skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMO I'd say war and atrocities do go hand in hand, they don't have to but it just seems to be a downfall of human nature. I believe what happened in Japan is a prime example, the US troops had heard of all the atrocities against POW's and when invading they treated the Japanese dead more like game than humans, including taking trophies, this then got back to the Japanese and they were so disgusted by the American atrocities that when the US invaded cities there were mass suicides because the Japanese didn't want to live through US occupation. So ironically the Japanese Military committing atrocities ended up killing their own people more effectively than if they'd shot a civilian with every POW.

Again looking at history, I believe without war we wouldn't have technology. Most of the technology that we take as granted in the medieval period came from the Mongols, who because of war managed to gather together inventors from multiple countries and cultures and put them together. They took Chinese fireworks and Bronze Workers from Eastern Europe (I can't remember the country) and put 1 + 1 together, they built a cannon. They also committed many atrocities, however it was always the victims own fault, many times they killed the messenger, which the Mongol's invented their own postal service so they got pissed off at that and just besieged cities. Other times they were given fare warning, nearly always 'surrender and we'll let you live your lives as you always have', yet people refused. IIRC one time the citizens refused and killed the messenger, this one led to the Mongols diverting a river into the city and then slaughtering everyone.

The book I read (http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World/dp/06...) is a real eye opener. The man merely wanted to protect his own family, but betrayal after betrayal he ended up conquering most of the old world. The only reason he didn't take over all of western europe was because 'middle' europe was so poor they thought it was like what we imagine the third world. Aside from Europe they didn't invade most of Africa and India, this was purely because they couldn't ride their horses and didn't feel like invading.
Now here is where that EverNote + Eye-Fi app is a better solution.

Take a picture of user's credit card or even consumer holding their credit card and have the app record/semantically understand the info and charge consumer accordingly. No data entry needed!

Taking a pic of the purchaser holding their CC would be good for fraud purposes and possibly social shopping (that might be a stretch though).
Luis von Ahn - Human Computation

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143
Those aren't the same thing.
f(a) != f(b) != f(c) is unsurpising.

Just because you don't personally, and explicitly define the inputs of the algorithm does not mean that they are none, or that they are static.

Of course, this also means that you can never do the "same thing" twice, because space and time are nice like that.

I think a more appropriate headline/analogy/Simpsons reference would be, "dig up, stupid".

Or perhaps even better, "the business of failure has failed: we need to make it work again!"
A very good read, thanks for the link!
Practical Brain-to-Cyber Interfaces Closer to Reality
Primal, Acute and Easily Duped - Our Sense of Touch
I aliased "g" to "git" - problem solved + g is 50% better than hg, right?
When is MercurialHub.com launching?
SimpleDB is hard to get from a traditional SQL point of view, but it's a joy to use in practice. My simple-minded solution was to add an invisible local cache for all of my writes and except the fact from all other players that I'm possibly reading an outdated data.

Eventual consistency is pretty close to real life situations, just try to image the overplayed "bank account example" in a real life bank around 1900 with all manual account handling.
Lenat's been working on this since the 80s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
Ultimately, thats who the Obama campaign was aiming at this semester: Americans. The people who can vote for him.
MIT students build mobile applications in 13 weeks
He admits he cant really read or write very well in his presentation.
Perhaps, a reference to http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001125.html
Could you elaborate more on this? What triggers the sync in the application-level example?
Hah:

86=	03-Sep-1987	SCO.COM

for how much longer, I wonder?
"... I don't understand the motivation to take big risks when you already have enough money to retire comfortably ..."

Because after you have enough to retire comfortably it's not about 'wealth', it's about power and the accumulation of power.
Suppose both sides 'decide to win'. Now it is a game of chance based on who happens to have the highest bankroll is it not?
I agree. I can never really get into IRC as there are always three condescending comments to every helpful one and it's like a high school clique with password protected rooms and inside jokes.

I also agree about HN, it seems to have managed to avoid a lot of that.
This might be a useful document to present to potential customers who ask "You want to charge us how much for fixing our multithreaded code?"

I've found myself drawn to the Java platform for platform-independent multithreading. Or any multithreading, actually, and I dislike Java-the-language with a vengeance.

These days I'm using Clojure, although I haven't yet used its STM in performance-critical situations. I'll have to see how that goes, but the functional programming model goes a long way to encourage doing it right: even if I did end up tossing out the STM and rolling my own atomic + lock-based system for an app that's limited by the STM's performance, it isolates the synchronisation issue logically.
I love mercurial. Works on windows/linux too and bitbucket.org is great.
Geek blogger worship
Right, but there was only one Paul Rand. :D
They didn't know how bad the mortgages really were, and the failure of one mortgage is not independent from the failure of the next. We're seeing this now in neighborhoods were foreclosures are driving housing prices down and making people want to walk away from underwater mortgages. This is starting to happen in California.
i aliased "" to "hg" ... oh wait ...
Not at all, nor am I arguing Cisco's case. I think Cisco has stepped in a big cow pie.

However, I think FSF is taking a big risk as well. The original demands, pre-lawsuit, were already rather severe and in the case of notification, silly. No one goes to that much effort about a product recall unless it is catching fire or something.

I understand that FSF is trying to prove a point, and a valid one, but I also fear what will happen now that someone has finally called their bluff.
Web might have stopped Hitler, says Nobel winner
Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites
So what we do every Monday is we review the whole business.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7724296011317502612

is a Google Tech Talk by one of the main Mercurial developers.
"The actual problem with CDOs is that the cows were all more diseased than the historical track record suggested"

I think you are splitting hairs here. The point remains, all the cows were sick, so Adams' analogy is appropriate.

The fact that everyone just ASSUMED that the cows were OK, because they usually weren't sick in the past, instead of just going out and looking at the cows, really doesn't help to make this whole situation less worthy of ridicule. Everyone was saying things like you are saying to convince themselves "no, no, it's more complicated than that, see we have all this math, you don't understand" when the simple truth was that all the cows were sick and just looking at the cows instead of doing the fancy math would have made more sense.

Sometimes it is actually better to oversimplify things and just get the big picture and not get lost in all the details. This is Adams' underlying point, and I think it is valid in this case.
anybody knows what was the price to buy 1 back then?
I'm running Tivoli CDP for files to do something like that. (actually i probably sould integrate it with dropbox come to think of it).
Automtic save to another spot on the HD (every time that you save a file)
Automatic sync to web/USB drive when they're plugged in/connected.

Saved me a couple of times actually - definately swear by having automated and easy backups.
"What's the going rate for infringement? $150,000 per copy or something?"

There is a range for statutory damages from $750 - $30000 per WORK (not per copy).

There is no reason to believe that the FSF would be awarded anything more than the minimum since they have not suffered any economic damage from the infringement.
Flickr hacking: 5 Questions for Paul Mison
So... anybody hear Cisco's side of this story yet?

Apparently, they weren't quite denying access to the source code outright but placed it on their website (where 1 hn commenter managed to find it, presumably, not after that much time). What about those requests the FSF claims went unheard?

Seriously, if not the lawsuit, at least the demands leveled against Cisco are ludicrous.
Should Michael Arrington Be Invited Back At LeWeb Next Year?
Wow, 29 dollars? What a scam. Just get a free firefox plugin and a free conversion tool. There are plenty.
"... What's your favorite embedded system? ..."

Arduino ~ http://arduino.cc/

Hands down the cheapest, most open-sourced and fun stuff you can play with. I know it doesn't run Linux, but the cost, expandability through open-design and toolchain make it worth considering for prototyping.
Check out http://www.bitbucket.org - it's awesome.
"That's already a shot in the head for that method being anything resembling realistically efficient, in my opinion."

I'm not sure. I've been thinking about this too for convention sales. If you've already got an online checkout form, why not just update it to detect the iPhone and render using an appropriate stylesheet?

If you have to mix two billing/merchant systems (because you have to use authorize.net for this), that's even more inefficient, IMO.
Yes. Controversy sells tickets.
you may want to take a look at http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-submodul.... mercurial lacks this as of now.
Ah! Good catch, thank you. That is a huge difference.

So they are demanding about a million cash maximum, plus a dedicated compliance officer, plus a recall-like effort to notify millions of customers about a "defect" that few will care about or understand -- in effect, subsidizing FSF's educational and advocacy efforts.

Hmm. This seems a little more reasonable but I still think this is a big risk on the part of the FSF.
I'm not sure that I understand what you're saying.

Are you suggesting that France is richer than the rest of the European nations (after cost-adjustment), but that it's still pretty grubby? If so, then all I can say is that I've been outside the tourist areas of a few different European nations, and they never looked that awful to me -- certainly no worse than rural America. The people didn't seem unhappy.

That said, I think this discussion is a distraction from my primary argument, which is that it's possible to guarantee a higher standard of living for people, without sliding down the slippery slope from corporat-ism to communism. There's a middle ground -- if our internet companies are 5% less successful, but we have universal health care, I think that's a reasonable trade-off.
".... Many Italians are tremendously creative, industrious, inventive people, but are going to find it more difficult to express that in some form of business ..."

I think the problem with Italian business culture (and maybe a strength) is they have not evolved beyond family based businesses. But I can think of an Inventive Italian tech. company that has succeeded ~ http://tinker.it/ creator of the Arduino ~ http://www.wired.com/print/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/f...
Thought this might be useful: If you're exporting to vCards and importing to your address book, and want to retain first/middle/last name so you can merge w/existing contacts, here's a regexp (for Textmate).

Find: FN:(\S+) ((\S+( \S+)?) )?(\S+)
Replace: N:(?2:$5;$1;$3;;:$5;$1;;;)\n$0

N:Smith;John;J.;;
FN:John J. Smith
please help me get back my mail password thank you !
(Internet) site: www.163.com
username:pengdan03
keep in touch with me:pengdan03@126.com
please help me get back my mail password thank you !
(Internet) site: www.163.com
username:pengdan03

(prove your skill) keep in touch with me:pengdan03@126.com
No. (Just to turn this into a poll - here's the second option!)
Or perhaps even better, "the business of failure has failed: we need to make it work again!"

Won't comment on the rest, but this is fabulous.
please help me get back my mail password thank you !
(Internet) site: www.163.com

username:pengdan03

(prove your skill) keep in touch with me:pengdan03@126.com
How did you get the "just a little poorer" part? Of course the US is the richest country at the moment, but I wonder if that also goes for the average American?

Also maybe in terms of owning things for example maybe it is easier to own a house with garden in the US, making people rich in terms of owning a house and garden. But french people living in an interesting cultural environment in a small flat might feel richer than somebody living in their own house at some crossroad in the middle of nowhere.

Overall I guess the average french factory worker doesn't really take 4 hour lunch breaks all the time, either...
Never heard of this before now, but seems like you should be able to leverage Benford's law somehow as a way to win lots of bar bets.
It was free, you just had to have a reason for it.
Git gets talked about a lot because it's a good tool, and was written by Linus Torvalds - which basically ensures that a whole lot of people will try it out. Since it's pretty damn good at what it does, most of those people kept on using it.
Oh yeah. They both also fail miserably on few large files (hundreds of megabytes). I did tests with 100-200 MB ascii text files and good old Subversion beat both Git and Mercurial easily. Git was better, just several times slower than SVN. For Hg, I had to kill the process.
I don't understand how anyone thinks they'll ever get away with Ponzi schemes. Is it even possible?

Maybe they just plan to flee the country and retire on the beach of some little island somewhere.
I hate it when a perfectly reasonable article is split into 15 separate sections you need to click through. Here's a copy you can read quickly - http://jottit.com/myvqn
Tor2web: Tor anonymized content available to all
Phasing in World of Warcraft
Isn't "make the mark think that he's on the inside of some shady but profitable deal" one of the classic cons?
They are asking for profits because that is one of the legal remedies they are entitled to. It sounds pretty severe, like Cisco stands to lose a lot of money but I really doubt that the FSF would be awarded anything here.

The defendant (Cisco) gets to deduct "the elements of profit attributable to factors other than the copyrighted work." (17 U.S.C. § 504 of the US Copyright Act).

I imagine if you take the profit from a single revision of a firmware image and subtract everything that is not attributable to the Readline library (for example, named in the complaint) you can safely round that down to zero.
> In the dawn of time Lenat actually did stuff.

Harsh, but probably fair. Or as Eliezer Yudkowsky put it "EURISKO may still be the most sophisticated self-improving AI ever built [...] by Douglas Lenat before he started wasting his life on Cyc."

> I've been playing around with a port of AM for the past coupla weeks.

From where is the code for AM available? I ask because some people on an AI list I subscribe to think the Eurisko code is unavailable (but would like to get hold of it). You wouldn't have the Eurisko code too, by any chance?

> I think the world's coolest AI programs are Eurisko, Copycat and AM.

I would agree, in terms of modelling general cognition.
Myst Online to be released fully open-source
No, the only similarity is that this article and the comic both use the word "solvent."
46% Percent of Women Say They Would Give Up Sex for the Internet
I don't really like him — I just don't know anyone with a bigger ego than his.
as time goes gnu/gpl/fsf looks like a license troll to me
"... Two veteran coders have teamed up to create a kind of Google for the anonymous underweb.

Aaron Swartz, a Reddit developer, and Virgil Griffith, creator of WikiScanner, have created a new service called tor2web that gives users access to website hosted anonymously on the Tor network ..."

Pretty good timing given the UK Wikipedia ban ~ http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/09/wikipedia-i... and the proposed Australian Internet filter ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2871574175/in/set-7215...
Mike Masnick: Why a Music Tax is a Bad Idea
As a person in their second start-up company I know that funding is the biggest problem. Your paper helped me understand my effort I have ahead of me. And made me more determined that ever for my idea and company plus it gave me some more ideas. Thanks

Jerrel Crider
Graphic Arts Teacher
jerreldcrider@yahoo.com
Thanks your paper gave me new ideas.
It's both. You're told you own the item, then suddenly that you don't own it any more.
Are they still free? Or are they now paying renewal fees like the rest of us?
Regarding your update: that's saying they encrypt the pipe between your computer and their servers using SSL. The files are still stored without encryption on their servers (as far as I can tell).
It's interesting that Le Muer talks about extreme quality given the atrocious quality of the venue and speakers at LeWeb.

I'm sure there is room for some fascinating cultural debate, but hot on the heels of a conference so badly managed that even the friendly-home-team Europeans felt it was a frozen no-internet disaster it seems a bit hollow to then talk about the culture of extreme quality.
I was almost entirely referring to mobile Safari's tendency to cache nothing ever. With an app like this, everything but the actual transaction data is stored locally, and the time you'd save from that could easily be the difference between accepting credit cards being worth it, or a too much of a hassle. Both in terms of potential consistency and responsiveness (no screen zooming in and out to enter data in a form field, for instance), and speed (no having to worry about having to wait between states other than actual card processing), having this software running locally as a native app instead of an optimized site, I think, have very tangible benefits given where this app would most likely be used.

Man, wrote more than I meant to there. Whoops!
http://www.soekris.com has good stuff
I think what rox is that it does that without imposing itself at all. I have it installed & barely ever use it. (no real need). I still haven't uninstalled it. I feel no cost to having it installed. It could come bundled with an OS.
Are auctions universally legal?
"... Each time we met a new person, we were constantly thinking of how this person can help our venture, . Everywhere we went, we explored if there was something there that could benefit our startup. Frankly we were classical ‘opportunity hounds” and quite shamelessly so ..."

I've seen this so many times and it tends to work well in a boom. I'm curious how well does this idea work in the current crash?
The following is written on the site:

"And no, BitBucket doesn't count just because they ripped off GitHub screen for screen. When they are 30 times bigger and I hear that anyone choose Mercurial over something else because of the community on BitBucket, then I'll reconsider.

Launchpad for Bazaar is closer, but they're still a fraction of the size, nor have I heard of anyone leaning towards Bzr because of the incredible Launchpad community they want to take part in. However, as they are more legitimate, I've removed the 'bzr' flag from this argument."
All this makes me wonder, why not just use nuclear spaceships? Aren't they much more viable?
Agreed, here. The very fact the question was asked at all speaks volumes about the person who asked it.
well I can tell you for sure that is only a San Francisco/Bay area thing. I lived in the east coast (Boston), and have many friends that live in NYC, and the culture is very different over there.
If you are not in by 9 am., it looks bad. Even if you are done with your work, and more, or can't be any more productive, you still have to stay in to put your hours.

You feel extra guilty just for asking a couple of hours off to go to the dentist or fix your car. etc. etc. Management doesn't trust you for sure, and half of the sites or the internet are blocked.

If you work in the financial industry, you can't use any external/personal email, im, or whatever. My company even disabled SMS from company phones.

Yes, it can be that bad even in the US.

So, what you discribing, as rolling in a 10-11am is ok, is just a California thing, and most importantly a startup world thing, so don't generalise it for the whole US.
You can tell a conference was boring if the most exciting bit of news is meta news about Silicon Valley's drama queen.
22 Pounds of UAW Rules and Regulations (Literally)
Jeebus. I'm curious what a 100GB branch contains? Data? Binaries? Images?
Larry Wall might say "Perl is a house-church".
I still don't see what your point is.

Something like, "google doesn't care about SEO therefore site s that do should use javascript frameworks instead of static html" or something?
That's a sensible position to have for an established company that has a lot of cash in the bank, doesn't pay its engineers very much and has a long-term view.

However, if you're established but don't have cash, have low margins and expensive personnel, you're not in a very good position to start doing heavy R&D.

Apple doesn't reflect the state of tech startups. Lessons learned from Jobs should be taken into context.

If you don't have cash, get some by cutting everything you don't need. Build up a reserve and invest in long-term projects. Preferably ones that tie into a strategy of supplying services that other companies need but are currently supplied by companies that are going bust. Also, be pessimistic on your revenue projections.

And don't take random advice on forums as your guideline.
Interesting.

I played around with the math a few months ago. Looks like you could do the same thing from the ground, with minimal rocket assist. You'd just get the payload package hotter than a fireball on the way out -- sort of a reverse re-entry. But a ground-based, low atmosphere mass driver could easily be built without huge diamond towers. A cannister/payload system could be constructed which would include a final rocket assist into orbit.
He recently invested in a ticket company (Live Stub) during a recession so he'll have a chance to act instead of talk.

Unfortunately the press releases spent more time discussing Morten Lund than Live Stub.

http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS56235+25-Aug...
Looking at the long term chart, Apple seems to get pounded extra-hard in recessions. No surprise, as they essentially sell luxury goods. Corporate-wise, it hardly matters what they do now since their balance book is (extremely) healthy, but they've got 2 years of hard times, if history is a guide.
Flagged. Not HN. Belongs on VW.

No offense to raghus, who's submitted some good stuff.
Though I can (usually, ok, sometimes) appreciate Techcrunch's position as an opinionated startup news outlet, this kind of stuff reads like a juvenile pissing contest.

Teenagers apparently indulge in this kind of behavior on MySpace, but I'm not exposed to it because I don't go there. If I somehow find the need to read the tech equivalent, I'll know where to go.
is there any strong correlation between spelling mistakes and achievements?

imho it's as relevant as predicting an asian engineering student success based on english SAT
How long will it last? If nobody can track down the origin of a site, they'll just sure the Tor2web operators instead.