skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Not really. It would just be an incremental improvement in nuclear fission.

Typical techy shortsightedness. I'm not talking reactor geekery. It would be paradigm changing for society. There's a lot of Thorium out there in the world, and nuclear power would be disconnected from proliferation risk.

> Not even fusion would be paradigm changing, unless its cold fusion

Again, typical techy shortsightedness.
Indian startup to improve lives using Android, Javscript, CouchDB, AWS
>This is becoming even more true as Steam will probably only support Ubuntu.

Has Valve said that they will only be supporting Ubuntu, at the moment they are still in a private beta for the initial port to Linux, and if it goes well I suspect that we will see Valve support steam on non-Ubuntu systems. Even if they do not officially support other systems, I suspect we will see people make on-official ports.
> Do you have multiple profiles? Do you have multiple profiles with a lot of different settings? If you want to store it all offline, then you'll need more expensive memory, and have to pay more for your mouse. Use the new cloud based Synapse and you don't have to store all your profiles on the mouse. Store it on the cloud, then sync it to your mouse when you want to use that profile.

Just put a $notmany flash drive there for those settings; it shouldn't really change the price, and it would give benefits like:

- mouse can work to it's full potential without Internet access

- orthogonality of computer systems is retained (why on Earth should a mouse depend on being able to talk to someone's server)?

- no tracking

- can't remotely brick my mouse to encourage me to buy a new one
It's worth adding that Nate is on the record as saying he'd have voted for either Romney or Gary Johnson, if he would have voted.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/150042
I made something very similar as a side project a few weeks ago: https://www.mailmeme.com

It's awesome to see the beginning of APIs that blur the line between the physical and digital worlds.
Is it possible to be more accurate than nailing all fifty states?
Being your own angel investor
"Would I do this with my own cash" is perhaps the startup founder's equivalent of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
From that comment thread I found this answer about why Digg failed from Yishan:

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-of-changes-upgra...

Digg stagnated because it listened to a vocal minority
of its community

but rather they are locked into an unchanging mediocrity
by the inherent conservatism of their existing userbase

isn't this EXACTLY what he is doing here? He's letting the minority decide that reddit shouldn't have adverts and shouldn't try and be profitable and should cling to the idea that reddit is one big happy family that is sitting around telling each other stories by the camp fire as they all help fuel that campfire.

Most people I know that use reddit don't have an account, let alone are willing to pay money towards reddit. Shouldn't reddit move forward; accept that yeah some of the vocal minority might hate adverts but with proper advertising they could transform the sites financial situation and hire enough people to make the site able to grow and adapt alongside the demand for the site? Lots of the comments on the blog post seem to have the same sentiment: the reddit admins are never around and the site barely seems to be updated, if people feel that way wouldn't they be happy to take an extra ad or 2 to see that change?

I would love to see an extra 2 adverts on every reddit page if it meant the site could grow and adapt and offer all the features it should have but are left up to the community to build (see: reddit enhancement suite). There's so much reddit could be...
Can't wait to read the article about the mom who hacked Lara Croft to have a guy rather than a girl as heroine.
Essentially a leader is not defined by your ability in doing something, it's defined by how well you are able to utilize your team's ability to achieve something that can't be done by one person.
>On-line document editing, on-line spreadsheets, on-line 3D modelling, on-line recipes, on-line weight tracking, on-line todo lists... Store everything in the cloud, use everything through the browser.

Documents, recipes and to-do lists gain two legitimate and significant advantages from being cloud based: sharing and collaboration. There are disadvantages too, but it's a trade-off.

With a mouse driver, there's no trade-off; it's just all disadvantages.
I swear there is a common denominator between the dissonance that allows people to find any tiny thing they can to confirm their beliefs even the in the face of growing and yet already insurmountable evidence. For years climate change skeptics held on to one or two prominent scientists who disagreed. They've both recanted and apologized and urged a reexamination of the science, yet doubters just latched onto something else. Or, in the case of droithomme, find some half-invented ad hominem attack to use to dismiss the ENTIRE body of science on the issue.

It's the same people that swore to me, up and down, bet me and made foolish statements that Romney was going to have some magic emotional boost and that Nate Silver was the devil working for the liberals and that his numbers were "wrong".

That you don't like the facts or that they don't fit with your world view does nothing to make them any less true.
Qt for Android Port Contributed to the Qt Project
1) Dedication: are they willing to dedicate the same amount of hours as you if not more
2) Knowledge: if they are in the business side then look for the school they graduated from, what kind of books they read, and make sure they are good at presenting
3) Personalty: Do you get along with them?
At some point, if this becomes clearly inevitable, I'm hoping large-scale geoengineering happens. It would be awesome to be able to personally finance it, and from what I've seen, it would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, so a bunch of families could individually, or even a kickstarter circa 2025.
Actually Jews were about 1% of Soviet Union population and 5%-10% of University students. If Jews were only 1% of student population it would not be an issue. I went to mathematical magnet school (best math school in 5M+ city) and easily 30%-50% of students had Jewish roots.

Essentially it was more difficult for Jews to get into university, neutral for Russians, easier for Tatars and some other minorities and extremely easy for what's called Northern Minorities (they had - and still have special quotas, no exams necessary)

Speaking as 1/4 Russian-Jewish, 1/4 Chuvash, 1/8 Latvian and 1/rest Russian.
TEDxPennQuarter - Frank Lantz - Reinventing Gaming
Khosla-backed LearnStreet takes on Codecademy with new learn-to-code site
Google Translate's English to Chinese is plain awful as well. At my last job, many of the employees only spoke Mandarin. If I had to communicate with them, I would use Google Translate and copy/paste the Chinese and the English for CYA. There was 2 people who spoke good English and Mandarin, so they were able to correctly translate the meaning. From what they told me, the translations were about 60 to 70% accurate and often comical. I guess the translations never asked my coworkers on a date or cursed them out, but ultimately, outside of the fact that my correspondence never happened unless it was an important issue and thus alerted the recipients that there is a pressing issue, the translations didn't serve much purpose. It was better than zero communication. There just has to be a lot of work done in the field.

I also disagree that having someone doing the translations on the webpage is a good source. One only needs to find Asian companies with direct translations to see how bad the human translations are. Just as those companies generally don't have good English writers, I think it is likely that American companies probably don't have outstanding Japanese / Chinese / et.al. writers.
What do you mean by "geoengineering" in this specific context?
I was just going off what was printed in the article. :)
How to get your IP unbanned on HN
HN has a hair trigger about banning IPs that request too fast (sorry about that; we don't have a lot of spare performance), so I wrote something people can use to get their IP unbanned once if it gets banned by accident.

http://news.ycombinator.com/unban?ip=<ip address>

Obviously you have to use it from another IP address, like your phone.
I've had the fortune / misfortune of working with some very smart programmers, who could quickly come up with amazing and correct algorithms to solve difficult problems... but I found much of their code very hard to read; it wasn't "horror code" by any means, but it was often terse and tricky, and pretty comment-light.

My theory was that because these guys were so smart, in many cases they overestimated the ability of others to comprehend what was clear to them, and as a result simply made their code too clever and omitted comments that might help clarify it.

It was a definitely a valuable experience, though; besides the natural pleasure of working with very smart people, it really drove home the importance of actively pursuing clear and well-commented code! :]
What percentage of the US population is descended from people who primarily immigrated after 1865?
Rodney Howard Browne 
On the other hand, you may have everything going your way and yet, if you have no relationship with God, you will never know true peace. Because we are justified by faith and made righteous by the blood of Jesus, we have perfect peace with the Father. Rodney Howard Browne
You're definitely right, and it really didn't make sense to me that they were doing that. I guess it's probably just a human nature thing more than anything else.

I think my point still stands though: this doesn't showcase NPR's neutrality - perhaps they are in fact biased toward Obama and just lie more strategically than most Republican pundits. (Certainly not accusing them of that, only saying that I don't think we can glean much from the fact that they gave Romney higher numbers than he deserves.)
Beşiktaş Bursaspor maçı canlı izle
If there's a bug, and you have to wade through 10K+ lines of utter shit to fix it, WITHOUT causing a regression, you're screwed. The "black box" mentality works fine for prototyping, but once you've got a working prototype, you should throw out the prototype and write a clean, MAINTAINABLE system from scratch.
To quote myself from Reddit (the article hints at this but it's a bit less than clear):

"When I was perfunctorily reverse engineering the (OS X) driver for my Razer mouse for this reason, it didn't seem to be doing anything special - even if the mouse is more accurate, this seems to be reported the standard way, and the software DPI control is just multiplying the value. I could be mistaken, but you shouldn't lose any functionality by simply using the standard mouse driver with third party software for hotkeys etc."
"Fuck you."

Oh, OK then.
Chicago's temperature can vary 5C in a single day. Does that mean it will suddenly be sheeted with two miles of ice?
Downloadable GNU/Linux PDF books
If they didn't acknowledge the well-known risks and how they got around them, they will have some concerned customers and questions from regulators.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak

Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf
Regarding Netflix's competition: "We demonstrate
that an adversary who knows only a little bit about
an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber’s record in the dataset."
It should! Is your carrier listed on http://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing ? If it is, send me an email, chad ät twilio.com
Another bullet point full of buzz words on a feature list. I wish I was kidding. See: http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-mice
The term "affirmative action" is so easy to manipulate that it could be used to cover any form of discrimination. I guess Soviets would describe their discriminatory policy as an affirmative action to increase the social and ethnic diversity of the class of intellectuals, or something between those lines.
I can't believe this troll comment is the top comment.

> Our team of the best eight Soviet students, during the month we had the problems, solved only half of them.

Those questions weren't hard. They were impossible. The point was simply to not allow any undesirables to pass. Higher standards for Asians might be bullshit but it's not the same as literally keeping all Asians out regardless of skill.
Lets hope more people switch to roccat mice. Roccat[1] is the only vendor that I know of with actual Linux support[2].

[1] http://www.roccat.org/

[2] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODY1M...
Reddit probably has the same issue Groupon brought to local business. It's userbase expects a high quality product for dirt cheap, and is very vocal when something goes awry. When Woody Harrelson showed up to do an AMA, that turned out to be more of an "Ask Me About My New Movie", there was backlash. A lot of people just went around repeating a comment about Woody taking some poor girls virginity from a local high school prom and then never calling her back(not sure if this was true). So the idea of leveraging pseudo-AMAs for marketing purposes seems like swinging a broom at a hornets nest.
Exactly, it looks great as it is right now. Where's waldo like. But I'm a video guy and motion would make this world epic.
> 上, 神, 紙, 髪, and 加味 are all pronounced かみ.

This can be mostly solved by context. There are very few situations in normal speech where you'd hear "kami" and not know if they're talking about 神 (god) or 髪 (hair). Also, it's not particularly hard to code that knowledge. E.g. try かみにいのる (pray to god) and かみのけをきった (cut hair) on Google Translate. It will suggest the correct kanji in both cases.

Anyway, I'm not a native Japanese speaker, but I find the whole homophone thing a bit overrated. As far I as can recall the only pair of homophones that cause trouble in normal speech are 科学/化学 (both pronounced kagaku, meaning science/chemistry) and 私立/市立 (shiritsu, private/municipal).
Not working for me :/
Eight conservatives predicting a Romney victory tomorrow
DMCA Safe Harbor protections apply to copyrighted material stored "at the direction of a user".

YouTube is not making judgements about the content - if they did, it would no longer be "at the direction of a user." Instead they've set up a system that lets other users (copyright holders) control content on the site. YouTube does not try to figure out whether those users' actions are valid - if they did, /then/ they could lose safe harbor.

DMCA does not explicitly require ContentID type systems, but it's becoming recognized as best practice as it makes it easier to show a court "hey, we're trying to be good corporate citizens here." It also pacifies the content companies which helps prevent lawsuits in the first place.

Source: currently doing research on the topic for our own service.
How does buying debt from creditors work? Would something like this actually cause buying debt more expensive and thus benefit creditors instead?
If I were an advertiser, I'd much rather pay someone to astroturf Reddit than buy advertising space on Reddit itself. It seems like a much better investment.
Ro rmt
Is anyone aware of what method they used to make the data anonymous? I'm currently doing research in data masking tools and would be interested to know about the techniques used and the performance of the tool.
Geoffrey Hinton (who leads this research at the University of Toronto) is teaching a coursera course right now about machine learning with deep neural networks:

https://class.coursera.org/neuralnets-2012-001

He talks about a surprising amount of cutting edge achievements being made by deep neural networks just over the last few months.
10,000 Year Clock Being built in Texas Mountain Range - Funded by Jeff Bezos
Not really, because it could just set a metric on how cheap debt is before it purchases (i.e the 30:1 return they mentioned).

In the end creditors want to get rid of risk, so if someone isn't paying the loan, getting 1/30th of that money is better than 0.

I don't see how this could create a competitive (and thus drive prices up) situation.
Get outside of your niche and look around. Progress is being made in lots of fields. And the rate is not slowing.

For instance 20 years ago mapping a human genome was on the "some day" list and sequencing a single gene was a reasonable PhD thesis. 10 years ago we finished mapping a human genome. Now individuals can get their genome mapped and the price of that is dropping rapidly.

10 years ago, space travel had been stagnant for decades. Now we have SpaceX.

30 years ago scientists rejected the concept of monster waves out of hand, and ships that got destroyed by them were comedy material. (OK, so http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcU4t6zRAKg really is hilarious.) Today we know that we need to build ships to be 5x as strong.

When I was a kid, superconductivity was an interesting phenomena that needed liquid helium to demonstrate. Today advanced countries (ie not the USA) have floating trains going at hundreds of miles an hour on superconductors. Recently we discovered preliminary evidence of superconductivity at room temperature. If that pans out, how much more will change?

Carbon nanotubes are coming in a big way. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_applications_of_carbo... for some of what they will change.

3-d printers are real today, and the technology is improving rapidly.

I could go on, but I think that my point is made. We are making progress at a lot of things that you're not aware of because you're only paying attention to one area of tech. When people look back in 50 years, this will NOT be seen as a period where technology stood still.
I'm sure they've gone over the numbers and determined the only way to generate enough ad revenue would be to seriously annoy the users, all of whom are familiar with Adblock anyway. And why go down that road if they don't have to, there's nothing wrong with asking for contributions in order to put out a product they're proud of. Advertising in print has always been a supplemental thing, the real money came from subscriptions.
That's weird - I thought I read that he was personally pulling for Obama somewhere on 538. I'll go look for that.
YOU DIDN'T READ THE ARTICLE DID YOU
So the idea of leveraging pseudo-AMAs for marketing
purposes seems like swinging a broom at a hornets nest.

There are many AMAs that exist solely as the internet equivalent of a talk show where a celebrity makes an appearance to promote their latest book or tv series. The problem with the Woody Harrelson AMA was expectations, it was billed as "Ask Woody Harrelson Anything" and then when it came down to it the reality was it was actually "Ask Woody Harrelson anything about Rampart!"

If you set expectations accurately and provide real value then there will be no outrage, there was an AMA a few weeks ago from an ex death row inmate who did the AMA to promote his book, did anyone complain? No, because he was open about it and spent time answering all the questions regardless of their value to his promotional intentions.

Just like if a celebrity went on to Conan O'brien and answered every question with "Okay! So about my new film! It's really great, everyone should go and watch it!" people would be pissed.

Here's a couple of AMAs that I just picked in <1 minute that are promotional but had no complaints:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/12vg2c/i_am_lizzy_capl...

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/12uwz7/we_are_videogam...

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/n9tef/hi_im_louis_ck_a...

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/kefnc/i_am_bear_grylls...
>> Is there actually evidence that higher poll numbers in favor of X lead to higher voter turnout from supporters of X? It seems like everyone takes that for granted but I've never seen any evidence that it's true.

I'd like to see some raw evidence, too.

But since we're forced to speculate at the moment, my bet would be that the relation to voter turnout and a candidate's chances of winning isn't linear. It's probably more of a parabola: the more extreme a candidate's chances of being elected (or being defeated), the less likely anyone is to come out and vote, because it feels impossible to make a difference. On the flip side, I'd suspect that the closer and more contested a race is, the more likely people are to feel obligated to vote.
Why not buy the most popular mobile apps for the site and monetize them? Users seem to be much happier spending money on mobile apps than on web sites.
That still isn't your identity. You can identify yourself by it, but no one else can. Unless they already know that information about you... it which case, they already knew...
Someone should analyze how much data is actually transferred. I doubt it's more than $0.12 worth of NVRAM that could be stuck onto the mouse itself.
I work for an Australian Bank. We had an internal competition where they didn't sanitise the data for this competition well enough. After a week of analysing the data one of the people in competing in the competition knew who's data we were looking at. It was a friend of theirs.

All identifying information had been removed/sanitised, they could tell from looking at the spending habits.

I disagree with your statement.
What? A post get promoted 'My experience with AT&T sucks, they're terrible and here's why'. AT&T's marketing department makes a call, and says 'we'll pull our advertising spend if you don't pull that item'. Suddenly reddit has to make a call between having the cash they require to stay afloat, and staying true to their users.

That being said, I think there's a better compromise for the ad block than what they're doing at the moment. I don't care whether the ad space shows a kitten or an ad for Maccas, so it may as well generate them money (and if a company pulls advertising, well, that sucks, but that's how it goes. Better than having no advertising at all.)
With about 100 mil worth of cash on an annual basis, you can pump enough sulfur into the stratosphere to cool the planet and keep the temps stable. It's pretty straightforward and a proven method (think volcano eruptions).
An analogy to this could be having a chat box available on your website (olark for example). Let your users know you're always free for an informal chat.
They seem to be following a familiar pattern:
- First, deny that temps are rising.
- Next, admit they are rising, but that it isn't caused by humans.
- Next (and perhaps finally), admit they rising, and that it is caused by humans, but state that there's nothing that can be done about it anyway.
Focus of the F.C.C. in a Second Obama Administration: More Spectrum
Perhaps an upside is that a move like this might indicate that they're living on the precipice of financial failure, so not buying their products will take care of the problem for everybody.
Stylesheets: A Step Backward For Browsers
Just now, I finished creating Visual Studio project templates to streamline the bootstrapping process. It's now down to just three steps! Microsoft's done a great job with the Extensions gallery. There were a couple of snags with VSIX but no big problems.

The updated quick-start can be viewed at http://projects.nathanalden.com/JuniorRoute/documentation/1.....
The Inverted Pyramid & other Tips on Making Product Demos
Not sure if Jason (the developer of Alien Blue... far and away the best mobile reddit client) would want to sell his app. It seems like a labour of love.
Looks like the climate police don't appreciate your objection. Figures.
For what its worth they have not "released" the data. I cannot copy any of the text from the FAQ section but if you browse the FAQs and "about this site" it looks like the whole site is basically an ad/demo of Market Blueprint[1]. But I could be wrong. estromiund, do you know where they released the data?

[1] http://www.quantium.com.au/market-blueprint
doesn't sanitize HTML fyi - may leave you open for XSS