skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand this reasoning. No one forces you to compile from source or even use the terminal. Likewise no one needs to touch the Windows registry or firewall settings if they don't want to.

There's a distro for almost everything and there's certainly one for the unassuming family PC - Ubuntu. It passes the "Mom test" for me and keeps my technology hesitant mother very happy. Email, web browsing, online banking, photo sharing, printing/scanning just works. If anything it's easier than "that Windows thing" (as she describes it). The Dash in Unity and the Launcher 'just work' and have made computing a much more pleasant experience for her. With the exception of very occasional hardware support issues (I change printers maybe every 2 years) it's more than convinced me Ubuntu is a very viable family OS.
The Free Banking Foundation.
The Underground Railroad. Prohibition. Hush-A-Phone. The Communications Decency Act. Crypto export regulations.

Breaking DRM.
7 Rules For Picking A Winning Idea For Your Start Up
This is yet another horrible naming mess. As far as I can figure out, the following is correct:

There are two things named GLX: First, it's a network protocol for sending OpenGL requests to an X server. Second, it's a library that X clients use to set up an OpenGL context. Traditionally, the GLX library used the GLX protocol, but in these days of client-side rendering the GLX protocol is just unused legacy junk.

Next, Xlib. Xlib is the traditional client library for the X protocol. I'ts a huge unmaintainable non-threadsafe mess, too low-level for application developers but hiding too much of the X protocol for toolkit developers. Everybody hates it.

As an alternative, the X developers created the XCB ("X C Bindings") library. XCB is much smaller than Xlib, is thread-safe and gives toolkit devs very fine control about how they handle X11 communication. XCB-GLX is XCB's implementation of the obsolete GLX protocol. (Most of XCB is auto-generated based on protocol descriptions, so it was little extra effort to include it for completeness.)

Now the GLX library API is still based on Xlib, not on XCB. The X developers however made sure that a single application could simultaneously use both XCB and Xlib, http://xcb.freedesktop.org/MixingCalls/. So that shouldn't be a problem.

I don't understand why Qt5 can't use that, and the article doesn't explain.
Feel free (you or anyone reading this) to drop me an email and come visit Art.sy, we're on Broadway & Canal (dblock[at]dblock[dot]org).
For sure, I work out of there and can show you around. Email frank at startupthreads dot com
No, the iPhone isn't boring
RF and logic on the same chip is not new. See http://www.fwdconcepts.com/dsp032112.htm .
This rant meanders too much to be a good HN post, but there is something in it that resonates with me:

The bit about union thuggery at trade shows is 100% true, and I've experienced it firsthand in Chicago. Union electricians must be hired (minimum one hour) to plug in a simple power strip. If your booth requires more than two hours to set up, you are required to hire (glacially slow) union laborers. We made it under the rules with one of those presto-setup tinkertoy-like lattice structures, only to find in the morning that someone ran over part of it with forklift. There are absurd rules about who can stand on the floor exhibiting; salaried employees only, otherwise you have to hire "professionals" out of their union pool.

Trade shows are a scam. Now that I'm an entrepreneur, I will never exhibit my business at one of these events. They are a huge distraction, there's no way the ROI is positive, and giving money to extortionists does not sit right with me.
IPhone 5 Price Breakdown (UK Only)
Live from the Moon: The Societal Impact of Apollo
I've been thinking about the sequencing question a bit (steps to go from "we're here" to "We're ready to accept visitors".

There are some interesting papers on microwaving the regolith into a concrete like substance. Water generation or acquisition will be key of course so different water strategies are interesting. Water mining robots may be key.

All very neat stuff.
> "I am not assuming anything other that what you wrote"

Yes you are:

> "it works just as well to consider humans to be char programs which map strings to strings."

Before proceeding, I will assume you're familiar with the distinction between countable and uncountable infinities, and the Cantor Diagonalization proof [0]. This argument is simply a special case of that.

Mapping strings to strings is an uncountable infinity (it's the powerset of countable infinities). All possible machine programs are a countable infinity (since any given source program is finite). The argument "give me an output other than what any of these programs would give" mimics the diagonalization step -- it demonstrates that, whatever is in the infinite list of possible AI programs, you can construct string mappings that none of the AI programs would have constructed.

Yet a strong AI should be able to construct any string mapping whatsoever. Thus, "strong AI" and "running finite source code" are necessarily incompatible. (We do not know whether human programming is enumerable; thus, we cannot draw the analogy you attempted to draw.)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument
Lol, Enta. I bailed on them when they cut my connection after one of those silly letters from US lawyers, because my wife had downloaded "Nurse Betty" here in UK.

Now i'm on Virgin, on a much faster connection. piratebay is "blocked" but i just use one of the 99 mirrors around and life is good.
India allows 51% FDI in multi brand retail, paves way for Amazon, Walmart
Use http://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk
It depends on what you mean by "ring of infinite circumference", because you're going to have to discard some conventional ideas associated with a "ring" in order to make the definition work. If you just mean "the rooms extend infinitely in both directions", then yes, the same reasoning applies; we'll just have an arbitrary "room 0", and then "room -1" on one side and "room 1" on the other. Then you tell everyone in a negative room to move to room n-1 and everyone in a positive room to move to room n+1.

However, this definition does away with the idea of a ring meeting itself on the other side. We cannot say that "room -∞" is the same as "room ∞" for example, because there neither of those rooms actually exist.
Flamebaity nonsense about nothing. I almost thought I will see a "is this all very confusing to you? Just use this other platform." somewhere. But the whole article is just a bunch of made up crap that has no real consequences.

It doesn't matter if AOSP is called Androidium or iHateittum. So long as the apps run (which they do - on the Kindle, on the Samsungs, on the ZTEs etc.), it is still Android - kinda like a better, actually working J2ME.

And so long as you can make your own, fully functional OS out of AOSP, sideload apps and other markets on what the OHA distributes, it is still very much open - the fact that Google's non-open apps are only available to those oha members under reasonable conditions (btw CyanogenMod, which is not part of OHA, uses sideloaded GApps and Google isnt shutting them off) is no reason to call Android closed. Google to my knowledge hasnt called their apps open.
I totally agree. If you run into something on either vehicle it's going to hurt. If you aren't wearing a helmet, you could really get hurt. It is pretty apparent with the behavior of typical commuter boarders vs. bicyclists that they know which is safer. Most cyclists on streets actually don't wear helmets. Most boarders do.

With regards to breaking when you don't have a rock, curb, door in your face...You can program anti-lock braking into an electronically controlled breaking system. If you have enough understanding of the friction of the rider to the board and the boarder is experienced enough to know how position themselves during braking, that system should win as it can avoid skidding. Regarding experience level: on a bike it takes some experience not to just use the front brake only and drop your head on the pavement.

Until we see some stats about which group actually sustains more serious injuries, commuter bicyclists or commuter boosted boarders, the jury is still out.
I'm living in NYC and paying ~$80/month for limited everything (900 minutes/1000 texts/2GB/other perks but other discounts).

I visited Berlin in June. I prepaid 15 Eur for unlimited one week everything on Vodafone. I could have gotten prepaid everything for 30 Eur/month, but I was only there for a week.

And the 3G speeds I received were actually higher than the ones I usually get in NYC.
Well, it is cheap to build above ground, but there is also a lot more maintenance.
Or so simple as speeding when you drive? There are many laws which do not function as they should.
A large portion of that 700kb of js is for user-level analytics to track everything, which is fed back into everything from Ads to Page Insights to News Feed algorithms. There's a lot going on that has nothing to do with loading and displaying content.
The chimera of using simple JS/CSS/HTML to develop mobile apps has failed. HTML5 and WebOS put up a good fight but they are obviously not enough. Maybe the direction to go from here would be to make native mobile app development simpler for the Web guys and not the other way around. Maybe something like the awesome Kivy Project which helps you develop solid opengl apps in python for multiple platforms: http://kivy.org/#home. I would love to see Facebook put their resources into something similar to this.
Dominos' India website hacked, customer info leaked
Ok. Given the depth of your argumentation, I still have no idea of what exactly you don't believe or find convincing. But I'll try to expand on these:

a) The list of the apps you use basically exclusively is completely missing most of the most used categories of apps. No games (used by 67% of smartphone users), weather (65%), social networking (60%), maps (55%), and news (42%). You do have music (45%) there, so that's fine. These numbers are from Nielsen Social Media Report Q3 2011 (I have no reason to trust these number particularly, it's just the first non-anecdotal data I found with a search).

Both the lack of overlap with your list, and the the low usage numbers for even the most popular categories of apps (let alone specific apps), should make it completely obvious that people's usage scenarios are completely different.

b) If you seriously dispute the presence of ecosystem lock-in that means apps in the same category are not fungible, there's no point in having a discussion. Even your own list has WhatsApp that can't be substituted to by any other instant messaging app. Its utility depends purely on your contacts using the app too. Something like iMessage, or BBM, or Google Voice might be in a similar category of usage, but they can't replace WhatsApp for you.

Another example you had was an ebook reader. Again, for a lot of people a generic ebook reader is of little use, since they're already tied into the Kindle ecosystem. While presumably for you the Kindle app is of no use as well.

The prime example of this is InstaGram. Yes, anyone could build a camera app with a fake polaroid filter. But 50 million people wouldn't install it. All of the value of the app was in the ecosystem.

And the list here is seemingly endless.

The harsh reality is that these apps are not getting ported over to every single platform. Can FxOS become an important enough platform that it warrants porting to? Maybe. But it almost certainly needs to become an important platform first. And becoming a major platform without having the apps is tough. Hell, even getting a good review for a device without the apps is going to be tough. See e.g. reviews for the Nokia N9, Lumia 900 (and we're talking WP7 here!), any Android tablet.

c) Let me turn this around. Where do you think a good mapping solution for FxOS is going to come from?
And...look at this, what 48 hours later?

"One of the men behind an anti-Muslim film was taken in for questioning by federal probation authorities."

-- New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/world/middleeast/man-linke...
I disagree. Here is the resolution.

The paper suggests that a finite table could be compiled which exhaustively enumerates all the possible conversations I could have with an AI (to be more generous than he is, I'll say) in my lifetime. Some of those will persuade me that the AI is conscious. We can make a (finite) program that follows that mapping, and hence it has to be possible at least in terms of a finite-length program.

I disagree with the middle assumption: some of those will persuade me the AI is conscious. I think it is entirely possible, if I pose the question I did up above, there is no possible response the AI could give me which would persuade me it was conscious. No matter how clever its response is, the program is just a lookup table, and hence whatever response it gives me will match the output of the specified program, demonstrating that the AI indeed did not understand the request.

In other words, I take issue with the author's assumption that there is some subset that will work. It is possible the sparse set the author is hoping to fish out has size zero.

(The difference between the AI and the human, in the chat logs, is that the AI has source code I can reference. The human does not. The human can run any program and produce a different output. An AI cannot do this with its own program.)
These are great articles, but I'm hesitant to lump Genetic Algorithms into the rest of machine learning. It's essentially non-convex optimization and one of the more popular metaheuristics, but I think of ML as classification / tracking / reinforcement learning.

That being said, GA's are a great starting point to get into the world of non-convex optimization. I actually wrote a version of GA's that run on the GPU using WebGL -- the demo runs in the browser:

http://petercottle.com/GeneticGPU/index.html

It's also distributed, so you can send the link to a friend and both browsers will divide up the search space and optimize over their half (and compare minimums). Very hacky but fun project for a grad class at Berkeley.
Ask HN: What powers HN?
Besides the Arc web application, how is HN architected? Hardware, load-balancing, database?

Apologies if this is already detailed somewhere; it is difficult to google for this. Thanks!
I think you're right; publishers are finally starting to realize that Steam is just as much a danger to them as it is (well, was) to brick and mortar retailers. And you're also right in how unbelievably horrible they are in trying to fight this battle.

I haven't tried EA's latest venture, Origin, but damn have the others been bad. I can't see what requires them all be so clunky. Even Steam could stand to have a lighter approach, I often feel.

Insofar as worrying about dominance, I think that's a legit worry. One asshole move Valve doesn't like, or your typing cousin just guys wild on your pc while you're not looking, and all of your games are gone. It really sucks to think I may have paid Steam hundreds of dollars to "borrow" games.
Ask HN: Internship ideas for a PHP developer in NYC?
Just left my job. I'm turning 19 in two weeks and really want to pick up some programming knowledge, including learning Python and C++. Right now all I know are Java, PHP, and CakePHP.

I am going to college and would love to intern for around 15 - 20 hours a week anywhere where I can program. I'm looking for something that pays around $250+ a week just to cover my expenses. Any ideas?
Given that the request for a pull to refresh API is a subpoint to "Scrolling performance", I am guessing they found that their implementation of pull to refresh had all the drawbacks they listed under "QoI issues".

From the post, "[Scrolling performance] is one of [their] most important issues."
> Have you ever done a search in your iPhone contacts? You need the fingers of a poorly fed six-year-old to activate that search function. No, really, I must waste four or five minutes a day trying to make that damn thing work.

> Seriously, how can an adult finger ever touch that little search icon without either hitting the “A” or the “+”????

Why exactly do I have a hard time believing someone this stupid would be as diligent as he claims to be in attempting to solve his issues?

I'm supposed to simultaneously believe that he is competent enough to understand and solve a corruption issue, yet he can't figure out the single most discoverable gesture on any phone, "swipe down"?

$20 says he restored his iPhone from the corrupted backup and then rushed off to write an article on the experience instead of performing the due diligence he claims he already has.

Bullshit. Nobody has this kind of laundry list of whining complaints unless their actual motivation to solve problems is almost zero. He sounds like one of those people that put all Apple products on this ridiculous pedestal where they are shit if they cause you any frustration or confusion ever.

Sorry, it's not magic. It's just a really nice computer. Expect some problems and issues, and expect to spend some time troubleshooting them. Just like any other machine on the planet.

If your first thought when seeing a 4x4 icon on a high res 3.5 inch touchscreen is "Stupid Apple, how am I supposed to hit that!?" then you are looking for things to complain about instead of actively trying to improve your experience with the phone by, oh I don't know... learning things?

Apple products are getting more complex and the older classics are getting bloated. There is an interesting discussion to be had on the topic. This isn't it. This couldn't be further from it. This article is basically just idiotic whining.
I wasn't being clear in what I was thinking of.

I was referring to religions that go to war vs another for religious reasons. Crusades: Christian vs Islam, for example.

Jerusalem is different, that being a country with displacement/murder of people at its creation. Not that I agree with any sort of treatment towards families killed or kicked out on the founding.

After having read a bit about the bombing of the King David Hotel, well, I guess there are some radical elements there too. Pity.
Yet a strong AI should be able to construct any string mapping whatsoever.

Why? I do not see why a strong AI must be able to construct any string mapping whatsoever. And for the reason that conversations have lengths that are bounded (as per the quote) we can know that the AI's string look up table will be finite.

"We do not know whether human programming is enumerable; thus, we cannot draw the analogy you attempted to draw."

My argument is only that there is an abstraction where you can view humans as a black box that takes a string and outputs a string. But I see the problem now, you are right in that I treat the CTT as true so I don't even notice when I am assuming the human black box is not something like a hypercomputer. But it is simpler to believe that humans are not something exotic like a hypercomputer than to believe they are.
ChromeOS is years before its time. It's an aspirational operating system where Android is a realistic one. That also means that it's a little early to pass judgment.
Facebook and Twitter is mainstream on its own.
The mixing of the possible with the impossible is certainly jarring.
I'm down to a few minutes of Google News per day, but that's hard to break.
I think you're right. My original argument was that when you step inside the mind of someone who does something like this and examine their motives, then you come up with a series of whys. Why are they doing it? Why not just rape/molest the child in private behind closed doors? Clearly there won't be any photographic evidence lying around of their acts in that particular case making the prosecution's case weaker. A part of the reason why they do it because they have a need to perform and every performer needs an audience.

Given how controversial the subject matter is it might seem that I'm making a blanket statement to further my own objectives, but this is more of an observation rather than a conclusion. Why they do it is unclear and up for debate, but the fact that they are doing it isn't. The scenarios you have mentioned did not have this component in them. In those cases the harm is a probabilistic function requiring several requisite conditions to be completed. (someone has to be driving, the speed must be high and so on) A series of things must go wrong and the probability of occurrence isn't 1. On the other hand over here someone must be hurt and I assumed that there must be a psychological feedback mechanism which kicked in for the rapist when people consumed the said matter. That's why I thought it was more reasonable to assert that there is a function of the viewer in the crime itself and that it was a part of the motivations behind the crime.

However what I had forgotten was that correlation does not imply causation and all of this is orthogonal to the actual crime itself. Therefore, I was wrong and you were right. Possession is indeed a victimless crime.

Now we have that fact settled it is indeed an open question where there will be net good or net harm given legalisation or ban. That's a rather difficult question to answer and I do not have the skills or the understanding to broach upon it. However, I think that over here the answer isn't as simple complete legalisation or ban, but rather some X thing in combination with more sophisticated enforcement to catch the perpetrators.

>>> Anders Breivik no doubt enjoyed the media attention and I didn't hear voices calling for his manifesto to become illegal to spread.<<<

Again that's a completely orthogonal incident to what is being discussed. The two cases are radically different and have no common ground.
Here is an exercise proposal: Find the hidden terms of a polynomial expression, where the fitness function is the integral of the hidden function minus the new one.
More or less free taxi for people with disabilities? Sounds awefully lot like the system we have here in Sweden.

http://www.fardtjansten.sll.se/sv/Information/Information-pa...
There's much, much more to it than just planning a community with some closely-spaced high-rises. The real failure of these projects like Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green was that they were part of the whole misguided public housing system. They weren't just brutalist high-rises; they were cheaply-built, poorly-maintained structures into which the most disadvantaged members of society were rounded up and told to live.

Not much more than a mile away from the former site of Cabrini-Green, in Chicago's Near North neighborhood, is Cabrini's urban-planning counter-example: Carl Sandburg Village. This series of mid-century high-rises and low-rises shares a lot of design concepts with Cabrini, but was privately built, with better architecture and higher quality, and following a conversion from rentals to condos, has been carefully maintained over the decades by its owners.

While Sandburg Village's residents are not the city's poor, they aren't necessarily affluent either: The place has a reputation as an affordable area for first-time buyers as well as retirees.
X11 Turns 25 Years Old Today
Maybe I'm not thinking enough about this, but wouldn't the best solution be to just stock up with elements that have the best value per weight, starting with the highest?
Interesting. But the link to the primary article is broken.
A firearm shop will sell you the gun, but they won't pull the trigger for you.

What about the torrent applications like uTorrent, Transmission, rTorrent, etc? Are they equally as guilty in your eyes?
Would that still be the case when adoption rate is higher, though?

Does anyone have an idea what kind of internet pipes LTE base stations get, and how much bandwidth they can (realistically) provide to every phone once they are operating at planned capacity?