skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great Stuff! Hope this will become the next Apple iphone app store for the rest of us!
Why would anyone need or want this? Running Windows as a standard user and/or Vista's UAC mechanism seems to provide the same functionality.

I can see that the virtualization layer is more beneficial if you were trying to make it so applications behaved the same when running on Windows, Mac, or Linux. In this case, you'd be expanding on existing things like Apache's Portable Runtime, Wine or Parallels. However, the business case for your Windows sand boxing system is not something that makes sense to me.
I agree, and I think specifically its about the agile iead of not addressing future, nebulous, requirements. The minimum necessary that will possibly work.
Man was that snarky.

You read fiction for the things that interest you. If an "interesting" thing doesn't hold your attention, it's not interesting. I find that some authors remain interesting upon multiple rereads, while others fall apart rapidly. But fiction can say things that nonfiction can't, because with fiction you can create an entire artificial construct just to prove a point.
Great article. I think it's an opportune time for entrepreneurs that are willing to look past, "Woe is me, look at the economy," and are willing to search for opportunity!
That was definitely part of it. But it's also that Ender's Game is such a widespread book, and that its showing up here was slightly unexpected and unprompted. The fact that it appeared was curious in and of itself.
"I hope that this post encourages other JRubyists to speak up"
Well, Card says in his intro to that book that part of it was his fascination with the language and the culture. And I think that the Portugese was what made Speaker such a fascinating read.

I don't think Card is trying to excuse Hitler. I really don't think so. Not even subconsciously. And I thought upon reading that article that it was interesting, but rather misguided. The OP response made a lot of sense, considering Card is very likely a Mormon. But even then, I think it was subconscious on his part.
> Man was that snarky.

Yes. We methane-breathing anti-gourmets are known for our occasional lapses into snarkishness.
NSA's Warrantless Eavesdropping Targets Innocent Americans
Their legal counsel had advised them that they were not a money transfer business and not required to do so.

They had also been in business successfully for years before the patriot act passed.

I also hardly think you could say that they directly ignored it as they had actually been disputing that they were under Fincen regulations for several years and not just sitting back hoping for the best.

Whether you agree with their analysis is up to you. I think it was probably not a battle worth fighting.

Their service was undoubtably used for money laundering, but mainly for smaller criminals and fraudsters. The same could be said for craigslist, paypal, ebay and even google.

Over the years money laundering has become code for tax avoidance, online gaming and dubious investment schemes. By using that term the DOJ make it sound like it was used by major criminal organizations. It wasn't.

Real large scale money laundering is done most often through real estate, fake invoices between cover businesses and use existing banks complete with know your customer compliance.

For more on how this is done:
http://econotrix.com/archives/000524.html
Last.fm are hosting a Hack Day
A sign-up fee sounds like a way to make the problem worse. Its big business to get a link on a site aggregator like Digg or Reddit so I think spam would increase if membership came at a cost. I really love Hacker News but I'm always looking for a replacement or another source for news.
They're profitable because the site is littered with ads. I have ad block on and I still have to scroll through a series of them to get to my map. Then, once I see what I searched for, MapQuest shows a "pop-up" call out box with links to more ads. ("Want pizza?" "Movie tickets?") Booo.
no: right-click on the flash movie, select "settings," then set "local storage" (third icon from the left on my setup) to "zero."
How to “hack” yourself into conferences for free
Personal Pod Transport Is Coming
DNS Drama Exposed (Dramatically)
Bailout more than Louisiana Purchase, New Deal, Korean + Iraq + Vietnam wars, and NASA
i don't think you can call this a "startup."
He's using Mechanical Turk's API to create a "give me feedback on my site" task automatically.

That task on Mechanical Turk usually goes for $.02-.05 a task. And, if you're familiar with MechaTurk, it really only takes about 15 minutes to set that task up.

He's charging $7 because people don't want to mess with Mechanical Turk. It's brilliant, and I hope it takes off. I actually think that he should charge $20-30 and give people 40-50 user comments. It seems like a better value.
Awesome, this works.
you're talking a couple generations behind what we're doing. there is a huge difference between plugging 10 variations into an ad server and using a genetic algorithm to quickly and efficiently find a local (or global) maxima in a search space of over 1 billion possibilities with constantly shifting preferences.

smartads is also a very different product, very focused on offer optimization, with a rigid system that doesn't expand well beyond the specific verticals they've created templates for. most players in this space have fairly limited optimization abilities, ie a/b testing, which does not scale up.
Humor, as pg succinctly puts it, comes from novel breakages. (There are academic studies confirming this.) So keeping that in mind, it's possible that something can be objectively funny without anyone actually finding humor in it. (For example, if they don't see the breakage or they just don't care.)

Interesting works the same way. Something can be objectively interesting without anyone actually finding it interesting.

If this sounds funny, it's because words are defined as used. And there are certain words that are used differently than what they actually mean. For example, if I asked you for an interesting idea you wouldn't tell me the number of penguins in Antarctica, because we all accept that a fact is different than an idea. But if you look in a dictionary, you'll see the word idea defined as if it were a fact, even though we all agree that it's not. Why? Because in practice when people use the word idea it's almost always in the context of "give me an idea of how big this room is" or something like that. I.e., in most cases idea is used as a synonym for fact, even though we agree that this isn't what an idea is. You'd have to look in a really good dictionary and scroll all the way to the bottom of the list of definitions to even get a hint that this is the case, and even then they won't give you a good working definition.

So what is interesting? Unalone nails it when he says something different. That is, something that breaks with our mental models of how the world works, but without actually suggesting a new set of more accurate schemas (which would be insightful.)

I prefer reading insightful stuff to interesting stuff, which is why I say that reading stuff that's interesting (objectively) doesn't hold my (subjective) interest.
Since your product seems to be coded in python the source is kind of "open-source" already isn't it? Also its not the commercial competitors that will screw you, the real danger is if someone will find your project interesting, disagree with some small thing, fork it and release it as a new free open-source product, get a few more people interested to contribute so you as a one-man-shop can't keep up and thereby replace your product with a _real_ open-source product. Heck, I'm almost tempted to copy your repository, do some simple query-replace and put it up on google code just to make a statement and see how you turn-coat and will start complain and whine in your next blog post.
Celebrate Newtonmas instead...

http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/on-december-25-a-s...
",[.]"

That is a BrainF*k program. It reads a char (","), then if value is greater than 0 (i.e. not null since ANSI 0 is 48, so more precisely, if the input is not null, rather than greater than 0), then in that case it enters the square brackets. It outputs the entered char ("."). It does not decrement the value in that cell ("-"), it does not add to it ("+"), it does not move the pointer to another cell (">" or "<"). It just sits there and outputs, forever (".") since so long as the value in that cell is not null it will not get out of the square brackets (the "while" loop) and since it never decrements the values ("-") it will always be not null. This is the same as saying "while(true) putchar(c)". This program will not terminate.

Seems to me, go thru a program source code, and look at all loops and see if the pointer controlling the loops ever decrements the cell it is pointing to. If it does, program terminates. If it doesn't program does not terminate. If cell pointer is at overflows its capacity program blows up. There. I just solved the requirements of the "get a coder" posting. That will be 300 euros please (because the dollar sucks). :-)

More seriously, I think in terms of the requirements, it is not a matter of running f(x). It is a matter of analyzing f(x). Maybe you can't do this for all x, but surely it seems like you can for all f. Meaning, you can't test an infinite number of inputs to a given input program. But you can go thru the source code, like the above example, and determine how it will handle the input x. Feeding x into the f above will give you an infinite loop. You don't know that if all you do is feed x to f. But if you look at f first and you look at x (in this case, to know x is not null), then you can predict f(x) will infinite loop, without ever having to run it.

In other words the requirements are not asking for a debugger. They are asking for an oracle, i.e., an "intelligence" in the program smart enough to look at f, look at x, and figure ok f never stops, f does stop, or f blows up. The oracle won't run f(x). The oracle will merely analyze f(x). And she does this by simply looking for while type loops, and figuring out the affect x will have on the pointers controlling them. Will x cause the cell pointed to by the pointer to get decremented to the point of stopping an infinite loop or not? If so, f(x) halts, if not, it doesn't. Gosh, this doesn't sound so impossible (again, viewing the requirements as really asking for an oracle, not a debugger). Maybe I'm missing something here, and would welcome comments.
as a point of clarification, the system greg's built goes much further than simple a/b testing. there are quite a few complications with implementing a genetic algorithm in the real world of constantly shifting preferences.

once done right, it can efficiently optimize millions of permutations with millions of ad impressions (<2000 clicks). more permutations means more chance for improvement, and this just isn't possible with a simple a/b testing solution.
Wow, you totally miss my point; and you do so in the most abrasive and rude manner possible.

And it's kind of a moot point because this site doesn't carry ads. And if it did, would be less attractive to many of us.
Can you actually completely take down Vista 64 through 3D APIs, given the user-level drivers? It would be very interesting if you could. The only plausible way I know of is to repeatedly crash the driver for several minutes, and even this is uncertain (I've seen this happen with Forceware + DirectX 10).
They should have been able to make this announcement 5 years ago.
"boring and pretentious"

Awesome, I think I like your brother. And I've never been prouder to be part of a community deemed boring and pretentious.
Make them craft an Amazon.com wishlist. I do it for my Mom who has no idea what to buy an uber geek like me.
We are looking for RoR hackers and/or software engineering generalists at EMI Music. Read more about our job descriptions here: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dg3h36zx_23c4ck9bc9
I think it was enough that Ian mentioned Kishore being an exceptionally bright person straight out of college. Mentioning MIT might make people feel bad who went to lesser schools like Harvard. ;-)
I'm using a lot of open source software which I didn't build myself from source. That's what distributors are doing. It seems to me you are selling the additional service of building the software. I guess it might work because you also got the name - people who know it want to get it from you.
Now, onions to power your iPods
I realize this wired, but did they really have to dramatize it so much?. I mean, come on, talking about the possibility of routing the entire .com domain through his laptop? It sounded like something that Robert Ludlum would write.
See also: http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/2008-11-04
No. Absolutely not. There is no objective study of humor, or of interesting. You can't manufacture it. Different people find different things funny for different reasons. I've taken classes in stand-up comedy, improv comedy, and in general dramatics, and this is the big thing that we learn. While humor can be analyzed, and while there's a craft inherent in modeling a joke, that doesn't make humor objective. And it's the same thing with interest. Some people find things interesting that aren't interesting whatsoever to me. The same is true in reverse.

I mean, thanks for agreeing with me, but from what you're saying here I think that you're saying something pretty nonsensical. "Interest" and "insight" aren't objective standards. It's entirely subjective, through-and-through. If you don't like reading because you don't find it interesting, then it's not interesting to you. It's not objectively interesting whatsoever. And usually, insight and interest are matched. If something's saying something new, then it's both insightful and interesting, precisely for the "different" argument that I made before.
EPrize Versus Slither: Fabricating A Competitor To Stay Innovative
While it may take fifteen minutes to kick in, for many people it has very strong associations with waking up. For somebody who habitually drinks coffee in the morning, even decaf may make them more alert for a few minutes by placebo. (I'm more of a tea drinker, and find hot herbal teas can have the same focusing effect.)

Also, if people usually drink their stimulant sweet, that's another confounding variable.
Since when has masterbation been a considered a bad thing?

In all honesty, I speculate nearly all 'bad' and 'good' goals undertaken by individuals are for at some level their own gratification, satisfaction, medication, pleasure, whatever the semantic of choice.

There isn't anything wrong with that. From deliberately catching a glance of a beautiful woman across the street to tirelessly working at finding a way to end world hunger, it's done at some level for your own satisfaction. It's what drives the world.

To those who feel so threatened by the idea of associating whatever endeavor with pleasure as a motivation, calm down. It's part of what makes us human. It certainly doesn't strip an accomplishment of it's value.
See 'YCombinator Startup Creates A Better Download App Store For Windows (BaseShield)': http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/25/ycombinator-startup-cre...
I am told by my friend Tristan that Apture.com is looking for top notch javascript hackers.
If I didn't get enough sleep the previous night and I have a sufficiently large lunch, then it would seem inevitable I would dose off :))) even if I'm in a meeting @_@
Fair enough, I guess you were given a straight answer.

Anyway for some reason you original reply sounded to me pretty much like: "these guys did not give me a job, they suxxors! Don't go near them!"

Often you do not know the reason for not hiring. "Just does not feel right" or "gut feeling" may be the real reason, and then you try to rationalize it somehow. Hiring is not an exact science.
kaizen at code level, i try to eliminate as many as temp vars as possible by using closure, map, macro etc

it's because i'm dumb, my brain doesn't have much STM capacity (that's why i don't use OOP)
If I was running Sun I'd seriously look at splitting the company in two. The software side is shackled by the fact that they need to move in a direction that is going to erode revenue from the hardware side. As long as they are in the same company you will have a tug of war between two sides pulling two different ways and nobody going anywhere.

I agree with the software folks trying to become the best deployment platform for web software. There's a window of opportunity while the JVM is ahead of other VMs where Sun could pull this off if they can produce a super stable, scalable, easy to deploy runtime that runs everything from PHP to Python, Ruby and Groovy and make it a snap to deploy and manage. The catch is that I don't think there's any chance they will achieve this if they try and tie it to either Solaris or Sun hardware. That ship has sailed - hosting these days is either linux or windows for all but the highest top tier. They need to completely get over it and aggressively push themselves on linux.
You're right; I've overstated (I'm not making up that he's essentially disavowed it, but I can't find the cite I'm looking for, so assume it's just hyperbole).

Here's the passage I was thinking of in "Practical":

Among cryptographers, Bruce's first book, Applied Cryptigraphy, is both famous and notorious. It is famous for bringing cryptography to the attention of thousands of people. It is infamous for the systems that these people then designed and implemented on their own.

The problems with AC include:

* No attention given to any of the practical vulnerabilities in cryptosystems, so that you could deploy code directly from the book and still have it be vulnerable to ECB cut-and-paste or parameter tampering.

* A candy shop of random ciphers without any context as to why one would be chosen over the other, with varying degrees of detail provided for each.

* Descriptions of protocols that are largely obsolete or discredited, without warnings or disclaimers or, really, any actual didactic purpose.

"Applied" seemed great to me too, but then I became a practioner (though by no means an expert). Even "Practical" lacks detail on a lot of major crypto issues --- side-channel attacks, parameter tampering, the safe use of public key primitives and signature validation --- that actually occur in real systems.
I don't know, while I might agree that what qualifies as 'interesting' probably is subjective, I think that insight is concrete enough so that you could objectively state whether some was or not with relation to the author or the audiance.
Is it just me, or have a lot of pro-napping stories been making the rounds for the past two weeks?
And supervisor processes, as in Erlang.
Just a nitpick: caffeine doesn't clear your system of adenosine, it plugs its receptors without activating them, effectively crowding it out.

Your brain, with its countless centuries of evolution, quickly catches on to these shenanigans. After a few days of caffeine use, it will adapt by growing more adenosine receptors -- either you continue plugging those, too, or you face the avalanche of adenosine when you quit: headaches and unshakable drowiness.

Anecdotally, small amounts of caffeine regularly throughout the day (e.g. thermos of green tea or caffeinated mints) seem less likely to trigger this, but I'm curious how low the threshold actually is.
Genetic A/B Testing with JavaScript
Thought you were supposed to be able to "borrow" from future PTO.
That's an absolutely valid point. The reason I went ahead and posted my comment anyway was because it's the most obvious example of how the reviewer and I interpreted the book differently. Granted, I read it years ago, and the goal was entertainment rather than literary criticism, but I saw plenty of guilt: it all simply landed on Ender's shoulders when he finds out what he had done, and fit in with the guilt for his previous acts. I think it's possible to read Ender's Game with either interpretation in mind (guilt vs. no guilt), but my interpretation seems to be more supported by the sequels.
"There is no objective study of humor, or of interesting."

From Paul McGhee's paper Cognitive Development and Children's Comprehension of Humor:

This study investigated the relationship between children's level of cognitive functioning (according to Piaget's theoretical framework) and their comprehension and appreciation of humor based on violation of cognitive expectancies. A distinction was drawn between novelty and incongruity humor, differing in the nature of expectancy violation represented. [...] Analyses of age differences indicated consistent significant increases in comprehension with increasing age for all humor stimuli. Similar analyses for humor appreciation yielded no significant age differences.

This was done in 1971, when we didn't know nearly as much as we do now about the validity of Piaget's framework. If this research was redone today with more modern techniques and cognitive development theories the results would be even more telling.

And if you look at the prior research this paper cites, it's clear that there is an objective basis for humor and it's been carefully studied.
He said: "Well, you've never had a good grasp of logic, SO this can't be true."

Which is the same as saying: "This can't be true, BECAUSE you've never had a good grasp of logic."

The problem with ad hominem attacks is a broken clock can be correct twice a day or more. So saying the clock is broken does not necessarily imply that it's wrong now just that it has been wrong in the past and will probably be wrong in the future.

When parsing arguments look for words like and, or, because, so, thus, etc as they are the foundations of arguments. You can add a lot of meaningless drivel around the core argument but as soon as someone starts tossing those words around they are probably trying to use logic. His point is the way an attack is connected to the argument determines if calling something ad hominem discredits the argument.

PS: People sometimes add an ad hominem attack as part of other more rational statements, so IMO attacking the person even alongside a rational argument is still an ad hominem attack even if it is not used to directly attack their argument. However, simply calling part of what someone says an ad hominem attack does not destroy the rest of the argument if it's not directly linked to it. It's like a defense attorney that counters the DNA evidence but ignores the video tape and the confession is going to fail.
relation to the author or the audiance

But that makes it subjective, doesn't it?
So don't do that! There's absolutely no need to merge into a working copy with uncommitted changes (unless, of course, you're just looking for ways to break things). Check in your changes, then merge. It's not rocket surgery.

Git doesn't even allow merges into a dirty branch (for the same reason), so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
Agreed. Though I like how the demo (incl music) is modeled after the iPhone ads; don't change that!