skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is actually a lot more common than you would think. I knew a oil prospector that 'struck it rich' but had his line of credit called on him by the Bank of Montreal because they didn't think he could handle setting up that many oil rigs at once. Nearly drove the guy out of business. He ended up suing them (he was successful in an out of court settlement and ONLY because BMO called it within 30 days instead of the 60 days specified in his contract) and to this day refuses to sign any agreement with any financial institution without his lawyer rewriting everything.
The site automatically autodeletes them, but the banned user can still see it.

It's a little obvious once he's troll'ed you though. Instead of the banhammer, there's a programmatic 25sec delay to load any page on HN.

Pretty sure it's done by the admin by hand, too. PH33R!!1
Check out browsershots - http://browsershots.org/ . I think you can submit a job to check how a page renders on a specific OS-browser combination. Otherwise you can download and check it out - it's open source.
Gödel might have said something about the possibility of a universal inference engine.

Like TrueKnowledge and the Freebase answers in Powerset, this system will likely be good at answering a small subset of very direct questions. Having access to Mathematica's symbolic solver algorithms would definitely help in building this system.

If it's successful it will either be faster than current inference engines, or capable of solving more complex queries. Or perhaps both. We'll see.
Enzyme behind cancer spread found
might using a berkdb (as suggested) make more sense for your case? it can be devilish tricky getting these things to work right.
You create secure temp files with mkstemp(). It's built into the standard C library.

Mad respect to Ts'o, but most Unix apps --- regardless of what he thinks of the developers --- don't do this fsync dance. There isn't an epidemic of corrupted files because of it. And there have been notable cases where syncing has caused calamitous performance problems; for instance, look up what the Apple developers did to sqlite.
I have set up and run both slony and mammoth-replicator in production. It is not a trivial task.

The big problem I've encountered is that the database to be replicated must have defined primary keys. Far too few developers understand what is meant by referential integrity.
Actually the article briefly mention that job postings are down 25% in the "American Mathematical Association's" (would that be the AMS?) "main job board" (would that be mathjobs.org?). I agree that the article is heavily slanted to the humanities though.
Maybe they are all mostly OK. Personally I would look for Linux support.
Exactly my feeling while reading this. Who cares? Not Nintendo. They didn't set out to build a platform that would please console geeks. They did the opposite. They set out to build a console that everyone else would love and buy, and which would make a solid profit for Nintendo. And they succeeded, big time.

Turns out nobody but console geeks cares about the architecture. And at a couple of hundred quid a pop, I'm sure most Wii owners will be more than willing to upgrade to a new version when the hardware is upgraded. They're not upgrading a small computer, they're upgrading a console.

PS3/XBox, on the other hand, have take the road of literally building a whole, powerful computer in a box. The market has shown that this is a less successful way to build consoles - whatever console geeks may have to say about it.
I love this thing. I'm a designer and I always use Photoshop for these kinds of things, but this is so much quicker and nicer to use...
It is a great database, but replication is lacking. Slony-I is the best of the bunch currently, but it works by using triggers, requires you to set it up for every table and key, scales quadratically, and just generally has a lot of overhead (when compared to MySQL's replication). Mammoth Replicator is the most interesting project to me since it operates a lot more like MySQL's replication in that it works off log shipping. Currently they only have a beta for download off their site (https://projects.commandprompt.com/public/replicator), but I'm hopeful for it.

Replication is a really hard problem to solve given all the little inconsistencies that can creep in, but it's one of those areas that's holding PostgreSQL back most. Hot failover and scalable read-only replicants are a big selling point for MySQL. I really hope that PostgreSQL nails this area in 2010 because it's query planner is much better at handling complex queries (really, even something as simple as a sub-query).

But you're right, it it annoying that PostgreSQL doesn't have a nicer replication option.

EDIT: If performance isn't your biggest concern and you don't mind a highly tedious setup, Slony-I is reliable. However, it's not suitable for larger clusters of machines since communication costs grow quadratically.
The first application I went to fix is in PHP, there does not seem to be an fsync() call in PHP. I may not succeed this afternoon.
I don't think you get it. If you could guess a user's password, why would you bother with this elaborate CSRF attack?
Wanted: Backend Developer
Any Backend Developers out there looking for a challenging project.

We are a flex team looking for a backend developer to help us architect and develop the solution.

We are open in terms of technology, just looking for someone that is passionate and creative.

We can work out the $ as a fixed bid and then hopefully morph into a more formal relationship.

Contact me at my username at gmail.com
A big part of the software development (like sdks and so on) of nintendo is farmed out to Intelligent Systems that is a not so big company in Kyoto (a bit over an 100 person) and the working environment is quite nice according to a friend I had there so I don't think that it's a problem of not being an attractive place to work.

Instead of it being a design feature, I think it's more a problem of not having anyone with the required knowledge to make good decision at the top. That said, nintendo as at least a few times listened and promoted people who were at the bottom of the corporate ladder like Yokoi Gunpei so Nintendo might be more flexible than typical japanese companies (like panasonic or sharp...)

As for the level of japanese programmers:
I have worked in european companies and in japanese companies and there is no comparison between the japanese programmers there and the european programmers I met in the european companies. The Japanese programmers were much worse... In a company I worked in (a big company that is also well known outside of japan) my coworkers who were developing software didn't know what object oriented programming was. Their java code was basically C code made in java with static methods everywhere...

Now I've only worked in two companies in japan and worked with altogether about 40 programmers and so maybe it's just me being unlucky but the level really was appalling.
Serious question--how does the struggling global economy factor into all of this? I'd think it would, at the very least, postpone a technological singularity.
There are plenty of direct ways to grind GMail passwords. I don't see what difference this silly attack makes.
Patrick - you're insightful and helpful and inspiring. Thanks mate.
This all became a moot point when Google supported POP and IMAP, didn't it?
The singularity prediction relies on a trend of technological advances that is ever increasing. The only thing it forgets is that resources are not infinite. Hey, bacteria on a plate grow exponentially, but eventually they run out of resources and just die.
How are we going to educate the AIs?

Hopefully not at our existing schools, which would bore them to tears.
"Buying a printer remains the last confusing part of modern computing."

Graphics cards are just as bad. RAM can be tricky with all the different types and price points. And how are you supposed to compare between the different CPUs with different numbers of cores, processor speeds, L2 Caches, bus speeds . . .

Everything about buying a computer is complicated for the uninitiated. Even hard drives, which should be a matter of picking the biggest one, have different speeds to complicate matters.

Of course, once you've bought a few printers it will all make perfect sense and you'll forget that it seemed confusing.
> if some aspects of personality can, on average, be discerned from facial appearances

Testosterone and estrogen levels are quite apparent in facial structure. People with male jaw lines and brows are more assertive.
Indeed, why hype a product that is so insanely great the news will spread practically by itself? I expect a product to be worthless if its hype goes beyond a certain treshold.
Printing needs the equivalent of the ipod or flip video camera: something that was redesigned to do the most common stuff really well and is dead simple easy to use
Let's not get too excited here. Generally, stuff that's hyped up before it launches tends to suck.

Was Twitter hyped up like this before it launched? Facebook? Google? Microsoft? Apple? TechCrunch? Hacker News? Wikipedia? Heck, pretty much ANYTHING that's successful now? (Even small stuff like Balsamiq that's currently very successful in a small way wasn't hyped before it launched).

Now think of stuff that was hyped massively before launch. Cuil. Powerset. Yeah.

Stuff that ultimately becomes super successful becomes successful over quite a long period of time and due to the excitement of users after launch - not the bleatings of gurus before launch.
Possibly. The ability to view/tweak the file in a text editor is something I find very convenient, but it's less important than consistency.
I would think that as long as you're not distributing the font file you should be fine. If you want to be safe, go for fonts that are distributed free, and provide credit somewhere on the site.

If you stick to free or standard fonts, I think the worst that happens is that you have to take them down, especially since you're not charging for use.

And whatever you do, don't use comic sans (http://bancomicsans.com/home.html).
2005-06 at Odeo.
The Internet Archive was served a National Security Letter by the FBI demanding information about a patron of the Archive. The Archive fought it with the help of the EFF and ACLU.

We won.

We can now talk about it, and what it is like to get a secret demand. We hope that this will be useful for the others that will receive these powerful demands.

http://www.archive.org/details/National-Security-Letter-Vide...
Heart Attack Risk and Daylight Savings Linked
Your statement is a tautology.

A domain that doesn't have a mathematical model would not be describable by a formal system.

And likewise, any domain describable by a formal system would have a mathematical model.
"[Kurzweil] says computers will have human consciousness in 25 years."

Wait is this one of those 1980s AI-in-25-years predictions or is this a new 2009 We're Really Serious This Time, Guys prediction?
For all the noise about replication, the reality is that buying a server with a) lots of RAM b) dual power supplies, each going to a separate UPS or power feed c) dual or quad CPUs will get you 95% of the way there.

If you really care, get an external storage solution and buy two identical servers; then you can switch the storage over to the working machine if the first one fails.

So many people I know have sites that do not require fancy-pants replication - if they just shelled out the $20K for a big 128GB RAM system and learned how to do decent backups they would save on hosting charges and have a site that is just as reliable.
If all Wolfram will be spitting back is an answer, I'm wondering how the user will determine the answer's correctness. Will there be a "proof" of some sort, or a list of references for the underlying facts and assumptions. With information found via Google, at the very least you'll be able to assess the reliability of the author/source (random message board v. NYTimes article) - not saying this is perfect, but a good measure.
The really big thing to look at is ink prices and ink capacity. Some printers have cheap ink made by third parties that lasts forever. Some printers have expensive ink only made by the company that only lasts 100 pages.

That's really the only thing that I research when buying a printer.
Maybe the universe is a closed system, but reaching the "Singularity" before we reach maximum entropy is probably more likely.
> As expected, the NTT Open Source team working on Synch Standby ran into some unexpected issues

Is that sort of like a known unknown? Or an unknown known?
"God is who he is, and our challenge should be to know Him, not try to create Him."

That's the tough thing. Maybe the only way to know God is to become God, at which point we just take it all for granted, like any other technology we integrate into our lives.
"Gibberish" - why? Many of the commercially used products that deal with representation of natural language use naive bayesian inference or statistical classification to return results.

Further, one of the promising approaches in this area involves using generative grammars (or other generative, non-parametric approaches) to approximate natural language representations.

Both these approaches 'compute' answers without a notion of natural language grammars that are usually associated with natural language processing.
Never gonna happen. As GvR said, 'with' already means something completely different.

Besides, it's not the Python style to have function calls without the () syntax.

I think you could do something interesting with decorators, though.
The Linux Foundation buys Linux.com from SourceForge
Maybe this is kind of the point you were making, but I think it's very likely that Ev wasn't trying to claim he "lacked focus" during the Odeo epoch, with or without false humility. It sounded like he was contrasting the more recent part of his career with the earlier period in which he lacked focus, discipline, and people skills.

I first met him in 2001, at Blogger's low point, so I don't know what he was like four years earlier.
The Importance of the Facebook Redesign
I'll add another tautology to counteract your argument: isn't it true that any domain that can be described by a formal system is essentially equivalent to mathematics?

Which brings us back to the original point: human stuff is not very math-friendly. I want to deal with emotions, politics, etc.

Think Bush and torture: can this system give me any definitive answers?
Big Music Will Surrender, But Not Until At Least 2011
A Conservative Pundit Turns 14
Wolfram Alpha Computes Answers To Factual Questions. This Is Going To Be Big.
Brewster's an incredibly nice guy. I emailed the Internet Archive about a piece of OCR software I've developed, and, even though I just emailed their generic contact, Brewster got in touch (email in lowercase!) and said "Can you scan the numbers in index pages".

I didn't really manage it, but I was amazed he replied in person.
Google 2+2

Not to be a dickhead, I know what you mean.

Questions that involve some kind of processing power can be a good target for Wolfram, but then, how much marketable besides academia?

The answer to the population of X country/city/town = wikipedia, plus more facts you may be interested while doing your research paper.

Maybe I just need 10 different questions/implementations of such service to get it.
normal computer users don't buy graphics cards or care about cpu l2 caches. they buy things like laptops and imacs that just work and they never upgrade them or take them apart.

unless you're an avid gamer, graphics designer, or building your own pc, i don't know why anyone would even care what kind of graphics card their computer has.
not mentioned in the original post is that the change password field also gives you the option of entering the answer to your 'secret question' rather than your password as the second token.

you replace the password query params with:

&group1=IdentityAnswer&IdentityAnswer=ANSWER_GUESS

not as improbable to guess since Google do not enforce a standard on the secret question answer (ie. with 'place you were born' you could just list major cities and probably get a hit every so often)

if you had access to a high traffic site (thank-you wordpress hax) you would probably harvest a number of accounts using this in an IFRAME pretty quickly. you just need to add some javascript to somehow inform you which ones were a success.
This would work brilliantly as a weekly digest for someone who's been to busy to catch up. It really gives the feeling of watching ideas enter and exit the collective conciousness.

Plus, its lovely and relaxing to watch.
i found it ironic that jason ended the article asking for suggestions, and there are now as many suggestions for different models as there were on the page he took a screenshot of.
It is reportedly very effective in the short term; immediate small changes in behavior. But, I don't think you'd want to go down that rabbit hole too deeply...there are a couple of definitive works on the topic, and everything else (including the original authors own later work and seminars) seem to be targeting the "fool and his money" target audience for self help type seminars, just rehashing the ideas in the context of business or picking up women.

Beyond NLP there are other areas of study that are less mumbo jumbo and more hard science. Influence is a great book on the subject of...well, influencing people. Why people do and buy the things they do, and how things like the Apple fanboy phenomenon (not explicitly in the context of Apple, just an example I know everyone here will recognize), and other types of extreme brand loyalty, happens.
I've taken ~6 months off every year since 2001. Given our progressive tax system it's a no-brainer. I keep a much higher percentage of my income than I would if I worked constantly and then retired. Working in high-technology it's been no problem picking up contract work when I return. Companies are grateful to have me as I produce more per-hour than those who've been burnt out for years with no break.

Do you really want to wait until you are decrepit before you 'retire' and have free time? - For many of you a heart attack or cancer will get you first... I rather whoop it up now and spend my elderly and decrepit years as a Walmart greeter.

-- Greg
What math department?

I was in math grad school for a year at UW-Madison.
Thanks this is the kind of feedback I'm interested in - the value of NLP as well as suggestions on related concepts.
he may be bitter because when hired he took the choice of a bigger salary and the corner office in lieu of stock options
Maybe for some use cases but most people on this site are concerned about scaling web sites where scaling up (which is what you suggest) isn't feasible because of the obvious cap to the approach and the fact that you can't even add your own hardware to cloud/virtual hosting which is quickly becoming the norm.

In general, every problem that can be solved in software should be solved in software.

Postgres can be the second coming of jesus but it's still utterly infeasible for high traffic web applications because of the replication issue. Even the current hacks that add replication will not work because they cannot deal with schema changes without downtime. At Shopify we add an average of 12 columns and 2 tables to the database every month and we had a grand total of 58 minutes of downtime in 2008.
This story may relate to the following article: http://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/retrieve/pii/S15356108080037...

Sadly it isn't freely available.
I used the word "schooling" instead of "education" intentionally, as I was speaking more about institutionalized, credential-backed education.

College used to open doors. Now it's essentially mandatory if you want even the right to apply for a decent white-collar job, and doesn't guarantee anything, because far too many people are going and there are too few good entry-level jobs out there.

The only way to save college is to cut it back to the status of something that's available to an elite 5-10%-- and I (along with most of us) would obviously prefer that this "elite" be chosen based purely on talent and not on means or family connections.

However, my point on the "idea [...] that schooling opens doors and improves one's life" was not that this idea is false. On the contrary, it's true of grade school, high school, and college. It's an idea that is dangerous on account of being true for a long time, then failing abruptly and catastrophically. (These are the sorts of ideas that form bubbles, e.g. tulip bulbs/tech stocks/houses are sure, good investments.)

With humanities PhD programs, the connection between education and social mobility semi-silently ceases to be true at that level, and there are a lot of students who aren't aware of the switch that has taken place until it's too late to turn back.
I like this! Great job. I'd include a small gallery of many great examples on the front page, and as soon as you click an example, it prepop's the settings. You've already got this feature, but it starts from another page. You could keep prepopulating this gallery with buttons that others are creating. :) Again, this is awesome and useful! And the button quality looks pretty good.
couple other things -- the layout looks a little weird on firefox on mac, and you definitely need color pickers (as I'm sure others have mentioned as well). ;)
MComet.com - Upcoming Movies, Movie Trailers and Reviews, Celebrity Photos and News
1. More fonts. Lacuna is a first one that comes to my mind as a perfect free font for this kind of things.

2. Highlight curve should be more like sine wave, It looks really boring when it is like a bottom of ellipse -- a part of a sine curve would be a better approximation of real-world shinies.
The solution to the colour printer problem is not to buy a printer. I've probably spent as much time trying to get home colour printing to work well as I have re-installing windows. These days neither thing (colour printer or windows pc) exists in my life. Use a cheap laser for black & white and when you need a colour print send it to the copy shop/bureau.
This is pretty nice. I would like to see:

1. More Fonts
2. A color picker
I think that's where the "restricted to domains where everyone agrees that there is a factual answer" comes in. (I'd like to have a system answer me if I really violated any traffic laws when I got a ticket last week, but I don't think that's going to be very easy...)
usually associated

I've definitely read papers about using those methods you describe on processing text. They are all just algorithms attacking a problems, so the distinction between NLP and computing is gibberish.
Numenta makes software that is used in (prototype) missile systems. The vision systems in missiles and aeronautics generally are awesome. They are much closer to practical, deployable software than this sounds.
one big advantage of js/canvas/image based charting as opposed to flash based is that all of the former work on the iphone. chartwidget was running on the iphone a month after it was released, more than a year before the app store was released. Flash based charting still can't do that.
Absolutely Genius! I've never wanted to pay for something more in my life. Why not use the ycombinator startup tipjoy? (http://tipjoy.com)
"If they ever want to have a “hypervisor” run above games, they’ll need to get a new CPU with full-blown virtualization capability (or an emulator), because games assume they have direct access to the CPU and most of the hardware."

Near-tautology -- the author described the two methods of virtualization he's aware of.
The Neokast Mystery
TrueKnowledge has been doing this for a while now... And they do it well. Did it change the world? No. I call BS on this article.
That's a good idea, but when I bought a laser printer (a Brother) last year, I was disappointed with its quality. (Seemed dim and/or pixelated.) Any recommendations for a reasonable laser?
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