skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems like as good a time as any to share something I've been working on which uses the same source data, even though it's pretty rough at the moment (slow, bad data, only currently goes through week 8 of 2012, etc.):

http://nfl-query.herokuapp.com/

The basic syntax is [stats] [conditions] : [row] / [column].

There's some autocompletion to try to make it possible to discover what is accepted.

Examples:

passing yards : team / season

first downs / first down attempts : down / distance

rushing yards min 100 rushing yards : player, game, quarter

rushing yards / carries min 200 carries : player

One of the biggest problems is that it's currently way too easy to shoot yourself in the foot by making a really slow query.
I imagine it might be difficult to structure in a way that isn't also seizable by the government.
um um um you sound like an idiot. shut up already you've failed to redeem and save face.
If all you want is a clickable link, you can set it with javascript- almost every "real" person runs javascript, and most of the spam bots don't.
20 High Resolution Spring Wallpapers
This is a tour de force of reporting on empirical research in an area that could hardly be of greater social importance. Drum deserves 100x more attention for this than he got for breaking the Romney 47% video in September.

Concidentally via http://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/22/scientific-american... from a couple weeks ago, here's a link to Reyes' paper on the lead/crime theory:

http://www3.amherst.edu/~jwreyes/papers/LeadCrimeBEJEAP.pdf

And here's a striking critique of the Freakonomics abortion/crime theory, which I suppose most people here have heard of:

http://www.economist.com/node/5246700?story_id=5246700

Someone inspected Donohue and Levitt's code and found a bug that meant they hadn't controlled for what they claimed they had. "Fixing that error reduces the effect of abortion on arrests by about half, using the original data, and two-thirds using updated numbers."
Existential risk around AI? Really?

That's just multiplying through by -1 the typical nerd wet dream about the Singularity.

I can't even keep Rails, Apache, or git from occasionally shitting the bed; I am not worried about AI just yet.
That seems to be belied by this very case, no? Rails had two ways of doing something, one of which forgot where the input could come from...
Riker Ipsum
Connecticut Town Will Collect, Destroy Violent Games
I came to say something similar. One of the reasons I liked the iRex Illiad e-reader was that the screen was large enough and had enough resolution that one could display a PDF and read it at its nominal 'size'.

What surprises me about this conversation is how sad it makes me. Displaying documents accurately was a solved problem in 1985 at Xerox. They had a lot of folks who were to document display what web designers are to web page display. They would go on and on and on and on and on about the kerning or the way this ligature in this language had to have this sort of thing in order to be 'correct'. They had fights with Imagen whom they considered the "GeoCities" of document display. Don Knuth got so fed up with how poorly computer formatted documents looked that he wrote his own formatter, and part of that included a representation (dvi) which was designed to be a high fidelity source that could render to the 'best possible' form on the device. These guys generally fought over printers because display terminals were 25 lines of 80 characters for the most part (unless you had a Xerox D-machine).

The thing that makes me sad is that we haven't been able to capture any benefit from that war. Everything patented then has expired, whether it was the special 'hinting' Xerox used on fonts or the way they maximized the fidelity of the half toning on two color printers. Sigh.
You need to think bigger. This is the future of teledildonics.
Okay, names and links:

I speak here only from personal experience; having used the following mostly at the gym, biking to and from work and while hiking in the Sierras:

- Garmin Forerunner 405 (https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?pID=11039&ra=true): All around general good "exercise" watch, but battery life requires a backup plan. Doesn't have Linux software, but can easily export to GPX for use in things like Google Earth and Maps. You can also combine other sensors: bicycle speed/cadence sensor (https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?pID=1266) and a foot pod (https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?pID=15516) for gym workouts, or just longer battery life.

- Zephyr HXM (http://www.zephyr-technology.com/products/fitness) combined with a smartphone (such as N900): Another good solution for basic logging; a variety of software to choose from, with different levels of openness.

Just to curb some replies: I know that FitBit does other stuff, lasts longer on a charge, has less friction getting data off, etc, but the thing I'm countering is the openness claim. If you have to pay for your data, and you still don't get a copy, it's a) not your data and b) not an open platform. Some basic research would have revealed this, hence why I didn't (and won't) get a FitBit, and I recommend others avoid it too.
tl;dr sheet music on iPad. There's a $20 billion music buyer market in the US and $80bn overseas, but most of that money is spent on instruments. The market segments Chromatik is chasing are a) classical musicians, of whom there are few (but enough) and b) high school band musicians, of whom there are plenty. The crossover with computer-based musicians is almost non-existent. Outside of the classical sphere hardly any working musicians use sheet music.
I doubt that Kurzweil has truly been granted "unlimited" access to Google's resources. His title of "director of engineering" sounds impressive, but there's so far little indication he will be a very senior figure at the company.
There's a very simple reason for that.

You're seeing a difference between Control and Variation in an A/A test is because a very small number of visitors have been tested. To explain, suppose you toss a coin 10 times and 7 out of those it shows heads. Just based on these 10 tosses, would you conclude that the coin is loaded? Probably not. Suppose you tossed the coin a 100 times, it'll probably show heads maybe 43 or 47 or 51 or 52 times.

Point being, as you toss it more and more, the number of times it shows a heads or tails comes closer and closer to 50% but you need to toss it a large number of times to be fairly certain that it isn't loaded. The more you toss it, the more certain you are. However, you'll only be more and more certain, but never completely certain. VWO works on a similar principle. The more number of times you toss up Control and Variation to visitors, the more certain you become of either being better, worse or equal to each other.

If you'll read the post, the graph shows the fluctuations in the beginning, after which things kind of settle down. In an A/A test, they'll settle down to a very similar conversion rate.

Here's an article from the VWO Knowledgebase that'll help you with running an A/B test correctly http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/knowledge/how-to-ideally-r...
Last time Convergence was crapping out when using private (or otherwise unreachable) IPs - kind of makes sense, but still dissapointing. Will check out tack.io and CurveCP, cheers for the suggestions.
drag/drop/paste
It looks like all of Google's new lobbying efforts have paid off. http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=d000022008
It's not forced for all phones - it's only compulsory on prerelease devices. Presumably nobody would use such a device exclusively if they're on an urgent on-call rotation. I didn't read that much animosity into the post personally...
You can blame Perl for that. Ruby took "Hash" from Perl's name for its native hash tables.
Time for a stupid question: what prevents the censor from simply blocking the facilitator? It isn't ephemeral like the "flash proxy"... so it seems like you'd have the same problem as you have with the relays.
These articles always seem to ignore quality of life - they assume that more life is necessarily a better thing. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that an extra ten years of life isn't much to look forward to if your mental and physical faculties are degraded to the point that you're a shadow of your former self. Better to burn out than fade away...?
Haha, I was equating it more to job postings that look for "rockstar ninja solo hackers". Childish was the wrong choice of word, and I failed to explain myself clearer. :)
I guess it's team or role dependent. When I interviewed with Google the first time I was directly told that there would be no 20% time (my memory is hazy but I was interviewing for something related to AdWords Fraud at the time). And this was back in 2005, when the media was actually glowing about Google's 20% time policy. The interviewer joked, "Sure you get 20%. On Sunday you can do whatever you want."

So I suspect that if people are picking up on the "curtailed 20%", it's because Google employees are telling people that it is during the actual interview process.
That Artificial Stupidity is more deadly than AI. (Perhaps this is because I don't see AI as an existential risk, unless it is used toward bad ends such as in war.)

We're not perfect as humans, but I don't think we're stupid enough to build something we can't control. We don't even know what consciousness is, much less whether artificial consciousness is possible.

I do know that it would save lives to liberate humanity from drudgery and stupidity.
The Federal government in the US can pretty much screw people it wants to screw. I think that's fairly well established. The same is true in every other country I can think of -- at least in the US the fact remains that if you're genuinely innocent you can have your day in court. If anything characters like Conrad Black get away with -- figuratively -- murder.

The question is -- do we have someone more sympathetic than a guy who looted his own companies and a serial killer to serve as an example of this kind of thing being done to genuinely innocent victims? Forbes may regard Conrad Black as a sympathetic victim, but I don't think most reasonable people would. What the writer of this article doesn't like is that the Federal government will do some very nasty things -- in court -- to people it knows are guilty but hard to convict of their actual crimes.

In most other countries if the government hates you that much you'll have much worse to worry about.
I believe that macca321 is wishing that, to avoid confusion, the term "hash" was reserved for referring to an individual hash code and that "hash table" was used for the data structure and the Ruby class that implements it.
Ford Motor Company - Silicon Valley Research Lab (http://fordsvl.com/careers/software.html) - Palo Alto, CA

We're the team behind OpenXC (http://openxcplatform.com/) and are growing out new research lab in Palo Alto. The current opening is for a software engineer with a broad range of talents.

For example we're currently working on mobile applications (Android), embedded computing (Arduino, chipKIT, PIC32, ARM Cortex M3), web applications (Flask, Django), the CAN bus, NFC and other networking research. We also do a lot of physical prototyping of electronics and housings - we're talking PCB design, 3D printing and the like.

The best candidates are those with a few years of experience in a professional environment or new grads with lots of cool projects under their belt. We love open source and are pushing the company in new and more open directions.

Don't let the big corporation name scare you away - the research team operates with much of the freedom to experiment of a smaller company, but with the benefits of large corporate backing (eg. if you need it to get your job done, we can buy it).
This is relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4997127

The answer is: it depends. How much data did you collect? How big was the difference you observed?

Javascript is less reliable than server-side tracking. There are lots of issues. Some people have Javascript turned off, though normally this is a small proportion. If people navigate away before the testing harness is loaded you can lose data. If you're testing elements that navigate away from the current page you can lose data if the harness is not implemented correctly (the browser will cancel pending requests when you navigate away).

I can't say what went wrong in your case but there is the potential for lots to go wrong.
Catch 22. The gerrymandering itself creates the predestined elections that keep the gerrymanders in power.
Hmm... How would copy-pasta code have prevented this?
If you were Samsung, HTC and LG, would you be betting your business on it? Would you not actively be looking at alternatives?
You can also check out http://chartbeat.com/labs/totaltotal/ for a more complete view of the numbers (I'd recommend zooming out a bit).

If anyone has questions or anything, feel free to ask.
For my ML class, I used this dataset to play around with predicting plays. Im obviously no expert, but wanted to share my report anyways:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cy04oxaq83mxvoz/report.pdf
Facebook launches voice in iOS and Android Messenger apps
Chris Sells added reference counting to the open source "Rotor" release years ago. This was to test whether GC overhead was indeed an overhead over deterministic finalization.

http://www.sellsbrothers.com/writing/refcount_rotor.doc

I'll let you come to your own conclusions about the results :)
Forgot to mention, if you're interested, get in touch with me at cpeplin@ford.com. A GitHub/Bitbucket profile link would be a great thing to include!
I agree, this isn't useless. I know my mom used to buy stick-on thought bubbles to put on pictures of her kids in baby books and such. If she wanted to do that now she's have to insert a photo into PowerPoint and add a thought bubble. I would use Photoshop which arguably would take even more time.

My suggestion for improvement: have it auto-upload to imgur or another image sharing site (maybe add a checkbox for that when people are reviewing the TOS).
Now all we need is some historical line & associated movement data...
Office Hours With The Accelerators – Thursday, Jan. 3, 3 p.m. EST
Don't forget Joda Time (http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/), at least until Java 8 is out.
Would it not be preferable if both the prosecution and the defense had fairly limited resources? It doesn't seem better to me for both sides to be armed to the teeth...though I'm sure it's good business for the lawyers.

In other words, I agree that balance is required, but disagree that using more wealth to achieve it is the best way forward. Not only does it destroy value in the economy, it begs the questions seen here about the defense of poor people.
I think this could actually have utility in a business setting: many folks doing presentations, newsletters, etc... don't have image software (or the know-how) to create this kind of effect.
Ask HN: Does Pinterest have a future in search?
Over the holidays I had an opportunity to listen to a discussion between a few teachers of various ages, trying to describe how useful Pinterest is to them in both their personal and professional lives.

The words they used to describe Pinterest are what fascinated me. "I use it to find ____", and "Just search for ____ and you'll get something great". In their own descriptions, this was a resource for discovery and search, rather than simply consumption. Furthermore, they talked a lot about the sharing aspect, "When I find something great, I will share it".

In my own experience with the site, the search functionality hasn't been great, and it's not a big surprise either. The community hasn't been encouraged to describe the posts with keywords the way that Twitter and Instagram do. Rather than describing things as "Light Blue Paint Interior", posts are often described with a reaction to the image "I really love the colors!".

I've always seen Pinterest as just a visual bookmarking tool with sharing involved. But it now seems to me that Pinterest is becoming a leading social visual search engine.

Although the social aspect of the site is well developed and intuitive, I'm starting to see a massive opportunity for Pinterest to improve the search engine aspects of their site. This could be effectively done by introducing functional hashtags (hyperlinked to search, like Twitter) to the site, which would likely be an instant hit with the community due to the pre-selected categories being too general. Further advanced search tools might also be useful, such as searching based on a specific color, specific domains, or advanced search syntax (AND, NOT, etc.).
If that's the case then I guess this is not such a great idea for a startup:).
Say Hello to Backbone.js
Just thought it was interesting to see the term Django take off (with the new movie out).

So much for using Google Trends to see what's more popular.
I'd argue that Disney's animated works as a whole is much more culturally relevant than Hanna-Barbera's portfolio. But I do agree that quality of animation is not the deciding factor in that determination.
Here is a start: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cy04oxaq83mxvoz/report.pdf
This may have been said before, but I am posting anyways since there's so many comments here and I don't have time to read them all.

I think I have a way to explain why pixel perfection is a very good optimization that caters to more of a a developer mindset like yourself; it comes down to image compression, and specifically PNG compression.

When it comes to UI elements, the fewer colors you use, the better. This means avoiding things like gradients, or unnecessary colors can have a major impact on file size. It's also the 'art of design' to manage to create a beautiful design without a lot of crappy and needless 'veneer'.

I don't know the specifics of the PNG algorithm, but it can do an amazing job at compressing an image if it's made up of few and often repeating colors (typically it's terrible at photographs, however).

When you apply a scaling algorithm (as exemplified by the post) other than nearest neighbor, it tends to create a lot of intermediary colors that end up hurting the size of the image.

Looking closely at the borders of those buttons, that blur is going to end up adding to the file size because it adds colors that didn't exist before. If you properly 'scale' (which sometimes requires a redraw at a smaller size to get it right), it can have a huge impact (sometimes as much as 2x or 3x).

Oftentimes you can get away with it from a 1/2x scale fairly easily, but you have to remember there are many android devices at a 1.5x scale, and that can sometimes require completely new rounded corners that take advantage of that pixel density.

This is of course anecdotal, but it's not as simple as 'looks' even though I could immediately see the differences between the properly and unproperly scaled images.
Give me a picture! No way am I giving you access to my inbox without anything more than a pretty button.
Well, it does look like it was made with a WYSIWYG editor using Trident (MSHTML 8.00.6001.18828) for visual layout. With "what you see is what you get" can sometimes be "what you get is what you don't see".

My favorite is the anchor that contains an anchor that contains an anchor that contains an anchor. This happens twice for reasons that don't seem to exist since no link on the page apparently points to them.
Someone should combine this with some kind of fast mutating genetic algorithm. Presto, procedurally generated solutions.
It's important to note that none of these achievements are AI-related (apart from character recognition, but that's a terribly shallow form of AI).

What's more, none of these are particularly impressive from a technology point of view, what's interesting are just the product ideas.
Automated tests are only superior when it is too intensive to do manually e.g. integration tests or serialization tests.

But otherwise especially for iPhone apps manual testing is far, far superior. It will always pick up issues with the UI that automated testing never will. And the UI issues are the most important ones.
Zealz GK802 - quad-core Freescale CPU onto a $99 stick
speculating here: if this free hand can give google a tens-of-percent increase in revenue then a low-single-digits move in the stock seems mismatched.
> However, Google is not dumb.

They did buy Motorola Mobility.
Timehop CEO Talks Web & Mobile Growth
Obviously they don't blacklist the CA because doing so would break the sites of all of their customers. That's a very high-cost action, and the cost is borne by people not involved in the security situation. You do it only in an emergency. The system has an existing mechanism in place: revoke the cert, (though see the post by mrb above which argues that the revocation was done incorrectly).

Longer term, yes: I think looking at punishing TURKTRUST in some way, including revoking their CA, makes sense.
Think about it as code formatting. In order for your code to be extensible and readable you need to make sure that you are using the right fundamental indentatation, naming convention etc.

Where you look at the buttons individually, the designer looks at the style. The sum of all the items styled in a certain way.

The real question is not whether designers go too much into details but rather when they should and when they shouldn't.
HTML? By having many small players, plus by virtue of the US department of Justice.

E-mail? By having many small players, or at least not one player able to call the shots.

Even today, many parties try to make carve out their own communication kingdoms. Examples: BlackBerry, MS Exchange, Apple's iMessage and FaceTime, GMail (doesn't do push email anymore via Exchange emulation)

And yes, HTTP is open, as is TCP/IP. That, IMO, is because of two things: lower layers get commoditized and network effects. Even disregarding the latter, there is too little money to make in such low-level stuff (that also is why Apple builds on BSD and Google on Linux, and both use OpenGL.)

And that democratic mindset? I tried to make an observation, not to tell you what I thought the world should look like.
Show HN: Organization by using hashtags
I have been working on linkies.com as side project for a while and really hoping to get your thoughts and feedback on the overall idea.

The idea: Linkies is an innovative social way to save/collect all the things you love and discover by utilizing the power of hashtags. You can automatically create albums or collections of links, pictures or posts based on the hashtags you use while signed into linkies.com or even while using other social based networks. Linkies also allows you to discover and subscribe to your friends or more importantly just the things that you are interested in.

Check out the video on our landing page. It explains the services Linkies will provide in more detail.

If I get traction or interest on HN then I will then setup a private beta invite just for the HN readers.

Again, I would really appreciate any early feedback as we get this site ready to launch.

Thanks for your time!
The market is moved by speculative speculation not facts or "nerd stuff"
Sure, eventually. But Ubuntu is blazing the trail here, and that counts for a lot. Right now, the Android is the only Linux "distro" (actually a completely different OS from regular GNU/Linux) that runs on phones.

After Ubuntu, I can imagine a Debian phone, or an Arch phone, or even an LFS phone. But right now, I can't. (Unfortunately, I don't think Pat Volkerding can ever support a Slackware phone. So we'll see if I ever move away from Ubuntu on mobile. Right now that's all moot though because none of it exists yet.)
I love those USB form factor PCs, I would love to have one with 16 cores and several GB of RAM in it :)
Dropbox to Merge with Box.com To Become DropboxBox
Whether or not these are Riker quotes strung together, the idea of this is still strange to me. Ipsum generators are meant to be nonsense rather than full sentences.