skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, it's not even that! Simulated annealing needs a cooling heuristic, which makes the algorithm smarter as it gets closer to the optimum. What this is is some combination of hill climbing and random state space search. Not sure if it has a name.

Want evidence? Look at the iteration counts. With SA, you'd see the differences between the successive pictures be roughly constant or even decrease (I can't prove it, but I've implemented it, and you usually end up choosing a cooling heuristic that roughly matches the human intuition for "closeness").

As it is, the algorithm that's implemented finds it exponentially harder to get close to optimum. You start off with a gap of 100 iterations between optima, and you end up at 300,000.

Which is exactly why I think this is even more amazing -- it's just about the dumbest algorithm you can think of, and it still manages to vectorize an arbitrary raster image. If an actual GA or SA version were built, it could have some real potential. (See my comment below.)
I don't think languages have to change every few years, in fact, I prefer they wouldn't in many cases. I also think that the JS libraries kind of define language extensions, but it also feels better to me to stick with the JS syntax than to redefine the syntax.

Even with LISP, I am not sure if I am so happy about the new trend to add syntactic sugar. Having just brackets is pure, in a way, throwing in square brackets makes me feel a bit uneasy (not that I am much of a LISP specialist, so maybe my judgment is completely off base).
Negative, sorry for abbreviation.
>Instead of building a search engine...

oh, yeah, I'm sure you would have kicked google's ass ;-)
The article was too painful to read through, but the example given at the start seems like normal play, not teasing as I understand it.
More something like kingdom of loathing (which I remember to be brilliant).
Who also alienates as many people as he attracts. But between DHH and _why Ruby stopped needing to worry about marketing a looong time ago.
An interesting thought. It doesn't address the impact this would have on schools (already over-crowded or not) or other capacity-limited public works. I mean, in theory the tax base would expand, but that would kind of be slightly after the need arrived. This would require a much more thorough analysis and would still be guaranteed to have some unanticipated consequences.

But out-of-the-box thinking is a good thing to be doing whenever one can.
Plus, the algorithm could always use some optimization. I figure implementing a true genetic algorithm (several 'painters' working at once, recombining their DNA instead of overwriting) would get to a 'good enough' result more quickly.

It makes me wonder whether there is some demoscener who has already done something like this to fit the Mona Lisa (or probably something geekier, like a picture of Clive Sinclair) into their 4k demo.
It's patent pending! Patended the combination of two buzzwords 'AJAX' and 'Database'.
Web 2.0 startups are hard because anything interesting conceptually is too complex.
Has this been your experience as well?

It's hard to invent a new sort of application and make it succeed when most people can only understand old ideas.
What should a person use to develop graphically-intensive web applications, then?
OK, thanks. So the problem is that transistor density is going up faster than pin density? Makes sense.

I guess one approach to that is a bigger die size, so you end up with a fixed transistor/cm^2? That would mean die sizes doubling with Moore's law I guess. So you'd want other ways of packing them in (use the flipside of the mobo, try 3d arrays and suffer heat problems).

Or the cores come with attached (non-shared) RAM, which is of course where we are with adding cache.

Other random thoughts: why have memory busses stayed parallel when peripheral busses (scsi, usb) have gone serial? That would reduce pin count for a connection?

Can we avoid going to full 'macro' pins for the CPU-memory bus (and thus pack more pins into the same area for memory connections)? Instead have a smaller, denser collection of pins which are attached as a group to each memory connector?

Sorry for being clueless and thinking aloud, but it's an interesting problem.
Actually, it seems like the argument is subtly different. Instead of trying to guess what we're looking for, this would try to answer what we've explicitly asked about. It's like the difference between your friends randomly telling you what car you should buy and them answering in response to your question about what car you should buy.
Anvato Raises $2 Million For Video Fingerprinting
Strands launches first lifestreaming iPhone app
Computer scientists find audio CAPTCHAs easy to crack
4% of his users are IE, let's say, he's running a multi million dollar business. It'll cost him 5 million a year to keep IE working, and the business from the 4% equates to 15 million. What would you do? Beat your chest and scream "look at my website I'm awesome!".

Jamis had a legitimate point. DaringFireball is hijacking this to pound his chest. Who _cares_. For some people and companies, supporting IE in some incarnation is legitimate. For others, it's not. That's all very reasonable.

I for one am sick of these fallacious arguments masquerading as rational and revolutionary thought. Peh. Who cares.
I'm not very familiar with dapper.net, but it seems to be saying that content owners can use dapper to distribute their content, rather than allowing random people to strip ads out of anything. For example when I search for [colbert] on dapper.net it has little icons saying permission of the copyright owner is needed.
I've created a bookmarklet that emails me direct from browser :)
voila - http://cli.gs/S4RVgy
If they do this, it could be huge. BUT, they need to make a clear incentive to do so - the iPhone app market is growing so quickly because people are reading the stories of $30.000 in a weekend and all that. If there is a clear way of making money on an email app, Yahoo will have a slew of apps, and this could solve one of the larger problems we are facing right now - email overload.

But for this to be effective, email has to be personalised also. Yahoo mail is inferior to gmail in that the experience feels a lot more like you are visiting a yahoo site, and not visiting your email box. That needs to change.
Creative taxes are for when the stakes are low.
HTML Canvas element + javascript?
Native Client: A Technology for Running Native Code on the Web
Great idea and solid execution, but I don't like your pricing page:

http://userfly.com/pricing

What is a Basic event vs. an Advanced event? How can I choose when I don't even know what those are?
Review my app - clipng.com
Hello all,

A while back I got frustrated with the folders full of disorganized bookmarks I'd accumulated. After some thought about how to solve it I built an app that's working well for me. I'm soliciting feedback to see what I can do to make it work well for other people.

clipng is based on the following ideas:

- I'm usually only interested in part of a page (a particular insightful piece, code snippet, recipe, etc)
- If I could collect the good parts all in one place then I could tag them and make them searchable.

To implement this I made the following:

- A bookmarklet that, when clicked, collects the current selection and some information about the current page (I call it a "clipping")
- A site that handles tagging and indexing for your clippings (I used App Engine)

I'm still in semi-private testing but the following link will get you in (Google sign in, no need to create an account):

http://www.clipng.com/hackernews

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Enjoy,
-Choong

(apologies if you saw the other post Friday, I neglected to read the fine print and so omitted this note)
very cool good luck with this... might have to install it and give it a shot on the next web interface I work on.
I'm not sure I have a good answer for your question directly, as most browser games are really old at this point. There haven't been too many new players, and most aren't interesting and don't allow scripting.

I will say that (partially my fault) there's a whole slew of them on Facebook now. They don't have any depth, but some of them are still wildly popular. If nothing else, it's worth a look.
Cutting Through the Bullshit
JScript and the .Net framework works just fine if you are happy with IIS and Windows
Yeah I know how this stuff works per spec.

The issue is that the var here is passed by reference. Ie, all 10 closures refer to the SAME "i" variable. So, when i is incremented, they see that it's been incremented.

No, closures refer to the j variable that doesn't get incremented, only assigned to. The assignment is by value - no vars get "passed by reference", whatever this means. The actual issue is that all invocations of the loop body alias the same var j, even though it's declared inside the block.

I usually wrap the whole loop body if it contains multiple variables and multiple closures closing over them - it's easier on the brain than fixing every closure creation spot. Kinda sad because JavaScript is almost the perfect language for my mind.
A short video course in behavioral economics (featuring Jeff Bezos and others)
I don't think the die size is a problem; AFAIK you can get very many pins out of a die, but getting them out of the package is where it gets expensive.

FB-DIMM is already a serial-style high-frequency interconnect, but it isn't needed on low-end systems.

I think this is really about business, not technology. What they want is not what the mainstream wants, so they must choose between cheap but memory starved systems or very expensive balanced systems. HPC people have been whining about killer micros for 20 years; this is just another version of it.
Ask YC: Do you receive Google alerts on your company and industry?
Do you think this is a reasonable way to consume news? What tricks do you have for getting relevant alerts?
The experience of HTML Canvas element + javascript on IE goes something like this (according to Vladimir Vukićević, the creator of the ActiveX plugin that enables canvas graphics in IE):

"Currently, the experience is pretty crappy: you have to click through an infobar to allow installation of this component, then you have to click 'Yes' to say that you really want to run the native content, and then you have to click 'Yes' again to allow the component to interact with content on the page," he wrote in a blog entry. "In theory, with the right signatures, the right security class implementations, some eye of newt, and a pinch of garlic, it's possible to get things down to a one-time install which would make the component available everywhere."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080819-mozilla-drags-...

If you want to go to war against IE, feel free, but the pragmatist in me says no way.
What do you mean? I see the GA being tested against the fitness function one at a time with the individuals in the population, with subsequent populations being the mutated and crossover'd versions of the previous generation.

Are you asking about the details of how each individual is represented? How the individuals are crossed over? What the rate of extinction is?
Yeah - as it says in the "headline" its called Android and it is intended to run on phones, PDAs, netbooks so erm laptops, desktops well anything really...
Why all the incessant Rand bashing? It strikes me as being really ignorant. Ayn Rand presented a moral defense of capitalism, and entrepreneurs should be thankful for that.
Advocating For Brain-Enhancing Drugs
I think asking to link into my google account before offering anything at all is a really bad plan to get users interested.

At least a homepage explaining what you are doing, giving me an idea if I can trust you etc. is necessary.

I didn't go any further than the google login screen.
One man's 3-year experiment in eating organic food - all the time
Has anyone bred one than gets past the dip after hill and doesn't somersault? The ones I have now seem to have optimum suspension for quickly motoring over the initial bumbs, but they all die in that damn ditch...
That series of posts goes beyond the science. I think his arguments boil down to him simply being unable to accept nondeterminism, and his argument that many-worlds is inevitable is simply absurd on the face of it; we could be in a simulation that is based in a universe without many-worlds and you'd never be able to tell the difference, so it's hardly obvious that even if we're not in a simulation that many worlds is inevitable. I also think he falls prey to Euclidianism, which most people do. In a Minkowskian universe, a lot of QM's nondeterminism is a lot less magical, even if it's still nondeterministic.
How exactly is it evolutionary computing when there is a designer in the equation (programmer) who puts constraints on the algorithm by the simple act of coding it and running it on systems that he designed?

This seems more like "computing to model the process of genetic adaptation". You can't label it evolutionary when there's a designer in the equation. The very definition of the evolutionary process does not allow for constraints on the process itself nor an end goal/purpose, something inherent to any system built by a programmer.
I have had enormous success with lead generation with the help of TimeSvr (http://www.timesvr.com/). $60 a month and they can spend hours a day coming websites for email addresses, sending personalized emails, and tracking their actions and progress in CSV files.
This makes all of my random cutting/pasting into .txt files obsolete. Bravo!
Teasing is a part of the normal play. The author tries to distinguish between playful teasing and abusive teasing.
How does this compare to CouchDB (restful http-based json doc-oriented, etc.)?
"difficult" has nothing to do with the power of languages

TeX macros are fundamentally as expressive as java.
hoi polloi == the people

Your extraneous definite article exposes you as one of those you project yourself above. Part of being elitist is being correct: without that you're a fool.
"That's just a sad state of the infrastructure."

Why is this sad? It seems pretty logical to me. I don't think it would make sense to build expensive (roads/sewers/cable/etc) to every far out node.
Computer translations fall in between a freshman HS language student and an expert. I am not going to trust it for diplomatic negotiations, but I have still used it for some verifiable tasks. Voice to text translations also fit in this context if you can't type then it's ok, but if you need a high level of accuracy then use a person. Which IMO describes the state of most computer AI. It's picking stocks and rejecting parts but I still want a real doctor.
Unlike computers, someone doing this every week is going to be unacceptable.
This is almost always an indication that a programming language critic has nothing really thoughtful to say. Same with Lisp and S-expressions.

i didn't mention lisp or s-expressions. of course taste is subjective, but the "objective c is fugly" meme has lots of adherents
Until they decide that certain regions aren't profitable enough for expansion so they pawn off the infrastructure on another company, leaving their customers hanging.
Apple tried Java bindings to Cocoa at one point

oh come on, it is well known that apple intentionally dragged their feet on their java support for years

probably because they realized that as gross as java was, very few people would bother with objective c if they could get first-class support for java on cocoa
You can think of the programmer as the physics laws in the universe.

This law, being a law, just dictates rules of what is possible, but the outcome is what happen in the mean-time.

Some people do think that God is the Physics Law. Some do think that God is the Time, where this happened.
actually no, the author cited example after example of helpful, positive, team-building, playful teasing, but never actually said what separates that from abusive teasing. The closest he gets to doing so is to imply with "age" it doesn't hurt anymore because we are able to perceive the playfulness and not the hurt. Which we all know is not true.
Lightview 2.4 : Overlay anything with style
I think you point it out well. Users have no business complaining because you won't add some feature they came up with. What if that feature is something the user believes is very important to the software, but you think it's a complete waste of your time to even bother to add or maintain it?

That's what this whole Capistrano situation seems like to me (sadly, I didn't even think cap worked on windows). People are irate because a project is dropping support for a platform it never seemed to work well on to begin with. Have the developers ever promised windows support? I always thought their main claim was that it's a tool to automate deploying (mostly rails) apps, and I think it works well in that regard. I didn't think those promises extended to platform support as well.
wow i seem to have got your irish up. typical fanboy response. this site is full of moonies
Yeah, I'm curious about the details, such as the mutation function and the phenotype. Otherwise it's a pretty straightforward GA.
Aussie Aussie Aussie - Oi Oi Oi! We're leading the world in something for once....

oh. wait.
Ask YC: Rate my news aggregator prototype
First, if you want to skip my explanation and just see what I've built, http://startupurls.com/

For those with a bit more time, first, my problem:

I don't go to popurls.com because I don't like reading news about Brittney Spears or the latest rantings from Digg, but I really like the concept. I like looking through top news stories in an aggregator along with unique photographs and videos.

But I've never found anything like it that is focused around startups.

I have a couple of specific questions.

1. Is this a site you'd visit?

2. What other url's would you be interested in getting news from? (I looked at startups.alltop.com, but it seems that most of that is not very high quality -- it seems to be there simple because the blog has the word "startup" in it. There are a few exceptions).

I'd really like to see where you read about startups, which reminds me, I need to add killerstartups.com.

Plus, there are no pictures. Pictures break up the monotony of getting news from text, IMHO.

3. Are there any sites (or feeds) that show videos re: startups? Pictures?

Thanks!
yahoo should focus on building features into mail that provide real benefit (imaps, better spam detecting, search that actually works) than features no one cares about (reading news in your email screen, more "app" mumbo jumbo)
Audiosurf "Visual Music"
Fifth paragraph:

The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it’s aggression, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, harass and humiliate. Sexual harassers grope, leer and make crude, often threatening passes. They’re pretty ineffectual flirts. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human.
I guess metaprogramming is out of the question.
I believe if you can make a significant business case for your new ideas then achieving adoption should be possible. It is true most people do only understand old ideas but if you can catch there attention and tell them what your product is useful for and how to use it, they will listen. I made a bunch of Camtasia presentations, they had the effect of turnings people's 'light switches' on and getting them to do more things then they first intended because they understand more.
New hybrid nanostructures detect nanoscale magnetism
10 Smartest Things Said About the Financial Crisis
Honestly, we haven't thought enough about our pricing; the cost will likely be proportional to the # of users you need to capture in a given period of time. For small sites I don't see us charging more than $10 a month. We are also playing around with the idea of licensing our software, so that companies can run the captures internally to enable ajax functionality, and keep their data private.
I have a cold :(
Flight Simulator is pretty nice, and has been for decades.

For a long time it was probably the only profitable Microsoft product that wasn't Basic, Office, or Operating Systems.
If the programmer specifies the boundaries (laws) of his own universe, then the evolutionary processes that happen within his own universe are not representative of the actual universe which he claims to be modeling. Why?

1) Current scientific claims express that the laws and boundaries of the universe came into existence without a designer. Having a designer anywhere in the equation is unacceptable, even one who simply created the universe, because that invalidates (or at least casts heavy doubt) on the naturalistic claims of any designer-free subprocesses that happen within the universe (specifically, Evolution).

2) Evolution itself is devoid of a designer and end goal.

Logically, it is impossible to model a process that is inherently devoid of any design or purpose.

It would only be scientific to question the accuracy of any model that can't even replicate the basic core constraints (eg. lack of a designer) of the system which it is trying to represent.
we just launched an ecommerce shop and where looking around for just this type of tool, going to dig in a bit more but surface review looks pretty solid. the free account look pretty limited, and it looks like a middle option for 2-4 users would be nice.
IPhone Aktivierung - Unlock - Jailbreak
Our pricing page sucks. Will fix asap. In the meantime.

Simple events = mouse movements, clicks, focus events, scrolling etc.

Advanced events = DOM mutation events triggered by ajax and other types of sophisticated javascript: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOM_Events

We will likely have to do customer specific fixes to get advanced event captures working well during our beta phase, which is why we want you to email us if you are at all interested.
nononononono
he defined bullying as we understood it, and then defined "teasing" in the narrow context of "a mode of play, ... with a sharp edge". Nowhere in the article does he explicate when teasing is done with intention to humiliate or embarrass, or teasing is done to someone whose social standing or physical attributes make it difficult for them to "play back", or when real harm is done despite best intentions. He seem to think that teasing is wholly a subjective game, where it's what you think it means that determines whether it is in seriousness or in jest, whether the joke is on your or with you. In other words he either intentionally ignored the defining line between good and bad teasing to make his "defense of teasing" point, or he actually believes that they are one and the same, that it's all in how you look at it, and how old you are. In the first case he is hiding evidence that counters his thesis intentionally, in the latter, he is disconnected with actual experiences of life.
Here's something I'd like to see someone try.

Take pictures of a 3D object from say 100 different angles, remembering which angles they were. Now, use this mona lisa algorithm to put 3D polygons inside a box of sufficient size, keep those that most look like the original object when looked at from all those angles.

Will you get a compressed 3D representation of an object this way?
We're still unsure of the cost to run this service as we scale up. We are looking for beta testers to try out our advanced features, so please email us, and we can get you a pro account for free, and start to iterate on the product to meet your specific needs (and lighter weight JS is definitely something we can fix for you).
I don't know how addictive stimulants can be if used properly, but stimulants like ritalin can be abused.
http://www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Pharms_Methylphen...