skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We will wear a device which will be able to read our brainwaves and determine which word we are thinking ala dictation

Since this thread is presumably being read by entrepreneurs making bets on the future of technology, it needs to be said that this will never happen with the current imaging technology. Brainwaves implies EEG, and the research in this field strongly suggests that it is information theoretically impossible to extract this information through the electrical activity on the scalp.

For this vision to become reality we need a new imaging device that has both the temporal resolution of an EEG, and a spatial resolution that probably needs to be better than an MRI.

In summary: Certain things are impossible. I can say with certainty that no algorithmic improvement will allow this to work using an EEG. I don't know whether it is physically possible to create a non invasive imaging device that allows such a signal to be detected reliably, but it certainly does not exist today, and it seems like a leap of faith to assume that it definitely will exist at some point in the future.
Excellent list, one of those things that I keep coming back to hacker news for.
YouTube Finds a Way Off Schools’ Banned List
What do you think its more portable and powerful that, or an ultraportable such as macbook air ?
Identity Companies: Paid to Know About You
Building a multiplayer HTML5 game using Node, Socket.io
pg was talking about something different however

See, I don't think he was. "Ongoing diagnosis* doesn't have to mean new tests if you can make the existing tests radically cheaper and easier. Given that existing behaviour is always hard to modify it would seem sensible to try and piggyback on existing behaviour.

Toilets with cancer sensors that would check for bowel cancer everytime you go would be as about as "ongoing" as diagnosis can get.

Maybe toothbrushes could be modified to check for viruses in saliva.

I'm sure there are other easy tests that could be done if you have blood. There are obvious ways that could be integrated into everyday life (for women, anyway).

I've read some studies that showed dogs could be trained to smell cancer. Maybe people would pay to have their clothes sniffed (!) when they have them sent to the laundry.

I've previously suggested (on HN) the idea of payment companies partnering with food outlets and exercise software vendors to log the calories you are buying. That's a good input into diagnosis software too...

I'm sure there are a lot of other ideas - look for low hanging fruit and you can do radically better than the status quo.
The ISPs can, and in the UK there is one of our lovely 'voluntary agreements' that has the ISP retaining information about web sites visited, but only for 4 days. Police need to move quickly, as they did in the riots last summer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retenti...
Atistic Edge
How to tie a headscarf – Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
The key is 'gave'. Past tense.

I think a lot more start-up people would fear (or even care about) Microsoft if Bill Gates was still running it. The same goes for the rest of the companies you mention.
To be fair, I'm not sure that "Spy on Everyone Always" is any more sensationalist than the original title, "Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers", is it?
I don't know how others do email, but for me, everything gets filtered and the inbox contains only emails I didn't know hot to categorize.

Mostly, I filter out 'family', 'friends', a few mailing lists, and some other random things, not to mention spam, and use "mark as read" liberally so that I always know what I have and have not looked at.

I don't really use the important markings or stars in Gmail, labels + archive are enough. Only important items stay in the inbox and they only stay there until dealt with, so I keep my inbox clean.
Interesting! My last startup was actually about the exact same problem and we had pretty much similar ideas and monetization plans. Unfortunately it didn't work out well or we gave up pretty much soon. But I am glad that someone is taking up this problem, hence confirming that what we were solving, actually was a problem and facebook isn't the answer for anything related to social.

Good luck to the team.
The Return of Adventure Games
JD is very good, but sorry to say he is not even close to being next SJ.
Validity
Before we begin discussing the specifics of data analysis, let’s pause for a moment to discuss the validity of a study and what it means. For the rest of this short course in research methods, we will be stopping to enumerate the various threats to validity that exist at each stage of the research process. We have already seen one: failure to properly operationalize the variables of interest can lead to the researcher drawing inappropriate conclusions about the research question. If, for example, the researcher had chosen to operationalize “economically productive” as “amount of money a person has in his or her savings,” the researcher would have observed an entirely different result. It is possible for people to have other sources of income (gifts, spouses, inheritances, etc.) that may affect this variable, meaning that it is not a good measure of what is intended to be measure and therefore is not a good example of operationalization. But what exactly is validity?

Generally speaking, validity refers to whether or not a study is well designed and provides results that are appropriate to generalize to the population of interest. There is a lot more to validity that we will further discuss in this course, and Trochim’s “Research Methods Knowledge Base” provides a succinct and useful summary of each of the kinds of validity. There are three types of validity with which a researcher should be concerned.
So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup.

I realize it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to try to become as big as Apple. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as Apple, and they did it.

I thought about this before, and I think building a hardware startup like Apple, or a systems software company like Microsoft is an order of magnitude harder than when they were founded. Let us take Apple. When Apple was founded, there was an ocean of people that did not have a PC in their homes. Big, uncharted market. When you hear Don Valentine (Apple's investor from Seqoia) talk about it, you can see how they did not care about anything but the market. Do we have that kind of market today? Maybe. At the moment everyone is occupied with their ipads, phones, and PCs.

Technology. Today the hardware is so complex, that it can be only competed with by largest companies in the world. It is not a coincidence that it is only Samsung that can compete with Apple in mobile devices. Take a Texas Instruments or Qualcomm chipset, you will face a complexity barrier at every corner. We won't hear you saying things like, my co-founder designed a chip so efficient, it will be a game changer. Anyone remember the JoJo Pad before the ipad was released?

So what could be done? I think it comes down to playing on the above two variables. For a new hardware/systems startup, it must target uncharted territory, i.e. introduce (mobile) computers to an area of use where it has never been tried before, and make sure everyone in the world needs it. (Like that thermometer startup, except find a wider use case) Use existing cutting edge technology, and build your new technology upon them (e.g. I would probably start with a top notch chipset + android + add new, hard-to-replicate technology.)
I always like presentations like this. I think most languages really just need screencasts where people show you, "here is how you start using this language." One of my favorites was Ryan Dahl's introduction to Node.js, which had the same general form:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo_B4LTHi3I

So thanks for that.

I still don't like Django so much, precisely because of the fact that you're sitting here navigating through these massive config files -- and you even need Django's bundled applications to make those files in the first place. Libraries seem much cleaner to me. I guess what I'm dreaming of is a version of django where this whole talk becomes a little simpler, a sort of cookie-cutter formalism where you just start writing:

#!/usr/bin/python
import django

serve = django.server(port=8080, db=('sqlite3', 'mysite.db'))
serve.url('/admin/.*', django.admin_site())

blog = serve.app(model={
"some json model": "I don't know exactly how it works"
})
serve.url('/blog/.*', blog)

...to accomplish the same thing that you're doing in this talk. I mean, it's okay that applications often get their own folder, but shouldn't they grow into that with import statements?

An open question to HN: are there libraries which do this sort of thing which I should know about?
Oh please. Humanity is pretty much the definition of a species that should, in all probability, have died out on a multitude of occasions over the years and I am not just talking about the world wars and Nuclear Bombs, but things like the plagues, Spanish flu and all the rest of the diseases; the host of predators for which we are no match at all (a standard monkey is stronger than all but the best trained humans), the environment we inhabited (today that is not much of an issue) when we left Africa (why do you think we left? Properly because stronger tribes where pushing us further and further away and the alternative was dead on the shore), when we left the jungle, when we went to Siberia (again almost certainly pushed by stronger tribes) and when we went to Europe (same reason) where we had to fight the Neanderthals. Basically humanity has been on the winning sides of terrible odds since we started out. Don't forget that we nearly didn't make it in Africa (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080424-human...).

No wonder we love and underdog -- there is no greater under dog than humanity.
Fly with implanted webserver
Interactivity implies that the system be able to reproduce realistic facial expressions in response to the ongoing action without doing motion capture of a live actress.

It's not so obvious to me that the path from this scene to that is very short.
We used MarkMonitor at Last.fm. It's probably best to think of them as an abstraction layer above the registrar level which handles any residual pain that might generate:

* They will register all TLDs. A lot of more obscure ccTLDs (e.g. Norway, Hong Kong, Argentina) require domains are registered with a local company. MarkMonitor will set the local presence up for you and charge you a fixed fee. Some other registrars support some of these TLDs but none support all of them, so otherwise you're split between registrars. If (for whatever reason) MarkMonitor can't register a domain themselves, they'll go as far as getting a credit card out and using another registrar who can.

* They invoice you: you don't have to worry about expired credit cards or any other payment problems. You get one invoice every month for all your domains. (If you've ever had to deal with submitting expenses receipts for 80 domain renewals, this is definitely a bonus. Now consider that most huge companies have tens of thousands of domains.)

* They handle the domain "sunrise" applications for you (this is apparently a big brand protection deal if you're a big company), so you'll regularly get emails saying "do you want to register the .xxx domains for all your brands?".

* They do SSL certificates as well, and they automatically get renewed and invoiced.

* You get an actual friendly human account manager to talk to.

I can't remember what their actual pricing is. The price per domain is perhaps 2-10x more than other registrars. I'm not sure if they charge a recurring fee.
Yes anyone who says that "email isn't a messaging protocol" has probably been smoking to many of those funny Jazz cigarettes.
Well someone better install Wordpress on the implant, so it can blog about the experience!
See also here http://museo.freaknet.org/ :o)
Conversational Hypnosis: Skills for the Evil Minded Person?
Many people become’s the victims while doing hypnotizing on them .Let us hope and pray that that no one can become one of the victims of this conversational hypnosis. But if you were, you didn’t even notice that you were victimized by this deadly and evil hypnosis that is raging in our streets. This is deadly and evil in a sense that many people do this wrong ways. They miss use the people. This is tricky and harnessing its powers that require training, patience and even time to master this skill
HTML2Canvas
Re: mailing lists. I think RFC 2919 is pretty official. List-ID is registered at IANA permanent message header field registry.
Burning 70% of your money when you are a charity thats trying to do stuff is simply unacceptable, both by comparison to what the rest of the "market" is doing, and arguably by moral standards.

If your charity is doing advocacy or some similarly abstract activity, then it's very different.
You should check out Robin Hanson's idea of 'futarchy' here: http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf
I'm also working on the email problem but on a different aspect. If, as PG suggest, you consider a new protocol, is there a way to share this work so others may build on it and contribute to push this big snow ball or do you plan to make it a proprietary technology ?

I fully agree that SMTP is broken. It is so obvious when examining DKIM.
That is an interesting point, but I don't really buy it. According to what he said we should make the integration tighter -- favor simple codes over frameworks -- but my guess is that it breaks down when a service can no longer be run on one computer or, as is the current problem, one processor core.

At that point we need more abstract abstractions. I my guess is that much of the problem steams from problems with lowlevel threading and I guess programs would be easier to write if we could use async message passing between threads, rather than shared memory. I know that the performance will suck compared to threads (say only 50% as efficient) but at the same time we only need a single iteration of Mores low to solve it and I believe that it would scale much better where that matters -- in the brains of the developers who have to write these things.
Yeah, I do that. One reason why I hate laptop keyboards!
You talk so abstractly. Can you give some concrete examples of how you would be better than gmail?

In what ways will your service be faster than gmail? How much time will I save?
Thank you for sharing this, a great post that makes the reader's life richer.

In the post, you say:

> On a more practical level, what matters most in our day-to-day lives is that we're good to ourselves and to each other. It's actually not possible to only do one or the other -- we must do both or neither, but that's a topic for another time.

Please do write on this topic. I'd love to read what you have to say on this.
Does anybody have the video for download? It's unwatchable in the flash player, I get about 5 FPS.
Today the OS has to support way, way more different hardware than BeOS and Symbolics ever had to. BeOS made their own boxes right? Symbolics certainly did and I doubt they had a TCP/IP stack build in....
Nice! It reminds me of the EDSAC simulator, which I find extremely important:

http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/

Why important, you say? Well, these old computers aren't around any more, and what better way to teach new computer-science wannabe's the values of 35-bit computing? ;)

Shall we play a game?

Honestly, the joke angle is lost on me - old computers don't die, their users just degrade them! A working computer, whatever the age, is still a damned fine machine to be using, User!
I would love for this story to continue and become a movie.
Your observation supports the hypothesis that you would feel equally bad if you only saw the clip without sound. That hypothesis could be correct independent of mine. Instead of 'not true', you could have said 'also'.
Please upvote, people should know this.
http://communicationtheory.org/lasswells-model/

It explains how mass manipulation works and how you notice it.
It works for horizontal enter as well.. the only key that is missing from a horizontal-enter keyboard is the one between left shift and z, which is just backspace, so you can disregard it. It's just that with a horizontal enter key, the ; key is above the enter. With a boot-shaped enter key the ; is next to l, which makes it easier for me to hit it. I use the command line a lot.

If you're looking for a good place that does boot shaped enter keyboards then you can use Unicomp's Model M. You can rearrange the keys as you wish and they'll even print key caps with anything you want on them with the home row indicator tab, so you can put one on the h key.
Squaring numbers in just 2 seconds
sometimes you do have to resort to it, especially if you aren't from US. Having said that, Randall Munroe is one of my favorite -- wait for it... -- writers.
Please. Stop. Bringing that old saw back while claiming that 'this time it is for real'.

Humans can do wonderful things when the alternative is to starve or lose their habitat. It is not different this time, it will not be different the next time, nor any time after that. Won't happen until we have a perfect AI which can do all jobs. Then, and only then, will humanity take a permanent vacation.
Chronische nekpijn, wat nu? - Xead.nl
That actually leads to an interesting question. What happens if you just keep killing the bad guys? If you kill a dictator, then his evil successor, then his evil successor, does the next potential evil successor realize it's a bad idea and leave a decent guy in charge? Or do you just end up with chaos? Obviously assisination isn't this easy - but if it were?
I really wouldn't call picking out patterns by eye as hocus pocus, I see where you're coming from, but I find (in my own work) that a good graph can help me to understand a model.
Again, this does play into the biases of humans, but given enough awareness of these, the intersection of algorithms to find automatic patterns and the ability of the human eye and mind to discern meaning and give interpretation to these patterns is a very powerful combination.
Where is Taj Mahal
Where is the Taj mahal - Taj Mahal tour info from a resident of Agra city of India.Taj Mahal is one of the most popular tourism spot in India.
I lament the loss of http://xkcdexplained.com/ (and http://xkcdexplainedexplained.tumblr.com/). Perhaps http://plover.net/~bonds/asdf.html is enough.
Solving overdetermined systems with the QR decomposition
This post explains how to solve an overdetermined linear system of equation using the QR decomposition provided by the python's library numpy.
RubyMine 4.0.2 With Bug Fixes
I think the real difficulty for prediction of the stock market is that your theory will be understood by others who will alter their behaviour in response to their theory, in essence invalidating it. Its actually a problem across the social sciences, witness the inflitration and acceptance of Freud and Jung's ideas which are no so much part of the culture that theories cannot be built on them (they were always a little suspect anyway though).
What is it they say? It seems invincible until it suddenly doesn't any more.

But at any count what companies seem like or appear to do doesn't matter to your company. What matters is what they are and what they do. If they seem scary, good, that will only serve to keep others from trying to beat them -> less competitor for you.

Now go forth and conquer.
Information and entropy will still be reliable guides in a post quantum world
> sitting here navigating through these massive config files -- and you even need Django's bundled applications to make those files in the first place.

what do you mean??
Apple's New Thing (iPod) - 2001
Retailers Add Gadgets for Shoppers at Ease With Technology
Home Cotton Candy Machine
Get cotton candy machines on sale now from Popcorn plaza. Professional and home use cotton candy makers.
The conclusion on Tactics and starting small and achievable is pure gold and something I took a decade to learn. I'd simply emphasize that it's important to fulfill a real need on a small scale. e.g. Harvard students really wanted to stalk each other, a basic interpreter really was needed, Columbus sailed west to find faster trade routes.
Why would Samsung use iPads for customer service? Could this possibly be true?
That's just standard separation of concerns, expecting individual police officers to make judgments about each case would make law enforcement very inconsistent.

People who are skilled at making arrests and beating down doors are not necessarily also skilled in analyzing data and crime statistics in order to decide which cases to persue.
So you're a believer of eugenics. Do you even know what you believe in?? Ask yourself, it's not late to change your mind, you've been victim of a mind-washing campaign. The only way to make you re-think is putting you into the "I've been a victim, I didn't know" position again.

Don't take this personal, this is a rhetorical question:
"According to your weird belief in a form of eugenics, do you agree to be eliminated by someone who claims to be genetically better situated?"

Of course not! Let's face it, you want to live and you can become better, right? There is no such thing as race based intelligence, that's propaganda you've willingly accepted, without proving it, because you want to be a believer. You want to be part of something. You want to make the world better..really? If you really want to be part of something, stop spreading someone else's words, use your own "intelligence". James Watson simply manipulated facts.
بورش - كاريرا -
Finding bugs: I'm a big believer in Linus' law - which basically says that the more people look at your code, the more likely you are to identify bugs.

In my experience, the single best way to identify bugs and other problems is to have a good code review process. Any at all is better than none. Code review can be frightening for the person whose code is being picked apart, but it is important to remember that it shouldn't be a personal thing. Even the best developers in the world write bugs - it's just the nature of the beast.

If you don't have a continuous integration process, think seriously about implementing one. It can be a pain in the arse to set up continuous integration after a project is already well under way, but do it anyway - because it will most likely save you a ton of time further down the road.
Google considers himself the king | Hot Gossip
We're not creating a new protocol. Sure SMTP and MIME are quite awful, but the network effects if these standards are so vast that even Google couldn't make a dent with Wave.

IMO a new protocol is something that can come later, we've explored that, but only an email service in a leadership position can make those sorts of changes to the standard thus forcing others to implement them.

At the end of the day there can always be a more efficient protocol, but I don't think that's the biggest problem in email.
PG is back. :)
The whole sci-fi view of AI seems to alwaysbe about emotions, while in fact most AI systems don't have an emotional system, and it's not the most researched subfield therein. It doesn't even seem necessary for a robot to have survival and reproduction needs that would require basic emotions and drives. While emotionsl are good dramatic fodder, it is far from what AI is about.
You're going too far to the opposite extreme. The LRA isn't a "legitimate choice". Kony 2012 doesn't exist in isolation, there is a large amount of independent evidence about the LRA's crimes.
Code Completion in Textastic Code Editor 4.0 for iPad [video]