skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the "new" ways that Burke (data creator) et al are using with this type of data is finding the Expected Points Added for each plays. The EPA allows one to determine how valuable players are to a team's performance.

http://www.advancednflstats.com/2010/01/expected-points-ep-a...

I've been trying to work at the college football level with this same strategy but I'm still trying to figure out how its calculated. It seems trivial but it takes a lot of data organizing.
A bit OT, but I thought this might be a good opportunity to mention the upcoming SportsHackDay in Seattle from Feb 1-3 which culminates in a group viewing of the SuperBowl.
http://sportshackday.com/
What do you mean "from a technology point of view"? Perhaps it doesn't seem impressive to you because you've grown up in a world that takes these achievements for granted.

Your statement is like saying calculus isn't an impressive mathematical achievement because any moderately competent math major in college could recreate it.
as i mentioned in another post on this page, you dont need to regulate the _ordering_. for example, the ftc could regulate the labeling and positioning. ie. google could be required to put all googley results on the right column.
YES some designers are crazy divas, rigid, and unwilling to compromise or see the big picture.
I love the drag and drop HTML development idea. I'm curious whether there's any open source libraries out there or open sourced projects that can help me develop something similar. Any suggestions?
You exchange your bitcoins for traditional currency using an exchange then pay by cash.

You can even buy bitcoins with cash - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/4616/how-can-one-...

Meaning that no transaction ever touches anything related to your identity.
Hey! Sorry, I just saw this now.

> Wondering what you thought of "go" since you were looking for a systems language?

Go is written by Google, so I don't want to use it regardless. But Go doesn't solve the problems I want in a systems language: I don't care about compilation time, for example.

> Did you evaluate various languages before deciding to go with rust ?

I've been programming in systems languages for a long time: I've built apps in C, C++, and D previously. D is basically a failure as far as I'm concerned at this point.

Ultimately, as I say on the bottom of the homepage, I'm interested in learning languages if they can teach me something. Rust can, and has already, regardless of it being super preview level. Hopefully I'll be building things in Rust in the future, but I'll be glad that I spent time with it regardless.
> "Gambling is illegal where it is illegal" is a bit of a tautology don't you think?

Absolutely. And that appears to be the context in which Laurent was using it. carbocation compared selling a sports car in a jurisdiction with a low speed limit to selling gambling software in a jurisdiction where gambling is illegal. Laurent replied that drivers of the sports car could still obey the law, while users of the gambling software would always be disobeying that jurisdiction's laws.

I'm not sure I find the argument all that compelling, but it seems to me that people are arguing with a premise that is tautologically true.
Yes, I would want to keep all my options open for future generations. But that doesn't mean I would invest real money in fully productizing and marketing an Ubuntu phone unless there was expected to be a real market for it.
Objective-C isn't just for iOS and it isn't just for OS X: the language, and the runtime, is built for both.

Is he aware that Objective-C can be used on non-Apple platforms?
More proof that Google is SkyNet.
Well, with the help of Google Translate, it appears to be the public transit body of the city of Ankara. If I was an evil government body, I'd ask for my intermediate CA cert to be issued in the name of JohnDoesInconspicuousWidgets.com, not a government organisation.
Isn't Turkey west enough for you ...
Or a great west wall should build. ??
Study: Eco-Friendly Light Bulbs May Put Health At Risk
none of these are particularly impressive from a technology point of view

Well, not now.
Simple and nice. I would suggest adding a third option to take a photo from webcam.
I'm surprised Netfirms is at the bottom of the list.
ACME Dashboard (Retina)
For the US, I think that electing representatives by proportional representation within states would work similarly and would work pretty well with our existing constitutional framework.
For anyone wishing to CSS transition height from 0 to auto (or other way round), you can do it with max-height and achieve the same outcome, i.e. max-height: 0px to max-height: 9999px
I really want to try this but I am still getting a connection lost error.
Can you elaborate why you've spent the considerable time to do this? Do you habitually travel / connect to completely nefarious networks?
The technical reason you can't issue certificates by having one for the parent domain is because the certificate system, for some reason, has no notion of restricted scope for CAs, as far as names go. So there's no way to say that a certain CA can sign for only these names - it's all or nothing.
that logic is always going to apply , meaning effectively, you are never going to be able to remove their CA cert, because its always going to break their customer's sites. So no matter how glaring the security problems a CA is never getting delisted. The PKI model as it exists is broken beyond repair.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959
ask.metafilter.com
Apple files for patents on MagSafe 2 and iOS Notification Center
Citation needed.

Even The Economist is now saying that the US patent system is hurting, not helping, progress: http://www.economist.com/node/18389167
Congrats Jeff!!
There are multiple ways of measuring market share. One way is by the number of searches, and by that measure, in the US, google's market share is under 70%. Outside of the US, google's share is over 90% in many countries.

Another way to measure market share is by counting incoming clicks to websites from search engines. By that measure, google's share is higher.
US Electricity Use on Wane
Judging by how Google says they stumbled over this, "Chrome detected and blocked an unauthorized digital certificate", it seems that's roughly what they're doing. I wonder how many sites it's able to do this for.

(but yes, that is definitely a good solution)
His resources will grow exponentially!
Why it's used by Apple is inertia, what it brings to the table that C and C++ don't is balance.

Obj-C tends to bring the best of both worlds, while making slight tradeoffs. It brings the benefits of compile time type checking, while retaining dynamic typing at runtime. Try adding methods at runtime to a C++ object.

Obj-C is reasonably good at a number of things and integrates very cleanly with C++ and C.
Sure, and in the corporate world it's standard already - director's and officer's insurance covers criminal charges as well. Naturally deliberate criminal acts are excluded, but it'll cover you against the sort of accidents people can make when conducting business.

The government gets around this by ousting their target from their companies prior to laying criminal charges. Once the target no longer has control over their business, the new management can be pressured into dropping / denying the target's D&O coverage.
God damn it... Not this again.

=================MY PREVIOUS POSTS=================

I don't think that's a very fair assessment of Kurzweil's role in technology.

He was on the ground, getting his hands dirty with the first commercial applications of AI. He made quite a bit of money selling his various companies and technologies, and was awarded the presidential Medal of Technology from Clinton.

As I was growing up, there was a series of "Oh wow!" moments I had, associated with computers and the seemingly sci-fi things they were now capable of.

"Oh wow, computers can read printed documents and recognize the characters!"

"Oh wow, computers can read written text aloud!"

"Oh wow, computers can recognize speech!"

"Oh wow, computer synthesizers can sound just like pianos now!"

I didn't realize until much later that Kurzweil was heavily involved with all of those breakthroughs.

===========================================

In addition, I'd rank Minsky, Larry Page, Bill Gates, Dean Kamen, Peter, Norvig, Rafael Reif, Tomaso Poggio, Dileep George, and Kurzweil's other supporters as much more qualified to judge the merits of his ideas, than Kurzweil's detractors like Hofstadter, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Kapor, and Gary Marcus. It seems that Hofstadter is the only one of that group who is really qualified to render a verdict.

http://howtocreateamind.com/

=====================================

Here's Peter Norvig himself on Kurzweil:

“Ray’s contributions to science and technology, through research in character and speech recognition and machine learning, have led to technological achievements that have had an enormous impact on society – such as the Kurzweil Reading Machine, used by Stevie Wonder and others to have print read aloud. We appreciate his ambitious, long-term thinking, and we think his approach to problem-solving will be incredibly valuable to projects we’re working on at Google.”

and him effusively praising Ray at a Google Talks event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4
- @1:25
I think his perspective is entirely reasonable. Take one small example:

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
It is less of a "problem" with the standard, but more of a "design decision". Performance is more important to C-people.

For example, the result of x+y is undefined for signed integers in C, because we want it to compile it to a minimum number of instructions on every architecture. No instructions to check for overflow and branching afterwards. No error correction instructions on architectures where semantics differ to the language semantics.
It's obvious because they issued and discovered it was being used for google.com certs.

If it had been innocuously issued, no one would have attempted to issue google.com certs.

Google is in a better position to detect evil google.com certs in use. There's every reason to suspect other evil certs were issued and in use as well (although google.com is probably the most attractive mainstream target; compromising gmail is important to most intelligence and police agencies).
Canada to stop producing pennies in February to save tax payers money
How can I block this? For reals. I have no desire to run a Tor proxy and be shafted with CP charges.

Edit: my understanding is that this can be put into any web page and then make anyone visiting that page a Tor exit node.
It looks like it's still in the development phase? I'd like to start recommending it to clients, and then testing it on client sites, but right now I can't.

EDIT: Oh, apparently plug ins for nginx and apache are now available. Sweeeeet.

EDIT: Although I'm a bit nervous about turning it on. Several weeks ago I couldn't get to one of my websites where I had turned on HSTS for about an hour from Chrome, and I got absolutely no feedback from Chrome about what the problem was.
But the luster soon dulled once I realized that it will be some time before Universities accept MOOC certificates as credit (or never).

Good news! http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680899/you-can-now-earn-real-col... Now you can get back to learning.
Yeah, my impression is that the level of his title is fairly irrelevant. The whole thing is just to give him the ability to hire a team and have access to Google resources, from which they're hoping he'll produce something good.
Ask HN: Cold-Emailing for internships. Suggestions?
I'm currently a Sophomore in college. Now it's time to start looking for summer internships. I've been following HN for a year now and I'm very passionate about the whole startup ecosystem. I have offers from Megacorps that come to my school to recruit, but being in the Midwest, most startups dont show up to these events. I know that cold-emailing (or LinkedIn's InMail) works, but not sure as how to approach the companies I'd like to work with.
I'm sure many member of this community are now on the other side of the table and probably had to do similar steps as I did, so I'd love to hear suggestions from fellow HNers.
I agree with you that Google should be free to have their own editorial voice, and it seems like a really bad idea for that to be interfered with directly by government.

However, as you have done, I often see this idea coupled with a quip like "If you don't like it, go find a new one."

Why do people keep saying this? It's clearly not a valid option. Doing fast, high quality search has gigantic barriers to entry. Some of these may literally be insurmountable because the data Google has archived from the past of the web will never be available to new entrants.

We simply don't have a range of search 'voices' to choose from. Telling people to choose from a range of options that doesn't exist solves nothing.

Personally, I think there's an argument for forcing Google to at least publicize that their search actually has an editorial voice to counteract the misleading idea that it was somehow algorithmically objective and free of bias, which was their position for many years.

At least that way consumers might question what they are seeing and recognize that it's not 'the web' but Google's opinion of what you should see.
I would argue the risks involved in creating a "real" AI are present regardless. Not to re-link, but this example is even more apropos to your question than my other answer in this post.

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
> They have a search engine, mobile platform, advertising platform and a bunch of popular websites. That's it. All of which have been done before for a decade now.

Also best and brightest of engineers and AI researchers, shitload of money, culture of ambition and a clear intent to go after AI tech. I haven't heard of any other company like that.

> I would be far more concerned about something like IBM Watson used in health care situations.

I'd actually welcome it with open hands. It's about time for some automated diagnosis.

EDIT I'm sorry but I do have to address this point.

> Nothing they do directly influences whether people live or die.

Shut down Google and see what happens. Huge sectors of economy depend directly on search ability they provide, not to mention how many people are now using GMail. Moreover: do you know the addresses of nearest hospitals? Phones to medical specialists? How do you navigate around places? Without Google we'd be all back to Yellow Pages.

If there's one company humanity really grew dependent on, it's Google. Yes, you could probably replace most of the services if needed, given enough time, but the fact is they're the best out there right now, we're all using them and they definitely influence our lives and deaths.
I've worked with these guys and love what they're doing. PropellerSDK looks great!
A New Look for Facebook
Maybe "cost" is the wrong metric to argue about. My point was that we have a situation where a bad cert was issued, and the correct treatment for it, barring special circumstance, is to use the process designed to revoke bad certs.
1926 FDNY footage showing electrical, automated signaling and dispatch
Well, in the 'they did for the patents' defense, it is hard to quantify the value there. We also need to wait and see if they have more plans for it. Google buying youtube was considered dumb until quite recently.
More speculation: the market assumed Google would win and thus there is not much change.
Dribbble Blog - Top 24 Dribbble Shots of 2012
CA death penalty for someone like TURKTRUST matters to users a lot less than CA death penalty for a global CA like Verisign or Entrust. I'd rather get the policy demonstrated with a regional CA (or ideally a small/enterprise CA) and made clear enough to make all other CAs suitably cautious.
It's easy and popular to reference Jobs. Let's be careful of cargo culting though, and let's omit that anecdote and see if the conclusion is the same.

In addition, the article paints a vision of a company filled with employees weary and worn out from the scientific approach of the lean startup. I'm not sure why this is necessarily true.

Jobs was known to berate his employees and push them to the breaking point, all in the name of his vision.
Ask HN: How do you find product ideas?
Hi HN, how do you choose the passion projects you are working on?

I just wrote an entry about how I find my ideas - http://first10.255bits.com/wordpress/2013/01/01/how-to-find-your-product-in-a-sea-of-prospects/

TLDR: I write down one idea a day as an exercise and then choose which idea to productize when I have enough time to implement it.
Norvig is a very very smart guy, however he wrote the textbook on a period of AI that is very far removed from the biologically inspired machine learning techniques (Hinton, Hawkins) that I would classify as cutting edge and 'most likely to succeed.' His decision to work with Hinton lately I think is a testament to his intelligence.

Kurzweil has recognized the value of Hawkins' ideas and based his latest book on them, though I and others (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/ray-kurz...) don't think he did a great job on it.

Full Disclosure: I work at Numenta (Hawkins company) but these opinions are my own.
Segway and all that Bell Labs stuff...
the traffic does not exit the tor network via this method. You are simply fuctioning as another intermediate node.

websockets have no ability no function as an exit node.
It seems that this device will be inevitably compared to the OUYA, another "open-source" Android game console. The only major difference in hardware, form-factor aside, is that this uses an Amlogic 8726-MX SoC rather than the Tegra3 T33 used in the OUYA. It's hard to make a direct comparison, but the Tegra3 has more cores and is clocked slightly faster. I have heard some grumbling over the OUYA's specs, though, so I imagine the GameStick will leave devs no happier.

While having more devices in this category will increase fragmentation, I imagine that "porting" an OUYA game to this or vice versa would only take a few hours (or less) in most cases- more potential buyers is good news for anyone seriously considering selling games for the OUYA. The only real difference between the devices from a programmer's perspective may be how they handle gamepad input.
That's supposed to be how it works, but often in practice it is far from it.
Or, as others here have suggested, simply give public defenders’ offices a budget comparable to the prosecutors’ offices.

If the interests of justice make it worth spending $100K of taxpayer money to prosecute someone charged with a relatively simple crime, then it’s also worth giving that person access to $100K worth of defense lawyering. If the government wants to spend $5M to prosecute an alleged mobster, that alleged mobster should have access to $5M worth of defense.

If the mobster has allegedly ill-gotten gains and the government wants to freeze them, then $5M of those gains would be placed in escrow; if the defendant is acquitted or later proves that the money was earned legitimately, then it would be deposited back into the public defenders’ fund.
In 2013, crush fear. And perfection.
I bought a Nexus 4 and phoned up phone support to ask about the shipping. I was immediately connected to a live person, I was told when it shipped and when I would expect it.

Love the phone, totally worth it.
Yeah, is he allowed to hire absolutely anyone he wants?

Google has billions in the bank and can afford to be silly for quite some time, but probably not unlimited silly.
If only he would share some of that context in the actual posts. Reading them is like watching someone argue with another person you can't see or hear.
Tactful Trademark Defense: An Example
It doesn't, as the Second Amendment is not designed to protect citizens from overzealous prosecutors but from a tyrannical government. These examples do not cross that threshold.
Fun fact: In the UK even the FA Premier League fixture list is copyrighted, and websites or publications wishing to publish all or part of the fixture list for a given season need to pay a licence fee.

I can't even give you a list of football fixtures coming up this weekend without breaking copyright law.
I have flexible. It's brilliant. I can't imagine not having it.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#samplecode/GenericKe...
No, Diginotar had their CA removed from several browsers and went bust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar
Can you set the record straight with respect to the Black case?
>Google already has goldmine of info about us; knows where we are, interests, friends, reads our mails before we do. What if it understands?

I do not think that I am alone when I say "please, for the love of god, don't let this happen."
Review my Startup: Populr.me (Professional Micro-publishing Platform)
I started a library to get data out of the fuelband, but never got very far mainly due to time:

http://github.com/qdot/libfuelband
If it was downvoted, it's because the grand jury process has become a farce. A pretty good description of how it actually works, written by a former government prosecutor, can be found in this entry:

http://www.popehat.com/2010/12/30/the-first-rule-of-the-war-...

Conrad Black also describes the use and abuse of the grand jury in depth as part of A Matter of Principle.
I hope that the Android "notification center" does not infringe on this very original patent, which was clearly inspired by the Quake console, also invented by Apple.
The best thing right now is cert pinning in Chrome. Unfortunately it's only in Chrome, and is a manual process on Google's part, so it really isn't applicable to a lot of people.
Larry is a smart guy, his success is proven, and he has the resources to make the future happen.

But don't put too much weight on his prediction. Real innovation usually comes from unexpected places. Historically, predictions of technology big-shots are not as accurate as the tech press seems to think.
Fixed-layout is supported via EPUB, but you need a reader that knows how to display the fixed-layout version. 99% of readers only display reflowable content.

What you really want to do is go with reflowable content that is formatted correctly (proper HTML/CSS), and if the content breaks across the page, changing the font size should help rectify.

(spoken from too many years of ebook + tech book experience)
The usual explanation of such things: T is not so important as 1/T. So negative abs temp is achieved by going through +infinity temp and coming back via -infinity temp.

Note that this is only allowed in systems which have states that are bounded in energy. The usual example is a laser: When in inversion, its absolute temperature (of the electron population) is negative.
I gave you a round of applause for stating that Americans should hold their government to a higher standard. Last time I checked we Americans walk around thinking we are the best and most free place in the world. Sometime's it feels like that's a facade though, because when things like feds reading all our emails for little to no reason occur they throw their hands up and say two things, first "I have nothing to hid so I'm not worried about this." followed by "at least we have freedom at all, in insert country name here women don't even have the right to vote." That's all fine and dandy, I'm glad we as a country are better in that regards. How much longer will it last like this though? With our rights eroding away like Niagara falls.
Sol Wachtler, once chief justice of New York, said that any district attorney worth his salt could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. (For what it's worth, Wachtler found himself on the other side of the law some years after he said that.)
Great service, Nothing like I've ever heard or thought of. Im looking forward to a invite.