skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, that's at least how I saw it. And I think that message is being lost in the rush to see it as the next Powerset. I know Powerset and NLP generally gets lots of hype, but I think that sort of positioning for them would be a death sentence.
Ask HN: What would you have Conficker do?
Being that today is April 1st - April fools day - and also the day Conficker computer virus was to download a new set of instructions. I was thinking what would I do with the 3-12 million computers at my beck and call.

Email resignation letters to everyone's boss.
Insert Porn into everyone's PowerPoint slides

Pretty lame that's why I asked the question.
Immediate reaction: Hey, cool, I've been looking for something like this.

5 seconds later: $29/month? No way I'm paying that much for a service I hope to never need.

2 minutes later: Hmm, only email? I'd like something more reliable than email for a monitoring system.

I'd like to see this service changed by:

1. Replacing the monthly fee with a per-call fee. I'd happily pay $5 to get a phone call if my server died. (But ideally there should be some way to test that the system is working without paying $5 per test.)

2. Adding different ways to have phone calls trigerred. Ideally I'd like to seen an HTTP POST gateway -- that way I could write monitoring scripts which can make sure that the message reaches RoboNOC.

Edit:

Also, 3. If you don't have this already, have a "press 1 to acknowledge this message" at the end of a phone call, and have some mechanism for retrying calls.
Sounds like we may have talked to the same guy. I agree that breadth of data is a challenge, and I didn't have the chance to push its limits. Though I was surprised that it knew about acids but not about the pH levels. That might be ok--and certainly fixable if it matters to enough people--but it's a reminder that there will always be holes.

It is interesting to imagine an approach like this raising the bar for information quality / provenance on the web. That would be a delightful outcome wrt information accountability.
Thinking about it, April Fools is one time where Google can claim to be making something slightly outrageous that they haven't made already.

It'd be useful to gather up a bunch of these to release on April Fools to see which one has the most traction, as possible future products.
The real April fools joke would be to actually announce something real on April 1st.
Microsoft asks feds for a bailout
Calculate the quintillionth bit of Pi. With ten million reasonably modern computers it shouldn't take more than 12-24 hours.
Qst.me - New URL and Text Shortener
Hey, thanks for your feedback :)

Per-call accounts are definitely something to be added. The biggest issue holding that back is getting a payment gateway set up to be able to do ad-hoc debits.

Look for a HTTP POST gateway soon - the thing about email is that it plugs right into all existing monitoring systems and apps, so there is no need for any changes apart from adding a new alert recipient. Edit: also, we hope that our email setup is as reliable as can be. Of course you also need to trust your outbound server.

3. Yup - we're also looking into adding escalation routes based on this information.
OP here.

I wrote this over the past day. A little simple URL shortener, which stands for Quest Me (hey, good names are hard to come by).

After bit.ly got $2 million, I figure it can't hurt.

I have plans to add a nice, simple API, bookmarklet.

Currently, if you create a URL or block of text, you can append a $ at the end (http://qst.me/5$ for example) to see where it redirects to or the block of text and how many times it's been viewed.

Let me know what you think.

Thanks!
The problem he's missing is simple math. We're a small startup making apps for social networks, and about 7% of our customers use IE6. (I keep meaning to check by revenue, I bet it's less then, since presumably a lot of them are using it at work where they can't just whip out their credit card.) Unfortunately, getting our great UI to work in IE6 takes up some percentage of our time. As time goes on, the percentage of users drops and the percentage of our time increases. I'm not sure if they've crossed paths yet, but if not, it's close.

Sure, if you have unlimited resources, develop for IE6, Opera, whatever else. But when you're on a budget, and you have to choose between making your app 20% better for 93% of your users, or making it work for the extra 7%, it's not a no-brainer.
> thought there was nothing I could do about it.

Did you contact them?
Could also be a failed attempt at drawing the "nikolaus hut" (not sure what it is called in english: http://www.kreudenstein-online.de/AppletNikol/AppletNikol.ht...).

That, or their alphabet is REALLY expressive.
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Wow, way to spectacularly miss the point!

1) No intelligent person is suggesting that a computer will directly map to a human brain. We're not trying to reproduce a brain in silicon. However, a sufficiently powerful computer might be able to model the workings of a brain - or even might not need to if we find another path to intelligence.

2) If anything, the complexity and existence of the human brain is an indication that such a system can be built efficiently. After all, the brain exists, therefore it should be possible to at least build something of comparable complexity and power, at some point in the future. Maybe it won't be as rapid as Moore's law predicts, but there's no reason to think that we won't eventually be able to reproduce what nature has been able to do through blind selection.

3) There's no reason why a singularity can only come via wholly artificial intelligence. Intelligence augmentation could easily achieve the same objective (and is perhaps even more likely - after all, it's happening today already, albeit on a smaller scale).

Did they even bother to read up on Singularity stuff before writing this article?
> The belief that technology will usurp governments is more than "a few years old"

What the article writer is talking about is not technology per se, but a new social structure. Which is just the same "nothing new under the sun" phenomenon if you look back in history. The printing press (another disrupting technology) helped usher in modern democracy and eventually the corporation, but they still suffered the same ills prior organizational structures like the church or the kingdom did. "Platforms" will not make the bad parts of human nature go away.
Ask HN: Cheese Weasel Day is Coming. Are you Ready?
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I like the relative simplicity of 960.gs. It does a reset and then has a fairly simple set of glasses for actually do the grid. It also comes w/ a basic typography class that I'll overwrite w/ my own base preferences.

I find that it saves me A LOT of time when doing sites that fit the grid style, which are most. It's out of the box functionality really shines when you realize you don't need to play around with floats, margins, and other CSS "tricks" to get your CSS layouts working across browsers.

The biggest issue I see with 960 vs. Blueprint is that I believe Blueprint will allow you any width you'd like. Resizing 960 probably isn't a huge ordeal but it's not as simple as in Blueprint.
Facebook announces new CFO + moves to Montreal
This isn't hard to do for free, with open source speech synthesizers and a modem.

That's well out of the reach of the general public, but presumably folks who run their own servers and monitoring systems have the technical acumen required to implement your service themselves if it sounds useful.
Have you considered using a prepaid system, i.e., have people "buy 5 phone calls" which sit in their accounts until they are used? Tarsnap uses a prepaid billing model and it is working very well.

also, we hope that our email setup is as reliable as can be. Of course you also need to trust your outbound server.

Right, and it's more the outbound server that I'm concerned about. After all, even if email delivery usually works, the one time when it is most likely to not work is when there's a network problem to report.
> because some people can't tell the difference between funny and not.

If you can't tell, it's not.
Open-Source Health Care
Though Guido did mention his eventual retirement at PyCon.
Seed torrents.

Hey, if everyone's upstream bandwidth is being soaked up by _The Wire_, other viruses won't be able to use it to send out spam.
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Prepaid might work, it is how most external monitoring providers sell their SMS credits. The thing about prepaid though is that the one time something big happens, you've probably ignored the "Please top up" emails all month.

If you're having network problems then a HTTP interface probably won't make much of a difference, though :) To help here you usually have an account with a third party such as Pingdom, JustUptime, etc.
Summary: the law says "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."

This is obviously closely related to Richard Gabriel's "Worse is Better", and the general philosophy of starting with a simple design, and iterating under the scrutiny of users.
As someone who lived for a few years right near TMI I dont understand how anyone could think the accident was worse then Chernobyl. I mean the plant is still running today, if you drive by it you wouldn't even know there was ever an accident (except for the towers not producing steam).

On the other hand the top of Chernobyl blew off from steam pressure, and as far as I know the area is littered with abandoned homes.
Thanks for your reply. Yes, of course this is possible to do yourself, as is almost anything these days. This is geared towards those who don't feel like setting up their own redundant infrastructure offsite just to make phone calls :)
No. I don't contact the bakery if it's bread is mouldy either.
Well, I'm thinking more of transient network issues -- the sort of things which could result in email sitting in a queue for hours, but wouldn't stop a script which loops "send HTTP POST to server; read response; if we didn't get a 200 OK, try again".
I'd actually suspect it was part of the business model. They're banking on companies paying for reputation management. After the recent Yelp discussion (and some other older examples of a similar issue), I was not surprised at all about Jason's post.
So it's a recursive technique named "APRiL 1.0" published on April 1st, and it's not an April fools?

The code is a bit to intricate for me to completely get it. :(
Check your web server referrer logs, you might be able to see which IP grabbed the RSS feed so quick and prevent it in the future. (That is, if twampss doesn't respond here.)
This is an obvious April fools prank and the phony Google announcement which links to this site is already on the front page. The announcement also provides more context for the blogspot page. Flagged.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=541393
Coding Horror: Should Competent Programmers be "Mathematically Inclined"?
Those aren't models. Those are investing philosophies. And they're so general and vague that I really don't understand what point you're trying to make. You asked no concrete question, and you will get no concrete answer.

If you want to educate yourself, don't ask HN, do your homework and read Harris' book: http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~lharris/Trading/Book
Open Source Software Model - A Positive Sum Game
Uh, yeah, I know it is an April fools prank. Geez, I hope when the singularity really arrives our successors will have more humor than some of us apes did!
Their service might affect your site even if you're not interested in it in the slightest (you sort of give the impression that you'd become frustrated with them prior to Jason's letter), whereas it's very easy to change bakeries with no second thoughts or problems, so the two are not equivalent.
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Update all the people with ie6 to something newer
Oh, OK :) Well that is definitely something to add. Please check back tomorrow, or if you'd like me to drop you an email, just send to martin at staff.robonoc.com - Thanks.
Give us the million years evolution had to develop the brain, we would surely come up with something better.
Simple and complex are relative terms.
What a highly educated person anno 2009 would find simple might be complex to a uneducated person anno 1009.

Which implicates this "law" is also relative, making a more useful description:
If you make something which seems complex to you, it will not work. Begin with something that is simple to you, and than evolve it in to something complex.
That would probably be a good thing to do an A/B test on. Everyone has an opinion (like me: "hey, I like the dollar sign! It's simple, clear, I recognize it instantly, and I hate web sites where when I want to give them money I have to go looking for how to do it!"), but measuring your conversion rate between the two options will tell you which one is actually better.
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While I agree with the principle "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance", I think a discussion of how a certain action caused damage, and how to remedy that damage, can be easily sidetracked by a discussion of whether the action was malicious or ignorant.
Some of us don't like the site being all junked up with phony articles and basically useless for a day. Besides, it's not very funny without any context and the original link was already posted.
It's rather irrelevant if it was intentional or not - the damage is still very real. If you accidentally shoot someones head off, you're still accountable for the action. Of course there's a difference in how to handle the mistake (murder-one or manslaughter?), but the question of responsibility remains the same. If GS handles this matter well (And so far they seem to), they might get away with some minor damage done to their own reputation, but that's not Jason' fault - That's their own.
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Now that you mention it, I can't think of anything better for humanity.
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Larrabee: Intel's New GPU
Point taken, they are absolutely philosophies. That was a sloppy question, it's getting late here.

I was curious if people more knowledgeable than myself on this topic took genuine exception to these philosophies and had others to add to the list. Part of doing your homework is asking other smart people questions. Perhaps not the best site for this one but what can I say, I respect the people here more than elsewhere.
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if they made good cars this would all be moot
This one gets points for joke commitment:

http://svn.python.org/view?view=rev&revision=70945
I've had a personal experience with people (not developers) who couldn't understand the concept of simplifying equations. So it was "add 20%, +8, x 2," or something to that effect. I said "you mean x 2.4 + 16". Their response was "just do what we said." So I think a minimum level of math is required, just like a minimum level of language skills.
First, Jeffs view of programming is too narrow. Secondly, and more importantly, so is his view of math.

Being "mathematically inclined" does not mean being well educated in mathematics. You don't need to be able to rigorously prove the fundamental theory of calculus to be a good programmer. Most of mathematics does not directly apply to programming but the thought processes are extremely similar. If you see someone sorting papers and try to figure out why they are doing it inefficiently, that is mathematical inclination. Its about thinking in algorithms, not mastering differential equations.

He's created the strawman that a strong mastery of mathematics is required for competent programming. That is not whats been said. A strong mathematical inclination is a way of looking at problems that programmers and mathematicians share. Its about seeing "through" problems and finding solutions. Its about reducing problems to previously solved problems (or simpler versions of themselves), etc. I can list a dozen ways in which programmers and mathematicians do similar things.

But, playing along with the strawman, real math becomes necessary in normal programming fairly often. Not 3d, Jeff, even 2d. What's the distance between a point and a line segment?
Agreed! The author obviously has not thought a lot about AI before and misses the idea of abstract models/functions as implemented by brains.

And she is wrong on the "dark, hot underbelly of Moore's law", power consumption relative to computational power has most certainly gone down in an exponential fashion.
Why do neuroscientists get so hot & bothered over the prospect of AI? It doesn't diminish the brain's complexity to think that one day we can rival it with alternate technology. There's a whiff of duality/magic animus in this line of thinking.
There are simply so many browsers and devices being used today, it is hard (impossible?) for a site, particularly a small startup, to support everything. I think its important to figure out who your target is. Do I need support on cell phone browsers? What types of interactions do I need with my users? What groups will be my "bread and butter" so to speak? If I'm selling Macintosh accessories, perhaps I don't need to support IE6.

I think you have to make some decisions about what you want to support. I really don't think complaining to your users about the browser they have chosen helps. If anything, it drives them away. I do think that no matter what you choose, you should always give your users back something. You may not be able to support all browsers, but don't return a page that simply doesn't work and leaves the user wondering why. This may be easier said than done, but I think its a good middle ground between the complexities of trying to support everything and alienating users by only supporting your "chosen path"
and more: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html

and more: http://www.google.com/romance/

and more: http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi

Isn't google taking this a bit far?
Voting by Mobile Devices Could Be Available in United States by 2012
Is it just me or has this bug been addressed after the parent comment was posted? The page (as I see it) does not require horizontal scrolling any longer.
Up-modded simply because of all things in the world you chose to seed _The Wire_. <3
SAVE IE6: IE6 needs Your help
You have a very limited imagination.
Yes, competent programmers should be 'mathematically inclined' in a general way, not because high-level math is itself necessary for most programming but because 'mathematically inclined' is a decent proxy for the ability to manipulate abstractions, which is necessary for both math and programming.
If you're interested in Finance, I suggest you read / follow Nuclear Phynance ( http://www.nuclearphynance.com ), a rather smart forum. Just make sure you don't post questions like this on NP, because those guys will eat you alive if you do.
I think that Mathematics is a much larger field than most people realize.

How can programmers not be mathematically inclined? Thinking logically about how to model and solve a system using abstract concepts. Computer science is a subset of applied mathematics.
It's April Fool's day, so I thought I'd have a bit of fun.
When Dijkstra said what he did, programmers made computers process data in an environment with a very high data/cycles ratio, and doing that efficiently has a pretty large intersection with math.

Today, there are very few environments that has a higher data/cycles ratio than anyehere in the Apollo program in the '60, and most of the "hard" problems you'll run in to on a day to day basis have been commoditized - you'll be hard pressed to find a programming language where quicksort is even marginally hard to get to. Projects like My/PostgreSQL, Lucene and so on makes fulltext searches over very large corpuses of data crazy simple, even on consumer hardware. When I did a Scientific Computing project in college three years ago, we ran out of data long before our laptop fans came on.

Math matters in computer science, but tooling is moving the "competent programmer"-demography farther and farther away from the "computer science"-demography. And that is a good thing, just like the separation of programmer and user which happened in the early 80's (I guess)

Final thought: A former boss once told me, regarding education, that he knew plenty of very good, but no really great, programmers that didn't go to college for math and/or comp.sci.
I would say that it is taking off. Now that BlazeDS is open source, there is less of a barrier to adoption.
No, a moderator must have removed the two-space indent.
I'm the only developer for a company that has created (and continues to support) some huge sites that require(d) a great amount of development. For the majority of these sites, IE6 is not falling in usage. It has hit - and stuck at - around 30%. Alienating 30% of a client's potential customers is just not an option.
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The US government actually has a long history of successfully turning around companies. Often the problems are obvious when you actually look at the numbers but management and labor are so dysfunctional they keep acting in an irrational fashion. People like to say large organizations need incredible talent at the top, but the sad truth is simple competence is hard to come by because you don't get into C level positions at billion dollar companies because of skills related to the job.
One thing that comes to mind is SQL. I've met many programmers who avoid complex SQL queries and use a "select all, then for loop" approach. Creating a complex SQL query is pure logic a ka maths.
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Ask HN : Review our first app SerialCooking
Hi everyone.

I'm working for few month now on a prototype for our application. First release went 1 week ago, and we know that it's just the beginning.

Next release ( 15 days from now) will include recipes recommender / twitter integration for recipe recommender and food blogs indexing.

I would really like to heard about what you think guys.

http://www.serialcooking.com

Cheers

Nic
CrossFire Charts: Measuring Agile in Matrixed Environments
I absolutely agree. You need to be able to look at YOUR numbers and do the math based on your company's needs. Blanketed statements do not work here.

FWIW, most people who are dropping IE6 support are doing so when it hits the 6-8% usage range.
Why Python is switching to Mercurial