skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've actually been in court for this kind of stuff. (Not as a defendant.) What actually happens is the prosecutor tells the court that they have X, Y, and Z evidence, which indicates the existence of W evidence, even though they can't actually get hold of W evidence. Then they don't charge you for W evidence directly, they just run the charges up for X, Y, and Z until you agree to a plea bargain anyway.

Your ability to defend against tactics like this is 100% dependent on the size of your bank account, which, by the way, may also be compromised if the prosecutors can convince the right people that you made any money at all on your illegal activities.

This is why I am mostly blasé about things like TrueCrypt's capabilities or this particular part of the law or what-have-you. If you're doing something illegal involving a computer, you're already screwed anyway -- unless you're independently wealthy and have some serious connections.
Apple's $46.33 Billion earnings in Comparisons
DrMelon and the rush of startups to mobile health
Apple Has Spent 100 Million+ Dollars On Android War
Most iPhone owners I know buy new versions every single time, just because they can. (And every time they show me how cool the apps are on their new phone, though I haven't been impressed in a while).
Not at all. That's opt-in.
Is this why megaupload was taken down?
I don't think cost has anything to do with it. If they really want it that badly they can do their best to open it. My due process is more important than their budget.
There are periods that I go without using it at home (I read a lot on the train with it), but when I do I am reminded of why I bought it. The internet in your hands really gets me
Best of luck, though this strikes me as a "Everyone should have a pony!" sort of thing. You're basically asking someone to build some magic compiler that handles all the logic AND does so efficiently. It seems if this were possible it would have happened by now.
DropBox and iCloud address different needs. I use both :-) DropBox for sharing document and work stuff with others, iCloud for personal life
I'm always amazed at people who don't do do this or know about them.

I stopped trying to convince people that no matter how good "their guy" is, he has to do amazing to offset his fees. And not just be amazing occasionally, but be amazing all of the time.

If you dig into it, the math for mutual fund managers really just doesn't make that much sense at all.
I also had Palm m515 and DateBk in the good ol' days. If you have iOS device, try Pocket Informant. This is what I use now and I think it covers most, if not all, of your requirements and syncs with toodledo and google calendar too!
I had an install of XP that went for 4 years, then another 4 after something in it broke and forced a reinstall. Windows 7 is shaping up to beat that record. I don't want to say people are exaggerating or leaving out details like doing uncommon things, but I don't see how so many people have problems with Window otherwise.
I freely admit I'm on the web side of this issue.

No question that apps are big. But there's a lot of data out there that people regularly used less than 10 apps in the last 30 days. Almost all of those are social or built-in apps. They used a lot more than 10 websites in the past 30 days.

The raw number of apps and websites available is a complete red herring. Mobile apps have existed (in a numerically significant form) for < 4 years. The web is closer to 20. Expect the amount of noise in the app space to follow a similar growth curve except to date app discovery is worse. With the control vendors have over app store environments, this may get even worse and not better. Or it might get a lot better. Who knows. One thing is for sure -- if you want to be found right now, you're better off with a good web site.

We discussed this a while back in a blog post based on other data from Flurry. Also discussed by Skyfire.

Mobify post: http://blog.mobify.com/2011/06/23/have-apps-really-passed-mo...

Skyfire post: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-flurry-got-it-wrong-on-ap...

Ed: fixed link.
Astronomical distance book for our Solar System
> What if you created a declarative language which allows you to override the algorithms in a functional/imperative?

We have that. They're called libraries. If I need to sort a collection, I don't write an imperative chunk of code, I just do:

sort(myCollection)

Looks pretty declarative to me.
I have a feeling the second question will stay open. :)
A type of fee commonly levied on mutual fund investors is called "Load." It's a fee you pay either when you buy shares of the fund (front load), or when you sell them (back load). Load is evil and should be avoided.

Index Funds are mutual funds that are not managed. That is, there's no manager and team of assistants that spend time curating the assets in the fund. These peoples salaries and their trading activities cost money and that comes out of your gains.

Index funds are simple: Take a snapshot of the market, say the NASDAQ or S&P 500. Determine the total pie -- add up the market value of all the companies in the index. Suppose AAPL is 15% of the total value, MSFT is 10%, etc. Take all the assets in the fund and spend 15% on AAPL stock, 10% on MSFT stock, etc. Rebalance periodically as needed.

Index funds have historically out-performed most managed funds. There are some winners. Some managed funds that have huge market-beating gains. But trying to pick these big winners is not a sound investment strategy.
There is a decay effect on the home page (the "hot" section) where posts will fall off as they get older.

The current calculation is bitcoins/sqrt(time)

The spammer is still just a single person, and if no one is sending coins to lets say his "viagra" post, then even if he has an advantage, it only takes a few people to like something else to outgun him. How many people vote up something on the home page of reddit. If they all put in for that, it would be very uneconomical to compete with.

Keep in mind, I don't really have a huge amount of faith that the system will work out. It is an experiment in micro-transactions and psychology.

Time will be the best judge.
It's probably worth noting that in other parts of the English speaking world, the word "mong" is derogatory and offensive.

I'm not sure if "MongOut" is a derivative of MongoDB, but if you're aiming at a maintream global audience you might want to consider the sensitivities.
It's a mutual fund that's designed to follow a particular stock index. For instance, there are funds that will exactly mimic the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or Standard & Poor, or other such indexes. And there's a pretty large number of indexes, so if you have an interest in biology, or tech companies, or junk bonds, you can find an index for it.

Here's the Vanguard fund for the actual Dow Jones Index: https://personal.vanguard.com/us/FundsMSChart?Ticker=^DJI

As for "no-load", that means there aren't any fees taken out of your account. Mutual funds take fees from your account to pay for their trades, and it's usually 1-2%. Index funds are brain-dead to manage, so they usually have either a very low load, or no load.
I can't be the only person who assumed Google already shared data between it's properties, right? I don't go into the grocery store and assume what I buy in produce is hidden from what I buy in the deli.

In fact, I want this. I use Google services for their convenience and function. If the things I share on Google+ or the videos I view on youtube alter the ads I see, it probably makes them far more relevant. And it's honestly about 1 time in 500 I don't get what I was looking for in the top 10 results in a regular search, even when logged in.
I like the idea - but it doesn't feel "addictive" yet.

Feature request: filter out photos of cats.
For those that don't have any bitcoins, you can get some for free:
http://coinsmack.com/posts/Help/Help,-I-want-to-use-CoinSmac...!
Fasttracking Your Career: 3 Stories
Great. I wondered if you could take whatever you're using for the "Best Value" ordering and display that metric in the boxes (so no need for more analysis).

Maybe you could store which models are always hatchbacks and always sedans, as a starting point (relatively few models have a hatchback version in the US so I think this would get you 80% of the way there). For those where there's a sedan/hatchback version, perhaps assume it's the sedan unless sellers include hatchback keywords - and If in doubt, maybe show the result anyway with a question mark icon?
Interesting concept.

Could you somehow allow for sharing revenue with content creators (where possible)? That way, people might be more incentivized to vote, since it would also be a donation to the creator.

Maybe you allow the submitter to specify the artist's email address, to which coins are sent. It would be an honor system, for sure, but it seems better than nothing.

Edit: in case it's unclear, I know that bitcoins can't be sent to an email address directly, but a link to a wallet can.
Is this referring to Google?

If so, I am confused as to where this sentiment is coming from. We still get our three free meals a day, 30" monitors, standing desks, microkitchens no more than 100 feet away, and many other perks. I'm certainly encouraged to work hard, not only because the compensation is good, but because writing software at Google is so fun.

I think the media is getting the wrong impression of what internal problems Google has. Most don't say anything publicly because the internal discussion fora are much nicer than ones on the "real Internet", and because it's hard to speak publicly about Google without speaking for Google and accidentally revealing something confidential. Anyone saying "Larry Page said XXX in an internal meeting" is leaking confidential information, and as a result, all that information is going to be used for is sensational source-less tabloid articles.

Yes, people leave Google, but it's probably not due to cutbacks in perks or Search Plus Your World. It's probably, "I want to do something new!"
Any plans to support setting subreddits on the hifi version?

Nice site, btw.
Help us build a building game (YC S11)
I agree with the form factor issue, but an iPad with a Thunderbolt port would basically take care of it. OK, might need a little more graphics hardware on the iPad to drive a big monitor, but that can't be far off.
In the search results, clicking to view a result is non functional on the iPad
If you only want to see the images I made a bookmarklet [1] that inlines them, & does imgur images smartly too. It's good for f7u12, at least.

[1] http://fuseki.net/home/linked-images-bookmarklet.html
The only reason it's one line in math is that the rest of math is implicitly hiding in your brainstate. If you could extract that out it would be much bigger and uglier much like your expansion of this code into loops and memory manipulation, etc.

But what's your point? Code can do more wide ranging things and does so with fewer available symbols (no superscript for pow() operations), so it's wordier, but really it's not so far different. It may take a computer 200 pages of explained C++ but it takes a child months and years of schooling.
For a while I used Hiveminder and Google Calendar to do something similar. You can email tasks like "Take out the washing [due:today]" to your Hiveminder email and then they show up in your Google Calendar for that day. It was very low-friction.

The integration is just iCal-based, so it should work with most other calendar systems.
I'm sitting here using a year-old $1300 HP Envy 14. It's the MBP of PCs -- all aluminum/magnesium alloy case, backlit island style keyboard, edge to edge glass around a 1600x900 display, i5, switchable graphics adapters, the works.

The fan cycles on and off every 3 seconds the entire time it runs. It hard freezes if I play certain games for a few hours. Sometimes it emits a high pitched noise. There's some discoloration starting where my palms rest. I doubt it'll make it another year without needing service to at least apply new thermal paste or pads or something. This is HP's finest build quality and it's still not up to Apple standards.

As for the software side, one of my jobs is to resell advertising services, and I manually review each order to make sure the sites to advertise meet some quality guidelines - 20 to 30 a day. At least one of them each day will be a site distributing malware of some sort. Even with a firewall, Windows Update set to auto, Microsoft Security Essential Real-Time Protection enabled, and using the auto-updating Google Chrome... I sometimes get infected by one of these sites anyway. Last week it was one of those pieces of malware that pretends to be an antivirus program telling you to register to clear an infection -- while autokilling all processes except explorer.exe and iexplore.exe on the system. Took me half an hour in the registry editor in safe mode to get rid of it.
We don't need new laws, we have the Constitution. It clearly spells out exactly what powers the federal government has, and everything else is left up to the states or the people.

The problem is the federal government has ignored the constitution the last 80 years. And the people/states haven't cared enough to do anything.
While I agree with the premises that

(a) doctoring the search results is killing the golden goose

and

(b) Google is essentially just a big advertising company

The reality is that even with watered down results they are still better than their competitors.

If I want to search MSDN then Google gives better results than Bing.

Think about that for a moment. How can Bing be a serious competitor to Google when they can't even search their own site properly???

So I think that there is some wriggle room for Google here. They can water the beer down... but it is still better than the cow piss the pub down the road is serving.
> What actually happens is the prosecutor tells the court that they have X, Y, and Z evidence, which indicates the existence of W evidence, even though they can't actually get hold of W evidence. Then they don't charge you for W evidence directly, they just run the charges up for X, Y, and Z until you agree to a plea bargain anyway.

Uh, yeah, so what?

If they have the evidence to prove you committed a crime, then they have the evidence to prove you committed a crime. It kind of makes sense that they'd, y'know, prosecute you for that crime.

They can't just arbitrarily increase your sentence based on the suspicion of another crime. There are statutory limits for the crimes they can prove, augmented by sentencing guidelines. The court cannot exceed the statutory limits, and deviations from the sentencing guidelines require a justification to be articulated. "I think you also did W" is not a valid justification.

You're always at risk of a harsh sentence for whatever crimes can be proven. If you're not prepared to take that risk, you should probably avoid committing the crimes in the first place, no?
Jon,

I think you're on the right (or at least an interesting) track here, one that I have been thinking about a bit myself.

For me these thoughts came after working for a few years on a clean room reimplementation project for a software component with a large set of automated tests (thousands). Slowly I got the feeling that each of those tests could be seen as an image of an unknown object, and that my job was to construct that object. Looking at just a few pictures it might be easy to find an object that could be projected onto planes to create those images, but looking at thousands of images it can be a very intellectually challenging task to find a single object that matches all of them. It's also a problem that has far more dimensions than the 3D world we live in.

In agile programming you may call those images "user stories". Agile basically says "there is no way to know all the images beforehand (because that depends e.g. on a market response), so just start with the most important images and build the simplest possible object that fits with them". Each time you add in a new image there's a risk that you have to make major changes to the object (to make it fit with the new image while remaining "compatible" with the previous images). That's what's called refactoring.

The really irritating thing with programming is that the effort of building a program does not scale linearly with the number of images (at least not in most cases). There is really no limit to how much work you may have to do to make the object fit with one or several new images, while remaining compatible with all the previous ones. That's because imperative code is a description of the object and not a description of the images.

What a programmer does is really solving the global optimization problem of constructing a minimal object that fits a number of images, and then writing that down in code. The better the programmer the more images they can handle, the more beautifully the images will match the object and the simpler the object will be.

It must be possible for a machine to do this. Don't get me wrong; it's a formidable optimization problem - and there are certainly sets of images for which no (reasonable) object can be constructed - but in principle it must be possible.

In fact there is a machine that does this for simple x-ray images and physical 3D objects: a Computerized Axial Tomography machine, or CAT scan as they call them in hospitals. Basically, what these machines do is take a series of x-ray images of an unknown object and then compute "backwards" what that object must be like on the inside in order to have created those x-ray images. I bet a really good programmer would be great at manual tomography, and that when you have implemented your new programming paradigm it will be a sort of CAT scan for software. :)

I'd love to talk more about this on occasion!
Labeling blog articles would be beneficial to me. For example: This is "A blog about blogging", "A List", "An open Question". On the other end there could be "Instructional (substantive)", "Solution".
+1, except where there is a choice between a big liquid ETF and a similar no load index fund I would in most cases pick the ETF for tax efficiency. (unless for IRA/401K, tax not an issue)

When you buy an index fund, you get a 1099 and pay capital gains taxes on any profits the fund takes any time it trades; also when you buy it you buy into the fund's tax basis, so if they bought all their stocks lower than where they are now, you would pay capital gains taxes based on where the fund bought them instead of from the price when you bought the fund. You might even take a capital loss and still have paid capital gains taxes.

see for instance http://etf.about.com/od/etftaxes/a/ETF_Tax_Benefit.htm
I'd like the complement "nothing but cats" photo stream.
Rotation matrices for developers (reformatted and fixed)
SPYW

...sounds like spyware... ...looks like spyware...
You would have to tie the spending to an existing account with a reputation system. The effect of your vote could be the product of your spend and reputation. Also an upper limit the power from donation. I voting with currency alone seems doomed
To-do lists do work. What the author lacks is a today list.

The purpose of the to-do list is to keep track of everything you have to do for the rest of your life. You should not be working off of it everyday or, as the author notes, it will overwhelm/paralyze you.

The purpose of the today list is to focus on one day at a time. A today list is a subset of the to-do list, the items you need to think about that day.

This simple distinction goes a long way. With a today list, you can actually get through your day, and feel good when the list is done.
Tips for a sane IA
I agree. I had a Palm III, then a Centro. The Centro HW was crap (bits and pieces were falling off after a few months), but the OS and apps were very usable and accessible. Hardware controls may not be sexy, but I could use the phone with damp hands, something I can't say for my Android device.

By "crufty", I mean that there wasn't a lot of shine or bling. Instead, Palm's engineers realized they were working with a very limited environment and kept things both simple and easy to use.
Selling for Startups (Flowchart)
What's another $12.99.

I have to admit though, I'm kind of scared, because it appears to have the same level of detail that DateBk did.

I purchased the new version of DateBk called Pimlical for Android and tried it out today. Not quite there but definitely a possibility. Since I'm on iOS I'll try it out.

If this works, I can't begin to put in words how indebted I'll be fore the reco
If they can prove it, why do they need you to decrypt it for them?
I like it. Imgur actually has left / right arrow support as well. (Example: http://imgur.com/gallery/ExxXR then hit →) I find it works well for a few chuckles if I happen to be eating at my desk in search of some web bubblegum.
Right, I'll just round up my suggestions and those I agreed with from other comments:

- In portuguese, and I imagine a lot of other languages, "mongo" is a pretty nasty word. Think "retard", only worse.

- Have this linked with your reddit account so you can up/down vote. Also, then you could, by default, show pics from the user's default subreddits. You should allow an user to add/remove subreddits to get pics from, independently from the user's default subreddits.

- Gamify this. Think up some sort of achievements (opting out has to be an option, of course). First step: you have that bar filling up, what about having a counter nearby, which increments everytime the bar fills?

- You should do some preloading up to a max of USER_CONFIGURABLE_NUMBER images, have a sane default like 1 or 2.

That's it for now.

Edit:

- I just got a imgur "this image is no longer available" thingy. I think you can scratch those from showing up entirely.

- You could add some sort of sharing feature. A permalink would be a nice step in that direction. I just found an image I'd like to share with a friend and I noticed mongout wasn't gonna be a part of that process.
I have a question about this Christian, assume that we can accurately model an atom with a computer and then we uploaded a human into the computer, wouldn't the computer then be able to either solve the problem or report that the problem is unsolvable? I understand the halting problem but isn't there some kind of meta check that a sufficiently complex system could output?
Google also has an ongoing PR problem with regard to privacy, with Eric Schmidt (sp? the recently ex-ceo dude) going on record as saying he doesn't believe in privacy.

Facebook at least pretends to care about privacy and then screws the user, whereas Google just skips to step B
His point that Zappos isn't a technology company, but rather a customer service company makes Las Vegas the perfect fit. Las Vegas is the #1 city in the world for service industries.
I'm just amazed that this is such a big deal.
Thanks. We actually had subreddit support in an earlier version but decided to take it out for the sake of simplicity. It's definitely a feature that we'd like to add back in though.
I think fastmail.fm provides[1] email as well as xmpp. I have been considering a switch from gmail to fastmail (also looking at rackspace email), and planning to use my own domain again.

I had previously self hosted (a pain), and then used google apps with my own domain. That was when google apps had no google groups or other integration at all, and it was cumbersome to have two google accounts (no multiple login then either). So I switched to plain gmail. Certainly less work and the bonus of being able to tell people 'blah blah at gmail dot com' and not having to spell it out every time someone asked for it cannot be understated.

My needs have changed a bit though, and being able to retain my email/domain should I choose to change providers again has become more important. In addition, I no longer use the gmail web interface, opting instead to use sparrow over imap. An unlikely shift back to client centric computing even while more and more of my other services are shifting away!

[1]: http://fastmail.fm/help/overview_features.html