skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Google maintains a separate logs system"

Could the difference be that Google associates data with your Google account if you have Web History turned on, but only uses IP addresses in their "logs system"?

If this was the case, IMHO, it would be consistent enough with expectations.
The packages are built for Ubuntu 11.10. What version of Ubuntu are you running?
Christian Cantrell put out a video of him using his Galaxy Nexus as a desktop replacement...

Original video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_--zcmqIyRI

Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB-icTl2J-c
A phone can't serve as a desktop replacement until I can drive Emacs, gcc, Python, and some sort of Lisp (like Scheme) with it.

Thankfully, there's this:

http://android.galoula.com/en/LinuxInstall/

Got it on my Transformer. ARM Debian tablet with a keyboard and all day battery life? YES PLZ
> Please be careful in reading

You should take your own advice. Bi-Modal sleep has a lot more evidence than just that, and the article includes some from historians, which I guess you missed.

This sleep pattern is well accepted, and has been known for decades. Not sure why they are writing an article about it now, except maybe the author heard about it and decided it would make an interesting article.
IMO, this is a huge problem for the future of electric cars. If you own one, you will always have to worry about this when going away for extended periods. When I had my honda insight, just leaving it un-driven for 2 weeks would seriously deplete the battery. I never killed the battery, but after the car had 130k miles, just leaving it garaged for a few days would noticeably deplete the charge. I'm afraid that electric cars will become the new disposable car at some point because no one wants to flip the bill for a new battery pack.
META - why is nathnb's comment being down-voted? (It's not rude or aggressive or meme-spewing or vapid "me too" / "plus one".)
I don't think "number of registrations received when offering only Facebook Connect" is enough data to evaluate the effectiveness of using Facebook Connect as your only login option compared to providing a real login option.

Edit: It looks like your product actually depends explicitly on Facebook data to work, so it wouldn't be possible to not use Facebook. While Facebook Connect is a good choice for a product like that, it is also the only choice.
John Nash 1955 on basing cryptography on exponential difficulty
Lucid dreaming?
Rahul, Martin, Conrad, and others, Many Congrats! Rapportive is a really great product.
He also predicted the first Gulf War, the election of Obama and the Great Fire of London. Wait, wrong guy...

In all seriousness though, while the technology factors certainly enable some 'shrinkage' of the firm, human factors change less, which to me indicates that YC like agglomerations will not replace the corporation in many circumstances. In other words, it's easier to find people these days, but as contractors, are they really still going to slog it out for a company day in and day out for years? Most people out there are not like YC founders, would be my bet, and are reasonably happy with their 9/5 jobs, and with not having to hustle to find the next gig. On the positive side, these people will also retain the tacit knowledge inherent in many human activities, and provide a sense of continuity that a shifting network might have trouble fostering outside a small core. Apple, for instance, has 60,000+ employees, according to the web page - that's not what I'd consider a small core + network, even though they certainly outsource a lot. So... trend, yes, but fairly slow once the low-hanging fruit that tech can provide has been integrated.

The other big question I have in this vein is whether it will remain so cheap to create a company, or if it's an anomaly, and in the future more capital will be required for anything serious. My guess is that the long term is towards cheaper, but who knows what may happen.

BTW, Wikipedia says it's just an article, and here's the summary for those interested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
Legal claims can be served via Facebook
Almost everything I read about the financial woes of Greece blames its government's inability to collect taxes, and not, say, beauracratic paperwork. So, excuse me if I'm suspicious of the causal implication of the article.
Personally I like to keep many files open so that I have undo buffers for them in case I change my mind. This is a subjective thing and I know there are other ways to solve the same issue (keeping versioned files ala Dropbox, etc), but easy undo of recent-but-not-too-recent changes is the #1 reason I tend to keep tons of files open when editing projects.
Puppet ain't sweet anymore & Marionette-Collective hopeful
Benevolent dictatorships are great as long as you agree with the dictator.
Why Businesses Should Not Rely On Facebook URLs For Advertising
Event Driven Programming in Clojure
Isn't that basically what a hybrid does?

Also, it'd be neat if you could attach to the wires for buses that are in many major cities.
Vostu: Layoffs continue
Sebastian is using one of those electronic pens to write in this course. I'm not sure how exactly this works, but his hand is transparent in such a way that it never blocks the text (I didn't notice this immediately, it all seemed very natural). I watched the first few videos of the Fall AI class--this is far better than that approach.

I'm not sure how they'll deal with errors--too soon to tell.

So far Sebastian has been very good about not using jargon without introducing it--in fact he's been extremely empathetic in this regard. Moreover, so far the format of the course has changed to focusing on solving the specific problem (like robot localization) and then afterwards introducing the formal ideas, like Bayes' theorem. Its much better than the videos I saw from the first AI course.

I think you're right that sometimes doers are not great teachers, but I am convinced that you should give Thrun another shot.
I found this a thought provoking talk at Strange Loop by the author of Lamina (async in Clojure) and Aleph (async networking in Clojure, built on Lamina).
Kickstumbler: elegantly explore random Kickstarter projects
Hacked this instead of sleeping.

It lets you stumble through cool Kickstarter projects by category (or across the entire site), or watch a continuous video channel of Kickstarter video intros.

What do you think?
His work also highlights the lack of support given by Google for backwards compatibility. Stuff like action bar (one of the biggest new UI changes in 3.0+) backwards compatibility is essential if you design your app around the new patterns and guidelines. Their official recommendations for having an action bar in 2.3 and below are:

1. Reimplement almost the whole action bar on 2.3 and below by building on top of their "ActionBarCompat" example which is very minimal and only supports menu items - if developers take this approach, there's going to be a lot of inconsistent action bars out there.

2. Just forget the action bar on older versions of Android (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/say-goodbye-t...), which is terrible advice - you can't just pretend that it never existed when the whole app is designed around it. Thankfully they don't believe this themselves since all their apps have some sort of action bar implementation on older versions too.
Again, missing the point. Seems like we're walking 2 different paths here and they're not likely to cross any time soon. Best of luck on yours in any case. Cheers.
That quote should be read as "tesla batteries can remain unplugged from a power source for weeks".

I agree this article doesn't debunk the other article.

I haven't read the Tesla documentation, but if "bricking" is real I'd expect some firm warnings about it. The other article said that those warnings were absent; it also claimed that the documents played down the risk.
I used to read techcrunch pretty often.. often enough to know that this "article" is damage control then anything.
What do you mean? Am I just dehydrated when I feel overslept, or oversleeping causes dehydration? The latter makes little sense to me, but I'm asking for clarification because this issue happens to me quite often.
The most implausible part of this story is that Google would care what Yahoo is doing. Other than that, totally plausible, which is a bit depressing.
HyperDex utilizes value-dependent chains for replication. Updates move forward in the chains, while acknowledgements flow in reverse.

To issue a PUT or a GET, the client contacts the head of the chain responsible for the object it is modifying/accessing. If other nodes in the chain fail, the chain will transparently recover. If the point leader fails (the head of the chain), then the client does not know if the operation completed.

This is analogous to a database library opening a socket and sending "BEGIN; INSERT INTO data ("x", "y", "z"); COMMIT" and then the client losing connection (or crashing entirely). There is always some point at which the server may complete, and then the client may immediately crash before receiving notification that the operation is complete. Even if this happens, however, HyperDex's GET and PUT operations are linearizable.
I have spoken to a guy who was at one point closely involved with the D-wave people. He suggested that the actual story with the Lockheed purchase was that LM sells an awful lot of gear to Canada, and as part of the contract they are expected to buy some number of million worth of Canadian tech in return. The D-wave purchase was one of these obligated purchases.

Just a comment given in unofficial conversation, take it how you will.
Well I guess it matters how important it is for you to get all the users interested in your service or a part of them. Right now there are two categories which you are definitely missing on:
1) People who don't have a Facebook account.
2) People who have one but are more privacy-concerned.
How affected you are by these two categories is defined of course by the target audience (demographics and social status for example), but it is pretty hard to draw conclusions without alternate methods of registration (for I know those 500 registrations came from 1000 interested users).
He asked what to do if an employer asks for his Github and he has nothing current on it. I answered with "fill it with your open source contributions." You're free to draw whatever conclusions you want from that.
The comments in this thread are painful and seem to be based on a lack of understanding of investor motivations and basic spreadsheet math. YC (and the rest of Silicon Valley)'s biggest successes are companies that make money and have real, innovative business models and products. Talent acquisitions almost always happen before companies reach this stage, and while they get a lot of attention because they are "news", they aren't where investors make the most money.

Investors aren't investing in technology companies in the hopes they get acquired for $10m in Google or Facebook stock -- they are looking for large sustainable companies that generate revenue (and profits). The difference between YC and traditional investors is that YC doesn't block founders from taking talent acquisitions, which may be one reason it seems like there are more of them.
What's wrong with SQL?
> I sometimes get there by being sleep-deprived.

Ah, yes. It's a little bit different. Clarity, calm, a kind of purely-mental energy, an ease to achieve good focus. Sometimes a positive, sunny feeling (unless you're completely exhausted or stressed, in which case it's nasty); other times quite an intense but smooth joy. But at the purely physical level, batteries are running out.

The twilight state has less clarity (it's not obscure, though), and calm doesn't enter the picture. But it's full of this roiling primeval emotional drive to create (in a very wide, general sense). It's where dreams come from, and most inspiring ideas. Some folks find it easier to experience it if they linger in bed in the morning, trying to avoid yanking themselves out of sleep directly into full waking state. It's a fragile thing, handle it gently.
oh no, your product is wonderful and the problem is most definitely not with your company, it's with the way people approach it. The way that Mint.com use it (they use getsatisfaction, but it's the same model so we can treat them as the same) is the perfect example of the model working so very well, it's not a complaint / criticism of you, it's a criticism of companies that think they can just half-ass some modernisation of customer support. Just like companies that think making a facebook page and then leaving it is "social media".
We should do further: eliminate aging so that we don't degrade in youth or mind performance.

However, that means adults who are hundred years old have a vast advantage over you, assuming he is able to keep and integrate the experiences of the last several hundred years.
Thanks! I was hoping someone would provide the link to that again.
Actually, most major experiments in particle physics these days (including the OPERA experiment) avoid this sort of confirmation bias by being run "blind." The scientists write all of their data reduction pipelines before taking any actual data and test their pipelines on simulated data. When they are confident that their pipeline is running as expected they run the experiment, put the data through their pipeline and publish the result, no matter how unexpected it is.

As the OPERA result showed, it has the problem that if you don't understand everything in your experiment perfectly (which is difficult to do in a very large, complicated experiment) you run the risk of embarrassing yourself by making some obvious-in-retrospect mistake and publishing an obviously absurd result. But in the long run it's not so bad a price to pay to avoid the sort of confirmation bias that Feynman was talking about.
I doubt having the UN in charge is preferable in any way to having the US govt in charge.

For all its faults, the US is a democracy where people do have some influence on the political process. The UN is essentially run by ad-hoc coalitions of tyrants.
This proposal suggests extending the existing Open Graph Protocol to better define how content can be shared on third party sites such as Pinterest.
A quick google suggests that you're right. Thanks for that.
Not too shabby. I could get used to the lag and flashing, in return for visibility in sunlight.

Any idea if this ruins screen lifetime or brings battery life to even worse than LCD (with so many repaints)?
Thanks for the comment Peter. We are excited to launch this new service and have already seen the viral affect that quotes can have. We have some cool features we are working on for the site and will consider the idea of displaying related quotes. Nice job with @codewisdom. Let us know when you do the blog post.
Here it is: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/frontier-digital-education-1...
To be fair, the linked slashdot posting has a link to this exact story as a counter-point.
I'm reading through the paper, and I'm curious if I understand the implications of key subspacing and value dependent chaining correctly - do all reads and writes for a given key get forced to a single node? I understand how the replication that's described allows for failover when the point-leader fails, but does it also allow for scaling writes and key lookups?
I've examined a lot of github accounts while hiring, and seeing thousands of commits is rare. If I'm satisfied that there's no chance someone is faking, I'll forego fizzbuzz, but really in the end it's nothing more than a 5 minute formality (and I make a point of telling the candidate that it's just a formality and yes it's trivial, and we both laugh at the absurdity of the situation as he scribbles it up on the white board). At that point the real interview hasn't even started yet.
Content providers will be forced through the door by competition from copyleft and creative commons content.

Competition is the easiest way to combat DRM.

The presence of DRM legitimizes a social norms of restriction. The lack thereof legitimizes social norms of sharing.

DRM is a tangible embodiment of the the tragedy of the commons. DRM is analogous to a series of electric fences partitioning off the commons so that only some cows from some individuals can graze in certain places, but no other cows can graze there. People will invent electric fences for use in chipping away at the commons, but it would be a disaster for society to standardize the electric fences so that anyone can chip away at the commons effortlessly.

I'm of the opinion that if some entity wants to cripple their content with DRM, that is their prerogative, but they shouldn't get help from W3C and other bodies creating open standards.

On top of all that, as a developer, DRM is one more layer of bullish*t to deal with. I'm perfectly happy paying for APIs based on usage. I connect, you measure, you charge. Last thing I want to encounter are APIs which require me to implement a cumbersome layer of DRM to use content.

Lastly, I can only see the presence of DRM reducing accessibility of content for special needs users, such as the blind, because any form of DRM is likely to reduce how you can manipulate content. What if the DRM prevents close-captioning? text-to-speech? Addition of semantic data? etc.

DRM is wrong. It doesn't not produce a better environment for the consumer because it reduces competition.

DRM introduces friction. Friction reduces "liquidity". Lower liquidity results in a smaller market with fewer options.

REST vs SOAP is a perfect example of unnecessary friction in a "technological market". A market with DRM would have the same impact on innovation as a SOAP-based market.
Chromatik: Empowering your musical journey [video]
I'm not looking to join a new team, but if I were, I would absolutely need to know what the business is. And since you say you have a prototype, I would need a link to it.

I'm guessing you plan on revealing that stuff when people email you. Except, I wouldn't bother to email you in the first place if I didn't see your prototype. You need to post the link to appeal to my idle curiosity. Then, if I think your product is awesome, I might email you. (The hypothetical me who's looking for a startup, I mean.)

Remember, very few web programmers are actively looking for a startup to co-found. You're competing with a lot of other non-technical founders for the same talent pool. The fact that you have a prototype gives you an advantage, and you should use it.

Best of luck!
The Nature of the Firm - Coase
Thanks for the clarification. We totally agree that any tool can be used incorrectly, which is why we're always working to educate our customers (and businesses in general) about best practices for customer service and customer feedback. One blog post at a time, we'll get people there. :)
But for sure it's moving very fast!

(even worse follow-up on a bad quantum joke)
Look at http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ it will do random queries so that the data that is collected does not make sense.
I wonder if there's an easy way to switch Android into tablet mode in these situations. It is much more suited to desktop use, representing a smaller scaling of images and few if any swipe elements.
On the off chance that you are reading this now that this is long off the front page: what I meant is that both having kids and having a social life is considered a strength, not a weakness, by most people.

I have kids too and I know what ordeal it can be, but "this is an ordeal" is not the same thing as "this is my biggest weakness".

You're right that it is something your potential employer would ideally be made aware of ahead of time, I'm just not so sure that doing so by way of calling it your greatest weakness is necessarily a good idea.

That said, good on you for taking good care of your kids, and I hope that things soon get a bit easier for you and your wife.
This comment got me wondering how important it is for navigation to take into account relativistic time dilation in GPS. Apparently: very. Turns out that ignoring it would cause a drift in position of about 10km/day. http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps....
There are definitely arguments against "everyone an independent contractor", but ending up with a bunch of 1-50 person sized companies instead of a much smaller number of 50k person companies seems very likely. This is a net win for everyone in that failure happens faster, thus allowing resources to be allocated more efficiently -- it also allows high performing individuals and teams to be accurately compensated for their success, vs. the strict seniority or internal-politics systems in larger organizations.

There's an argument for internal communications costs vs. external communications costs (Coase's thing) -- if it's more efficient to communicate within a trusted firm vs. between firms, you end up with huge firms. Things like tight-knit social networks outside of the firm (college alumni, things like YC, sites like hn, various ethnic diaspora in history, ...) would create some kind of hybrid, too, where a lot of interconnected small firms would work, so each firm could be smaller than otherwise. This would actually be interesting research for someone in economics or sociology -- I'd look at formal networks like YC and informal networks like casual coworking and web forums.)
Two things would have made the Atrix useful:

- docking the phone into the trackpad area, using the phone as a trackpad + other cool stuff suddenly possible
- Ubuntu instead of the crappy, crappy OS it used in laptop mode
Why is everyone complaining about a Techcrunch headline? It's Techcrunch^^
It does? This is just ICS + a mouse/keyboard and an HDMI port for video. My Transformer is just like this, except on 2.3 instead of ICS. Its at best a phone on steroids and a very limiting OS. The Android browser is terrible for everyday use and you can't just install a linux package and do your thing. You're just using mobile apps on a big screen with a keyboard. Whoopdeedoo.

Ubuntu for Android is a full linux OS. Its not Android. Its a full distro in your pocket. That's powerful and compelling. My Transformer? Its a toy.
So if one wanted to try getting into this cycle, do you set an alarm after 4 hours or if you wake up at all naturally in the night, stay up?
As a developer it wouldn't be hard to implement this. Create a Facebook Login button which logins in with facebook but doesn't allow the post-as-me permission. Create a separate button once they've logged in which says something like "I want to share this with my friends now" which would ask for the share-as-me permission. Or set up the dialog so that it only asks for the share-as-me permission when the app needs the share-as-me permission. I think this is more developers not putting enough thought into what permissions they actually need vs what permissions are nice to have.
Heroku was acquired and is an excellent example of YC startups being the product traditional corporations purchase.
Legal claims can be served via Facebook, [UK] High Court judge rules
Paste slurp v0.2 Live occurence matching on pastebin & co
A much better Jake and Amir website
A better faster jake and amir video search website... finally
Priam: Netflix' open sourced cassandra management tool
Why? An OS built for small screens and touch input, shoved through HDMI onto a monitor is absolutely, in no sense of the word, a desktop replacement. Wait for Ubuntu for Android or add your own chroot and then you'll actually have a mobile desktop replacement.
I keep getting this:

level01@ctf:/tmp/tmp.c6PoABNv99$ ls
bash: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable
Did you see the Ubuntu for Android post yesterday? You just described it exactly.
good video, but vimeo is utter crap.

Tiny video, neither signup nor HTML5 player work with the newest Chromium on Ubuntu ...
Someone set us up the (fork)bomb. That didn't take long. Sadly it's a bit silly and ruins all the fun for the rest of us :-/