrong with making money; that whole argument is a fallacy (a false dichotomy). Just because you let people modify and redistribute the source does not preclude your making money; I bet Apple would be raking in just as much cash even if you could (and hey, some people do already) run Mac OS on different hardware.
I'd say both are somewhat true.

A lot of early "progress" in AI was found to not survive contact with the real world -- for example, most of computer vision. This was because collecting data was so expensive/difficult that only a few images could be captured for many experiments, and the methods they came up with often worked okay for those examples, but nothing else! So a lot of clever-seeming algorithms end up being rather useless in the real world, and progress was illusionary.

I find that in computer vision (my area of research), a fundamental component of many disparate problems is that you are trying to interpolate or extrapolate data in a very complicated underlying space, where linear approximations are completely unusable and optimization is too unconstrained. The key is to come up with suitable regularizers that can use prior information to constrain the problem appropriately.

Getting more data thus helps in two ways:

1. It reduces the amount of interpolation you have to do, since you can get a denser sampling of the space.

2. It allows you up to build up these priors using real data, making interpolation much better.
Heh, the cloud could use some outlines, perhaps silver?
This is a huge red flag. If the other co-founders won't show you this stuff, then you're not a co-founder in their eyes.

Without the information you need, all you can guess at is that someone is spending money without wanting to tell you - and this could be construed as stealing, since some of this money is yours (as an owner of the business).

There may also be tax consequences that you may be on the hook for too!

If you can't get the information from your co-founders, it will be necessary to get legal advice from a professional (not HN!)
(ahem) ...and Windows. Although I realy think that a clean, native LaTeX export for both of the current platforms (something that can avoid the current MultiMarkdown intermediate kludge) should be a higher priority than shuffling index cards on the corkboard on keyboardless devices.
You could, but this is Norvig so everyone who has read his previous stuff on big data knows immediately the former interpretation is meant.
very cool.

Of course, this won't be how food is prepared by robots ultimately. Each step will more likely be performed by small robots optimized for the task.

Food will also probably be driven from place to place by robotic vehicles. You might have one company making noodles and sending them to other companies five minutes away that incorporate them into a dish or other product.

Virtual supply chains will eliminate a lot of capital cost of setting up a restaurant and reduce the delays that destroy freshness and necessitate preservatives. Like fabless semiconductor companies, there might be prepless restaurants.

Another company may just do all the selection and slicing of your vegetables for you. They may be picked overnight at their peak and delivered to you so you can throw them in your omelet. The slicing might even happen on the trip to you.

I can see you selecting a recipe and a web app that prices and source all the ingredients for you. If you love to cook but don't enjoy finding or prepping some or all of the ingredients, such arrangements could help you save money and get better results.

Quite a few people eat the cheapest and most convenient foods they can find. But in the future, healthy food will be cheaper, fresher and will find you, hopefully making crap truly uncompetitive.
Kindle Fire Redirects Android Market Links to Amazon Appstore
FB For Android Finally Has More Active Users Than FB For iPhone
sqlite3 isn't that hard to work with, you know; for example, I only spent an hour or two writing a script to extract recently visited URLs from Firefox (http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs#browser-history) and I don't even know SQL.
Usually things like preferred stock and senior bonds are used to protect shareholders from bankruptcy, rather than acquisition.

When you issue stock to someone, you accept a fiduciary responsibility for increasing the value of those shares to the best of your ability. That fiduciary responsibility includes siding with their interests if and when a conflict of interest arises.

If the founders really did receive a large pay day while taking the value of their non-preferred stock to zero, then it sounds like that fiduciary responsibility was ignored.

So yes. Sleazy is an appropriate word.
Would US citizens be served better if there were more members of Congress?
Feynman springs to mind. A Nobel winning physicist with some success after a lot of practicing.
Terminator, a cross-platform GPL terminal emulator
Price per GB is a crap metric; price per used GB would be more relevant. If your test data is terabytes, you externalize to servers or lock yourself into only being able to work off a desktop. I also question whether or not a subset of that data could be run locally, and the CI system could run a full stack.

This just sounds like a justification of a bad test environment.

I also can't think of any project that compiles "in a second or two". Compilation and tests usually run build time into the minutes quickly, and time grows linearly, or possibly superlinearly with a project assuming even mild test coverage.

If you're locked into a desktop, you're locked into a network, and you can stick big data on a NAS or centralized server for re-use and testing. Or do you copy and paste the terabyte of data to every new developer?
“Say you sue me because you say my dog bit you,” he told the audience. “Well, now this is my defense: My dog doesn’t bite. And second, in the alternative, my dog was tied up that night. And third, I don’t believe you really got bit.”
His final defense, he said, would be: “I don’t have a dog.”

http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/richard_racehorse...
What you lose in piss & vinegar, you can replace with experience and wisdom.
This has struck a chord with me. New ideas are so addictive, but getting down to business to get one done takes a lot of effort. Sigh.
UMG will probably have to argue that MegaUpload is a criminal organisation that distributions disproportionately high infringing content, therefore, them producing essentially an advertisement that tells people about MegaUpload amounts to linking to infringing content. Under this circumstances, DMCA provisions apply because it is a method of circumventing copy protection.

In the end, this is not a battle over free speech. It is a battle by several private interests - YouTube, UMG and MegaUpload over content rights.
Being an artist and musician, I'm a little disturbed at businessmen thinking they're producing art.
Look again?
I know it's Hacker News, but there's really only one response to this. Rest assured I'd say it to your face:

You're an idiot.