skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perphaps I'm misreading you, but isn't that directly against the main gist of the article. Historical events happened in a certain manner, there is no probability involved. It's all 1.

Presented with partially unknowns about historical events one can use different approaches to decide how to proceed, but when talking about law, most things revolve specifically not about what's probable, but what actually happened. There is no "probable". Isn't that the main point of the article?

It's quite easy, from a law perspective, to decide what to do when no sure about what actually happened: let the accused go.

For most of us, though, this is not the type of answer we're after, and that's one of the things the article is trying to make us understand: our perspectives are different.

Neither perspective is inherently inferiour.
The direct ways of guessing the password run into rate limiting -- it starts prompting for a CAPTCHA after X failed guesses. That's all this attack avoids.
Acai Berry Zone, manufacturer of Acai Berry products
Acai berry has been used by the Amazons of Brazil for generations, but was recently introduced world wide, mainly as a health supplement but also as a weight loss enhancer. These articles discuss Acai berry and diabetes. It is also help us to reduce the body weight.
Nice book on convex optimization techniques
Hey all, here's a nice text on the theory and algorithmics of solving problems which can be described as max/minimizing some function subject to some feasibility constraints
http://www.pgadmin.org/docs/1.4/slony/slonylistenercosts.htm...
It's surprisingly hard to make buttons that look bad with this. I had to work hard to pervert it to make a 1997-style monstrosity. Good work on making pleasant design the default.
That's pretty shocking. What school?
I don't think one can generalize much here because your initial attitude or frame will determine your success with said techniques. That may also be one reason why you don't get consistent lab results but still see it clearly working for some people. I think of such schemes as placebo-type, and not at all in a bad sense. Even if a "real scientist" came along and somehow proved it all to be mumbo jumbo, someone who responds well to the material could still profit from it. Why not just go over to some torrent site and sample a few of their offerings. Alternatively, book store, library (physical),...
A lot of the reason people take a long time in humanities PhD programs is that they wait in grad school till a job opens up.
We arent even close to understanding the genome. Genes encode proteins. There is pretty good evidence that the "junk dna" is functional in some way, just not directly encoding proteins. I dont junk dna has been decoded at all. Also we have very limited understanding of traits that are encoded by multiple genes.

I am in favor of curing diseases by genetic modification, but I am reluctant about further tampering, especially at this state of our knowledge.
Hmm, maybe we have a business model here. I could easily enough make such spams not appear to users with over some threshold of karma, which the spammers presumably wouldn't have. Can you point me to the page with the offer?
Is it possible to understand what a gene/junk dna does by observation? If so, perhaps it can be rewritten from scratch without understanding its implementation.

Understanding implementation that is a product of evolution is extremely hard. It's a real mess.
Well written, unalone. Any thoughts on what the next iteration will be? (beyond "lifestreaming")?

I understand I'm asking for a purely hypothetical prediction.
Design Patterns In Ruby, Explained
On the other hand, Mathematica is pretty cool. Wolfram is a clever guy with a lot of money. That's worth something.
See

http://www.broad.mit.edu/~mokelly/other/hn.avi [mp4 format]

Half-speed, with PST day-night cycle (6am-6pm). Printed timestamps are still EST, as in the original.
I don't understand why naming a function is such a problem? You can even do it in the local scope and prefix it _ if you want to.
Let me compare you to http://www.mycoolbutton.com/ which is what I used a few weeks ago when I needed a pretty image button.

What I like better there:

* Their button has a really sharp glossy look. Yours are nice, but not as nice (that I noticed, at least).

* They have more fonts than you do.

What I like better about yours:

* Lots more control over most of the details. Notably, the custom color gradients.

* The showcase of editable examples. Very nice.

* Less clutter on the page. Though I certainly would not blame you if you put up ads or a tip-me button.

Although I think your extensive options are good, it's sort of a power-user interface. You might consider a simpler interface for visitors who want something very quick and easy. Or, you could expand your gallery of examples, perhaps even add a sidebar of examples to the front page.

All in all, very well done. Congratulations and thank you.
Angelsoft Lets Startups Find Funding Through New Investor Filtering Tool
The challenges are legal in nature, and have a lot to do with the political strength of banks in the US. Technically there are a lot of companies that could provide banking services tomorrow, PayPal is one of them.

Given the current economic climate, and the recent criminal incompetence of the banking industry, now may be the time for alternatives to step up to the plate. It'd be pretty dangerous, even with banks on the ropes, to go up against them, though. I'd be shocked if even a PayPal or Google or Amazon could actually pull it off, though all seem to have aspirations and current products that bump up against bank services.
The Technium: Collapsitarians
I'll be interested to see how well this redesign is received by Facebook's users. Their last redesign was--from what I heard among the Facebook users I know--not terribly appreciated. Hopefully this added functionality garners more than a collective groan because it's definitely important for Facebook to continue innovating and staying ahead of or at least keeping up with competitors.
Oh, I agree with that. But I think the perception of (mock) organization it provides and its visual similarity to graph paper is what draws people to it. The power of spreadsheets are in the computations, and of course people use it for that, but I bet there are just as many spreadsheets that contain entirely static content as there exist spreadsheets that actually use spreadsheets as more than just a glorified grid formatting engine. I've seen people do calculations with desk calculators and then type the results into their spreadsheets. It does let non-programmers define their own computations, but I wouldn't call what non-programmers do with it to be programming, "computation for non-programmers", most definitely. I believe this may come down to how the both of us define programming, however.

Interesting contrast, though, is the relative avoidance of accounting ledgers, which spreadsheets are a closer cousin to than they are to graph paper.
Even if it worked as advertised, what fraction of your search queries is of the factual type that this system would be able to answer?
The VC Apocalypse: Careful with Your Time
Our "plate" is probably not all of the known universe. We may never leave this solar system.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned pornography. Low production costs, varied format, and internet delivery. This displacement of TV shows has already been proven as a successful business model.
One small criticism -- the 'Create' button is not immediately obvious, especially since it's up in the navigation section. Maybe make clicking the button do the same action and place the Create button more prominently by the options.
Tobi, that's good to know... I'm assuming you're running MySQL then?
Ruby style blocks would have made the with_statement (and a bunch of other stuff) obsolete. In fact most stuff can be implemented from blocks (like decorators and generators) and not the other way around.
I'm pretty sure they cut off POP/IMAP access on too many failed attempts and you have to go to the website.
Go Retro, Convert Any Image to ASCII Art
Users complain every time, and they tend to always feel nostalgia for a year and a half ago. You can follow the Facebook redesigns from the various groups Facebook set up, and it tends to be that they miss the one that's two editions old.

Right now Facebook's in a position where they don't have to change in order to stay up top. Their design is pretty tight - tighter than any other site - and they've got enough of a monopoly that people don't feel the need to switch over. Their real competition comes from mobile sites like Loopt, and those are still a pretty slim set of the market right now.

Part of me thinks they're innovating just to appeal to product sales. Another part of me thinks that some of the people up top at Facebook are innovating because they really think they're breaking ground. I'd bet it's a mix of the two.
I don't think it matters at all what the vocal minority of users think about the redesign. Sure they made a big stink about the last design, just as they did with newsfeed, and when Facebook opened to non-college-students. However vocal they were, the numbers of users that actually quit Facebook over those issues paled in comparison to the amount of growth they saw—much of it as a result of the changes. The proof is in the numbers.
I think if you compare the cost of getting a dual power supply server, to the cost of getting two servers, you will conclude that buying two servers gives you more reliability per dollar.

I have come to the same conclusion even with regards to RAID. After using linux software RAID and occansionally the expensive 3Ware cards for years, I have decided that the cost and complecation of the RAID system inself also needs to be accounted for. Sometimes there is downtime directly attributable to the RAID scheme.

What I would like to be able to do, is set up two linux servers, such that any change to the file system on one would be writen to the other. This can be done with inotify and rsync, but I suspect that it would be hard to configure rsync to both have a low enough load on a heavily used database machine and also "keep up" enough that the slave system has a consistent snapshot.

It would be nice if there were some block-level way of doing this, so that I could have the slave system just be running the OS without the DB server started, and on the master every change that happened to the database data area would be quickly synced on a block level with the slave. This would remove the database software from the replicaton issue, replication would be handled on a filesystem or directory level, and the database would just have to be configured to sync to disk within a reasonable amount of time.
And how many companies we know have scored funding by paying these people?
Too bad no medical studies support the idea that taking vitamins improves health: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/news-keeps-getting-...
The only thing I can think of is they'll move towards mobile: taking advantage of GPS and making a more localized service for finding people.

Facebook's one of the few sites I've never predicted correctly. That last change was unexpected - I didn't expect they'd decentralize the profile pages that much. A part of me still hopes they'll tie Pages into the user's profile page more - "Books" taking you to communities created for each specific book - and I think that would be a good method for them to bring more content holders into the fray, but for whatever reason, I doubt that will actually happen.

The process tends to be that a site will unify its design, then break it up more. Facebook is unifying everything right now. The next step would be to find new niches to break the site down into, so they can bring a new fresh feel to the site. Considering they've all-but-abandoned the "base it on colleges" design, and now they're moving towards more commercial things, I'm wondering if they'll begin shifting it back again with a new emphasis on networks. I wouldn't bet either way, though: my track record is pretty bad for Facebook guesses.
If I find a Yo La Tengo CD on the rack at Wal-Mart, I'm unlikely to boycott them for that, either.
PopBox Javascript image manipulator
I think he got it, and thinks it's very stupid to submit a story that's already been on Hacker News with a title that manages at once to both make something look overblown, and to make a stupid lame joke that's below the standards of this site.

Perhaps I have no sense of humor either.
I dont think its completely fair to compare the wii and the other consoles. They both have different customer bases who value different things, although there is some overlap.

I've got a wii and an xbox and havnt bought a new game for my wii since I purchased it. Wii sports, and wii play, which come with the hardware have been enough to fill my gimicky urges. So while it outsells on hardware, I'd hypothesise that it doesn't do so well on games sales, if I'm representative.

The content, and services (xbox live) on the other consoles far outweighs anything the wii has offered me.

I know the wii has sold a lot of hardware and has been a success reaching the masses, but I think for a substantial number of people, it doesn't offer anything with real depth. Thats not to say I don't enjoy it, but if all that was available to me was a Wii, I would feel disapointed with this generation of hardware. Most of all I'd miss playing in HD (wii looks terrible on my tele), and xbox live. Theres also been a number of fantastic games that simply wouldn't have been possible on the wii.
I see the distinction, but I think the review is light on content, so the criticism is fair. Why, pray tell, do we need to be hyped about a great new piece of software?

If it even close to real, the results will certainly speak for themselves. And the results might even be really awesome! I just would advise people to not pay attention until they see them.
Anything we do daily will "rewire our brains" ... unfortunately, nothing practical can be done with these results, and scientists still really don't know how to interpret them. So, I believe that fMRI studies such as this one really only serve as curios ...
How to stop the drug wars
Blackmail, really? What were the terms of the blackmail?

I'm not saying the 140 char post is super clear. Part of the problem with twitter is an inability to increase the bandwidth of the conversation in-line.
"Ruby does it this way and people like it" isn't an argument that will work. You can accomplish the same things in Python with an extra line of overhead.

If you want to get this past python-dev you'll need to explain the benefits, here's a start:

1) Lower cognitive load: Users can understand blocks but the extra naming/reference is one too many things for their brain stack to handle.

2) More descriptive: with blocks the first line says "I'm about to define a function for use with X" instead of the existing way which says "I'm defining a function. Now I'm using that function with X."

3) Show me: take a chunk of an existing project (stdlib is best) and rewrite it with the proposed block syntax. You get to cherry pick the example so if the new version doesn't read much cleaner than the old version maybe the idea isn't so hot.

I'm -1 on the idea but if you want to change my mind you have to make an argument that doesn't start with "In Ruby..."
Have You Ever Failed?
I want to believe you, but the fact that you signed up just to leave this comment anonymously doesn't do much to alleviate my skepticism.
> "metastasis ... is known to be responsible for 90% of cancer-related deaths."

It's important not to misinterpret that fact and conclude that preventing metastasis will reduce cancer deaths by 90%.
We actually launched Shopify beta on Postgres. One of the last things we setup before launch (literally 2 days before) was replication.

This was foolish by us but there was a lot on our plates back in the day. We spent the entire weekend setting up every different replication solution for postgres and in the end I just had to make a judgement call and went to mysql.

Luckily we used rails which is pretty agnostic and we have a huge unit test coverage so we could quickly get it ported. We converted the data and launched on MySQL and have been very happy with it ever since.

In fact this was a good decision for other reasons as well: the MySQL query cache saved us from having to seriously look at caching for a crucial 3-4 months which we could spend on more important things.

On a personal note, i like Postgres much better if it weren't for those issues.
A similar feature was already proposed and rejected: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0340/

Anyway, I'm kind of sad that people seem to want a straight copy of Ruby's blocks. I'd prefer syntax that allowed passing more than one block to a function, like the C-like syntax I proposed here:
http://www.hackerdashery.com/2006/10/code-blocks-and-c-like-...
VC Meetings
Thanks for all of the great tips everyone. Should keep us busy :). Looking forward to meeting some of you at some of the events.
Test it IE6 and IE7 on the same machine: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/11/30/ie6-and-ie7-runn...

Yes, it's a pain b/c you have to run a VM, but it's the most reliable way of testing IE. Other "shortcuts" won't perfectly emulate IE7 in an IE6 environ, or vice versa.
Concerts. Merchandise. Tipjoy.
Jim Cramer on how he manipulated the stock market
Grumpy home-brewers care.
The article claims that in a few years, recorded music will be free. Unless you plan on paying for free music (which seems difficult,) you will support artists by going to their shows, buying their merch, etc.
How the US forgot how to make Trident missiles
6000 years ago our DNA was almost certainly incredibly different to what it is today (whether you believe God created it or not). A drastic change like that would basically be akin to evolving 6000 years in the space of just a few :)
(Ive lost my link to the research done into our genetics that shows we did not all come from 2 common ancestors but I know some was done somewhere)

Mastering the genome has long been my marker for true mastery of our race. But (and this is directed at the OP) I wouldnt like to seeanyone overly mess with it. We'd have to be damned certain we knew it inside out before tampering with it that heavily.

On the other hand they are tampering with genes in mice etc. to try and cure diseases (and Folding@Home is investing a LOT of time modelling protein creation to help move things along :)).
Are you going to South by Southwest (SXSW) ?
This will be my first year. I'm quite excited to go. Are you going? Have you been before? Anything to say about it?
This comparison misses something key, the Wii's innovation wasn't aimed in this direction. The Wii completely broke the mold in a number of other, apparently (by its sales), more significant ways.

I can fully appreciate not building an architecture which would allow this kind of updates because they were focusing in a different direction. When the Wii was released internet console gaming wasn't what it is now. If they weren't designing for that as a priority I can see how they got where they are.

As other people have said the Wii's success is something they can build on for the next version. I imagine that Nintendo will produce something that extends the best bits of the Wii but also integrate an internet experience that has proven to be successful on the Xbox 360.
"no medical studies"? That seems like a very interesting claim, but the article you linked doesn't support it much, instead just listing a few studies which found that specific vitamins failed to improve health in specific areas.
I think if you compare the cost of getting a dual power supply server, to the cost of getting two servers, you will conclude that buying two servers gives you more reliability per dollar.

Really you should compare the TCO, including the sysadmin time to configure replication vs. the time to configure failover.

What I would like to be able to do, is set up two linux servers, such that any change to the file system on one would be writen to the other. This can be done with inotify and rsync, but I suspect that it would be hard to configure rsync to both have a low enough load on a heavily used database machine and also "keep up" enough that the slave system has a consistent snapshot.

This is called a dual-ported array plus GFS2 plus Heartbeat.
> According to Angelsoft, 2.6 percent of the applicants ultimately get funded

Charging poor startups to pitch seems like a pretty backwards business model, and ultimately provides poor incentives for Angelsoft to operate on. They should just take a percentage of funding or equity from each completed deal, so they, you know, only get paid if they actually do something helpful.
Agreed. Plus, I doubt the companies using Numenta's sdk want it advertised that they are using it.

If you have not tried their sdk, I highly recommend it. It is open source(not free though). You can play around with it for free but if you want to use it commercially you need to pay.
Have you heard of any? I haven't.

If taking vitamins regularly was something that improved our health, we should be able to measure that. But as far as I know, we haven't been able to.
Ask HN: Trouble uploading to S3 from local?
Hi folks - I'm working on some site improvements and suddenly I can't put anything to S3 from my local env. Has anyone else had this issue before? I have put a note on the amazon support forum. I'm using windows, developing in ruby, I've tried the right_aws gem and the amazon s3 gem to no avail - running a tracert doesn't look good -

1 7 ms 7 ms 7 ms ##.##.###.###
2 6 ms 8 ms 7 ms ge-2-2-rr01.whartford.ct.hartford.comcast.net [68.85.163.193]
3 7 ms 7 ms 6 ms po-51-rr01.bloomfield.ct.hartford.comcast.net [68.87.182.242]
4 8 ms 8 ms 7 ms be-50-ar99.chartford.ct.hartford.comcast.net [68.87.182.238]
5 13 ms 10 ms 11 ms pos-1-6-0-0-cr01.newyork.ny.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.90.61]
6 10 ms 11 ms 11 ms xe-11-1-0.edge1.NewYork2.Level3.net [4.71.186.13]
7 11 ms 16 ms 17 ms vlan79.csw2.NewYork1.Level3.net [4.68.16.126]
8 12 ms 10 ms 11 ms ae-71-71.ebr1.NewYork1.Level3.net [4.69.134.69]
9 28 ms 16 ms 37 ms ae-3-3.ebr4.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.132.93]
10 15 ms 17 ms 17 ms ae-74-74.csw2.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.134.182]
11 56 ms 16 ms 14 ms ae-2-79.edge1.Washington1.Level3.net [4.68.17.80]
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * * Request timed out.
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * *
You should definitely give Dirty Jobs a second look. It's very very well done and Rowe carries it exceptionally.
Ugh, that is bad if true. A filesystem shouldn't commit a rename to disk before the file being renamed; that is common sense causality. Especially since (AFAIK) #2 is totally safe under ZFS, so Linux is behind yet again.
If Python were made to look like Ruby, I'd have to find a new language. I don't want to do that. Luckily, this will never actually happen.
How to play ultimate frisbee
I really like this. I love programming but I hate photoshopping, and I'll probably use this all the time. It would be nice if I could upload my own font. Response time was quick and I like the history saving.
This study might be promising:
http://www.landmarkstudy.com/

"Usage patterns, health, and nutritional status of long-term multiple dietary supplement users: a cross-sectional study"

It was conducted by researchers from the University of California (Berkeley)
"Fogbank," the aerogel at the heart of this issue, is made with very toxic solvents. It would not surprise me that most of the documentation on the processes to make it were destroyed to avoid litigation over health and safety issues.