skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really interesting article, well written, and all on one page.

Reminds me of this Philip Greenspun piece on early retirement: http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/

One of my favorite pieces of advice on not getting swindled I think comes from Oprah: always be the only person who can sign your checks. You'd be surprised how many people who come into sudden wealth give someone else they barely know the keys to the vault without a second thought.
Readable print version: http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis...
Interesting article, I agree with Bringsjord's position that in order for the AGI to be reliable and beneficial, one needs a sound mathematical proof to how it will operate and about its specifications. But then again, obtaining such a proof is 'probably' beyond present human abilities. Theoretically, if such a proof can be produced, one needs and some other form of AI. Now, one needs a proof to build AGI and to derive a proof one needs AGI - sounds chicken or egg type problem. But I'm sure there exists a solution.
That's an inconvenient truth that ;)
Ignoring the economic argument, I'm happy to see that there's mass-market-ish consideration of opening up the licenses.

BSD is more inline with original hacker culture (IMHO, obviously). The GPL forces you to believe what I believe to use my code. Dropping it to get rid of viral fears is a very good idea. The more use the code has, the better off we all are -- there are enough other good reasons than force for people to share changes and contributions.
Why should you invest company resource on FOSS that could be used against you? According to Joel, because the project complements your commercial product: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
I have a thermostatic mixing valve in my shower. You have two knobs: One for volume and one for temperature. That's all you need to know to use it.

The valve keeps adjusting the mixture of hot and cold water until the desired temperature is achieved. (Alas it can only achieve convex combinations.)
no. primarily looking for someone with a big vision and solid motivation to deliver on the vision.
Congress passes wide-ranging bill easing bank laws (1999)
Outbound firewall rules almost never limit the source port, 99.99% of them only limit the destination port. If party A can accept packets on port 80 then almost any client out there can connect to the service on that port. The point being made is that a lot of default firewall rules allow traffic to any port 80 destination and accept traffic from any source to the local port 80.
Shorter version: if you're not in a box, you're probably going to see more things, and if others aren't in a box, they're probably going to see more things, too, but the odds that those things will overlap goes up.

Then the things that were in the box that aren't getting the same amount of attention paid to them because people have more choice, those things get their feelings hurt, or something.

Add dubious computer model and some inscrutable graphs.
While I have never done any advertising on StumbleUpon, I will say that my experience with traffic referred from SU matches with many of the other comments here. They will generate a lot of hits but quality is low. The bounce rate is many times higher than other traffic sources and the return rate of those visitors is almost non-existant.

* As a disclaimer, I do know someone who has an upper level job there, but it's pretty clear that hasn't influenced my opinions about the service. :)
We Are Toast: Latest Malware report
Surely you aren't denying the existence of religious believers? I mean, I'm pretty sure I've met a few...
7 next steps for social networks
Thermostatic mixing valves use a thermostat to control the ratio of hot and cold water to output a selected temperature. Basically you select a desired temperature and the system attempts to provide you with it. This let's you use the shower while the hot water pipes are still heating up even though the hot water's temperature is changing.
I hope they keep focus on simplicity and usability
that proxy model thing seems complex and bugmaker to me
A month seems a bit short.

If people are going to trust their accounting to you to provide you with test users, I think you should at least provide the first 10 or 20 test clients with a free service for a year. Changing accountant is a big deal and so "one month free" is not much at all.
The one, two of product marketing
We spider using random graph walks, and it makes sure that some x users in y directions and z steps away from you are spidered. However, this was the first time we'd tried to run the engine on an "incomplete" (meaning that we don't have the whole graph) data set and there are some quirks in the recommendations. It was hard to tweak the algorithm, because until there was a bunch of data, we weren't sure what tweaks would be necessary.

The skewing happens because we first check those x and y to see if we've already got enough data before running the spider. If we happen to have already spidered heavily in one subset of your friends, then you'll see the results skewed towards those until we end up spidering the others.

The other skewing, which other works better on complete graphs is that it tries to do some weighting based on how many incoming and outgoing edges users have (friends, followers), which if your tech friends have a whole lot of friends and followers and you don't, might be part of why they'd be less highly rated.

For the moment we're not really trying to compete with Mr. Tweet (though, when I tried their recommendations they were pretty bad) and whoshouldifollow (which does pretty well) -- it was just a neat way of showing off some of our engine and applying it to a different area.
I don't think the author fully understood the purpose of most of the tools he was dabbling with – he spent a lot more time making jokes about the differences between imaginary age groups than what the tools enable you to do. He talked about CouchDB but said he couldn't think of useful things one could do with reductions outside of counting.. come on. (Plus, you don't even need reduce to count maps to a key in CouchDB.)

Kind of a fluff piece. Lots of buzzwords. I had forgotten about Persevere though, so thanks for the reminder :)
That small list of docs seems to be the key - am I scanning them or entering data from them? If I have to type in any bank info, add invoice data, add petty-cash data, etc. ... then it seems I'm better using a local solution with potentially better security?

Programs like Quickbooks produce P&L, etc., at the touch of a button. It's the information input that sucks IMO.

[I'm a small business director using SAGE Accounts (UK)]
All good ideas and things I had to fight off in one-more-thing-ism mode before we put up the beta. Those should all appear in a soon-ish update.
Two issues are interesting here:

1. The overall trend in malware variants as putting the signature based scanning mechanisms of old in risk because of the total volume.

2. Spam is getting simpler (as predicted by PG long ago).
I'd say OSX's (and Red Hat's) success bears testimony to the fact that good marketing, not good technology, is the deciding factor in market success.
Of course you can feed it that way, but the plumbing would be very convoluted - up to the shower, through the machine, and back down to the heater. The loss in water pressure would be bad, and can you imagine having two showers? The plumbing would be nuts.

I know about thermostatic mixing valves, but I'd have to break the wall of the shower, and redo all the tile. But I guess if I'm putting in this device I could do it at the same time.

But all the thermostatic mixing values I know of actually work on water pressure - so if someone turns on a faucet it automatically adjusts to keep the temperature correct.

I don't know of any that actually measure the temperature of the water, which is what is needed to help this device.

If you want to do this properly you install a heat exchanger on your main sewer stack, and then route the incoming water line through it. They do exist, this concept is not new.
Interesting conclusion that we should think about: bad guys are moving "up the stack", targeting businesses themselves rather than users.

However, the path that the Gartner article takes to get there is garbage. The graph at the top should tip you off to "lies, damned lies, and statistics": when there are no labels for the axes, what do they expect you to think?

Showing an increasing number of vulnerabilities in web apps really just shows that the number of web apps is increasing. This "revelation" doesn't necessarily show that any particular user is more vulnerable; if they're using the same set (or same number) of services, then we have no data showing an increased risk per service. And for any particular service, we don't even have any suggestion of increased exposure.

Personally, I'm relieved to see reports like "SQL injection attacks increased by 30x within the last six months". This kind of vulnerability is so trivially avoided that I'm glad to hear that the bad guys are wasting their time on it.
Aggregation support alone is worth the upgrade.
"The decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 provoked dire warnings from a handful of dissenters that the deregulation of Wall Street would someday wreak havoc on the nation's financial system. The original idea behind Glass-Steagall was that separation between bankers and brokers would reduce the potential conflicts of interest that were thought to have contributed to the speculative stock frenzy before the Depression."

Being right is tough, especially when you're not vindicated until years later (and after years of "success" by the new policies).

More:

"''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,'' Mr. Wellstone said. ''Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''

Supporters of the legislation rejected those arguments. They responded that historians and economists have concluded that the Glass-Steagall Act was not the correct response to the banking crisis because it was the failure of the Federal Reserve in carrying out monetary policy, not speculation in the stock market, that caused the collapse of 11,000 banks. If anything, the supporters said, the new law will give financial companies the ability to diversify and therefore reduce their risks. The new law, they said, will also give regulators new tools to supervise shaky institutions.

''The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown,'' said Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska."
Two hikers are running from a grizzly. One of them asks, "Do you really think we can outrun the bear?" The other says, "No, but I think I can outrun you!"
Optimizing route planning (with google maps)
www.zippermaps.com
Chrome is process-per-tab; there's architecturally almost no shared state between two different render contexts. Contrast that with Firefox, where there's a application-layer permeable membrane connecting content-driven code to browser core state.
Perhaps you should contact me off-forum for the long answer. As president of a statewide parent organization for the families of gifted children, I've had occasion to read reviews of, write reviews of, and recommend a great variety of online learning experiences for parents who want to go beyond what is offered by their local school system. My oldest son is an alumnus of distance learning courses from the Center for Talent Development (affiliated with Northwestern University, and I think a Blackboard client), Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth, and Stanford's Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY). He is now enrolled in the EPGY Online High School

http://epgy.stanford.edu/ohs/

which has been rolling out implementation of eCollege and PowerSchool for various aspects of school communication to students and parents.

Two very crucial things that the part of the market I know still has to get right is

a) building student online communities in a way that encourages emotional and social growth of the students,

and

b) adaptive placement in courses so that able learners can reach a high challenge level and master lots of new materials. Most online courses are too easy and too dumbed-down for the learners I know best.

See my profile for how to reach me for follow-up.
This is gold.

I spent a lot of time a few years back looking for something like this, and the existing solutions were just terrible. Like the author says, there just wasn't a usable dataset out there. Mostly there were a bunch of bad web APIs wanting to charge money for wildly inaccurate data.

So yeah, this might still be inaccurate, but it's a huge step forward.

Thanks!
In the upper middle classes and above, perhaps. In the working class, my personal experience is the old are just as foul mouthed as the young (although they tend to use it in the correct company, rather than everyplace). This might sound classist, but I'm working class and it's what I've experienced in any case.
I've been using it for about 9 years. If all you need is country resolution, it seems pretty much spot on, and very useful.

I haven't seen anything that is all that accurate beyond that. Most geo location (for the UK anyway), pegs people at the ISPs head quarters, rather than their actual location. Which isn't really very useful.
Microsoft vs TestDriven.Net Express
Google Wonder Wheel - Search Visualisation on Google Search Page
The Ruby and Rails communities realized this years ago. Almost all open source in those communities is MIT or BSD licensed. You can usually spot a newbie or license zealot by the use of GPL.
A "good" reddit submission is a bad article that makes the rest of your blog look iffy. 30k hits in a day, zero registration.

Seriously, if you want to make a good reddit submission, take an inflammatory/biased/extreme opinion pieces or research and quote the most provocative part of it as the title of your submission. Almost a whole paragraph.
A follow-up to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=526341
Data is encrypted... Tor is plain text which is a huge security risk as anyone running a Tor node can just sniff your traffic.
So Obama wins in counties that are diverse and/or educated and/or rich and/or urban and/or didn't like bush very much.

Shocking! :)
Steve Wozniak Joins DeepDyve Advisory Board
Not so predictably. Where did you look? Continue on to page 2 then page 3... until the page for number 1. It works for everyone else.
I've used Alex's test editor for over a year. It's great work, and I'm glad to see that he's opening it up to the community to work on.
It seemed as if the Slashdot crowd, et al, held him personally responsible for the dot com crash, coming as it did shortly after he talked about how weird it was to be rich (of course he lost it due to dropping stock prices, I think).
Google's top designer quits, blames engineers
Reminds me of this old article: http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/06/Economicchaos....

Humans learn best by quick feedback (I think Gladwell had an article about this, can't recall). In complex systems, such as economies, changes can take a long, long time to propagate. Teasing out true cause and effect is pretty much impossible. (Programming large systems can be this way too)

Given this lag time, decision makers never really learn to be experts, since there's no quick feedback.
This seems very interesting. I definitely think there's a need for competition to MaxMind's free geoip database. I registered openipdb.(org|com) a year ago with the intention of doing that but never got around to it.

Is anyone interested in taking this data and turning it into a legit open source project? Let me know and I'll donate the domain name :)

You'd have to contact the author and make sure the data has an open license, but my guess is that he's OK with it.
Interesting... The LED's that I have flicker more noticeably than a cheap florescent fixture.
I think Chrome and IE are both on track to become proved-secure. I think they are both close to being able to use automatic tools to prove that malware cannot get out of the sandbox without an operating-system exploit.

Microsoft seems to be working on a provably-secure micro-kernel for Windows. In a few years they will be able to legitamately claim that privilege escalation is literally impossible without the user's consent. That is such a big and expensive task that I'm not sure their mainstream competitors will be able to match that claim in any reasonable time frame (except maybe Symbian, because it already has a micro-kernel architecture).

After that, security on Windows will be all about UI. How can we prevent programs from tricking the user into letting them do something bad. How can we prevent programs from doing bad things without the user knowing? How can the user be sure that a program will not violate his privacy? How can the user be sure that a program won't cause data loss?
Actually, when it comes to contracts that don't involve reasonable consideration (in the contractual sense), you might have a point, despite the sarcasm. Consider EULAs. The contract of sale is independent of the EULA contract which some consider a "duress of goods."

I'd certainly be in support of not enforcing contracts that can't be broken down into simple statements that a 10 year old couldn't understand. It'd prevent a lot of the problems you see rolling around about now regarding investments people "didn't understand" and the like.
IBM-Sun Merger Talks Could Hinge on NetApp Litigation
DBMSs for Science Applications: A Possible Solution
(github.../LICENSE -> Apache 2.0 license)
My CS professor told us that before our final exam. :-)
Communications of the ACM Blog
Ask HN: Unit testing a ZF MVC application
I have almost finished an application I have been writing in PHP with ZF and now need to give it a full test suite. Does anyone have any advice for fully testing a web app that uses MVC? In particular how to set up different tests for each model, view and controller.
The iPhone 3.0 SDK has a wonderful new NDA.
Protein Stiffness And Scaling Laws
Made me think of the giant retrospective Vanity Fair article on David Foster Wallace, his next unfinished book was about IRS workers reaching transcendence through boredom:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_...
another great quote . . he even got the timing right

''I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010,'' said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. ''I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.''

besides the s&l crisis, the long term capital blowup seems to be another good comp in hindsight.
I was trying to find a free SQL database of IP geolocation with country, city, region, latitude and longitude for a project but none was accurate and up to date so I decided to create my own and now I offer it for free.

He makes it sound as though this isn't particularly difficult or expensive. Does anyone want to speculate on the method he is using to compile this data? For his zipcode database he seems to be running mass queries on the Google Maps API.

Simply doing mass WHOIS queries to the regional registrars only gets you data about the corporate headquarters of the ISPs, which I suppose could be enough depending on the level of granularity that is acceptable to you.

(presently a similar question on his forum, posted by someone else, is unanswered: http://blogama.org/node/105)
Holy crap - this is the most succinct explanation I've seen of the economic crisis:

"The opponents of the measure gloomily predicted that by unshackling banks and enabling them to move more freely into new kinds of financial activities, the new law could lead to an economic crisis down the road when the marketplace is no longer growing briskly."
Even when demand was high, GM was unable to run a profitable business. Same can be said for Chrysler and to a much lesser extent Ford.

The economy tanking was more or less the straw that broke GM's back completely.
I think that the first is a closed, proprietary product based mainly on BSD-style code and the other are services centered around the evolution of a free GPL-like product that remains free speaks for itself.
Startups and enterprises that use RoR are themselves an important potential market for 37signals. Likewise, enterprise shops using Eclipse are a big potential market for IBM's consulting business as well as their hardware.
Good point. Changing accountants is a big deal. In fact, one of the goals of this potential startup is to make it a much smaller deal. Nonetheless, we're not necessarily looking for someone to change their accountant with this exercise. What we want to do is test our process with some startups, and in return, we'll provide them with a new (and hopefully valuable) perspective on their finances.

That being said, we're open to any ideas, and when we speak with the startups we might be doing this for, we'd be happy to discuss any possible arrangements in terms of duration, etc.
What does that explain? Does anyone actually claim that the main cause of the current crisis is that the same bank can make a loan or underwrite one?
Last.fm Radio will soon require a subscription
Basic Tax Law That Every Start-Up Must Know: the 83b Election
I tried adwords, Facebook Ads, and stumbleupon for http://www.reviews-web-hosting.com/

Adword: $0.90 per visitor in average
Facebook Ad: $0.45 per visitor
Stumbleupon: $0.05 ($25 for 500 users)

I haven't see much difference in behavior from these 3 origins, but that may be because nobody spends much time on the website :-(
Yes, the small list of docs is the key. We're asking for statements, etc., not data entry on your part.
In case you want to let SI make a few cents for your time, here's the article on their site: http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazin...
If you can sell the house. In a down market, you might lose money, or like the article says: get stuck in a bad local job market.

The potential payoff from selling your home isn't "security", its counting your chickens before they've hatched.
People are complaining that this was a destabilizing bill. And yet, the current crisis is largely due to stabilizers: Fannie and Freddie manipulated mortgage prices to make them trade like treasuries, leading to artificial stability; AIG sold CDSs as part of a regulatory arbitrage, leading to a collapse later on; depositors didn't have any reason to care whether their bank was lending to someone who put 50% down on a first home or 0% down on a no-doc third home -- whatever happened, the FDIC would take care of it!

It is impossible to imagine an alternative history in which a lack of ostensibly stabilizing regulations led to a larger crisis. These rules will tend to reduce the chance of a small disaster, and amplify the effects of a massive one. Thanks to Fannie and Freddie, housing prices couldn't drop 5% in a year -- they could rise 10%, or they could drop by 20%.
That's great to know!