skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not that PhysX or ODE aren't good enough, it's that they only solve part of the problem. We did do some empirical analysis to get the pneumatic models.

"Brute force the problem by using large amounts of real-world data, is what I'm getting at."

Absolutely, that is Trevor's viewpoint, and I agree. Turns out to be somewhat difficult in practice. It's hard to even know what all the parameters should be, much less do all the work necessary to tune them. And all the while, the robot itself is changing. Joints get loose; servos get replaced. It's a constant battle.

There is a feeling among hard-core robotics folks that this level of simulation is either impossible or not worth the trouble. I tend to disagree. I think we got pretty far with the Anybots simulator; we did manage to evolve a neural network that balances on the simulator, and also balances the real robot. It's definitely a 'hard' problem to get a simulator good enough to be usefully predictive.
The reddit thread (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/888km/how_a_pro...) on this point gives some insight into the mind the person who holds such a prejudice. Apparently, PhDs can't code, take too long to solve problems because they want to solve them utterly, and are difficult to work with. This is news to me, but it appears to be a popular sentiment among rank-and-file coders. You could make a lot of guesses as to why this perception exists, or even if it's correct. Maybe it has to do with the caliber of PhDs that apply for rank-and-file coder jobs, or maybe it has to do with the caliber of shops that hire redditors (oh snap.)
swing sucks almost as hard as AWT.
For every awesome PhD who can code, there are 3 who forgot how to code, never coded anything beyond a toy, or are too good to code what we code. Maybe all the good ones get snagged up by Google.
I found "abstract NLP", specially their use of Chomsky's work, a bit of a voodoo. I have worked through Bandler and Grindger with a pencil for months, and eventually became disenchanted with the faux-science aspects of NLP.
Of course there is more to it. But every app starts with a (unique) idea. Think of it as a stealth startup. We do that for a reason too ...
This document is covered with "FAIL" stamps, but they didn't even mention HAProxy as a load balancer! Anyway, I think that slide 135 is what most people do, maybe adding a DB cluster.
I think we're talking past each other, though there is still a fundamental disagreement in principle. Of course I believe that science 'works', in the sense that in theory, everything should be reducible to a lower level description. High-level source code reduces to machine code; weather reduces to quantum mechanics. However, there's a critical decision about what level you choose to work at when you attack a problem. While you may know that QM has something to do with why certain steel alloys are strong and light, when you build a bridge or a building you don't work at the QM level.

In the practical world of software development today, we do indeed have tens of millions of lines of code 'under' the application level most of the time. Even on Linux, where every one of those lines of code is theoretically accessible as source, the practical fact is nobody has the resources to read, comprehend, and manage all of that code during the lifetime of a typical project. Therefore, you are necessarily in a position where you have to deal with most of that codebase as black boxes, which have a statistical likelihood of doing what they are intended to do. You have to program defensively, hoping for the best but assuming the worst. You have to rely on your pattern recognition skills and your intuition to guide you. You have to treat the chaotic complexity you sit on top of like a surfer riding a wave. You cannot afford to take a fully reductionist approach. It's just not possible anymore, full stop.

The exception to this would be a small, embedded system with a minimal operating core and limited memory. But wait -- that system today is almost sure to be networked up to the bigger, chaotic systems that populate the metaverse. So again, at the level of communications, you have to treat the components you communicate with as black boxes.

If you disagree, give me a feasible scenario in which you could in fact take control of the situation in a reductionist fashion. I propose that any such scenario is a toy problem, that will not scale to real-world deployment.

The cat is already out of the bag.
The question is what is the simplest or most basic product that people want to buy. If you don't merge all of the feature requests, but pick the smallest subset that prospects tell you that they will pay for, you are less likely to get overwhelmed/diluted. Once you know what the minimum feature set is you are more likely to be able to develop it, and if you have pre-sold it there is much less risk than you have developed something that you love that no one wants.

"Frankly, I don't see a point in pre-selling, do you?" If you have ever developed something that no one (or too few) people wanted to pay for you may get more cautious about developing something without assessing customer buying interest first.
Dude, it's like 75 and sunny where I am. Not going outside, hacking to be done :)
Siftables, the toy blocks that think (TED talk)
As someone who has been interested in paying for a SaaS or Hosted version of Etherpad since January it's been annoying.

Because I plan to use it with my customers I knew I wanted to pay for a supported SaaS/hosted version. I have been surprised that we have been unable to have any meaningful discussion about it. I know that one interested user doesn't constitute a market, but I was dismayed with the lack of meaningful engagement beyond we will notify you when it's ready.

I think the part that's was left out of the Venture Hacks article was when someone tells you they want to buy it, have a conversation with them to understand how they plan to use it and how they value it (what are the alternatives that they are comparing it against).
High-level languages are the single most important breakthrough in the history of software engineering. That's because they enable a tremendous compression of meaning.

Languages, both natural and artificial, have two purposes: thinking and communication. Maximizing both of those depends on maximizing clarity while minimizing noise (including extraneous text). HLLs help achieve both. That's why most everybody uses them.
Former AOL Head Jon Miller Heads to News Corp. as “Chief Digital Officer”
Content Stealing Jerks
This happens a lot with chips: you will generate a set of "preliminary" data sheets for potential products and see which get interest. It allows you to have a conversation with a potential buyer that's more useful (or at least as useful as) starting from a blank sheet of paper and asking them what they want.
Two reasons:

First, those mockups are not supposed to look "real". The idea is to give somebody something that very obviously is not anywhere near a finished product so as not to give the wrong impression of how "finished" the product is.

Second, it's easy to share my mockups since you can simply share the URL, and all changes will be synchronized live. So you can collaborate over the phone and see each other's changes (which is why I've made the thing).
Pay per click formula 2.0
The second version of pay per click formula named pay per click formula 2.0 is going to launch by GauherChaudhry on 31st march, 2009. Get pay per click formula review and exclusive bonus here.
I've been putting this together for myself in a few hours, so there are not too many features yet. Automatic snap-to is certainly something on my to-do-list, align probably too. Not sure about multiple pages since it's easy to just create additional mockups.
I'm a bit confused on who the audience is. Students going into high school or students going into college? After reading I'm noting to myself not to waste any time in college.
There is another less known but worth to mention project. There is a man, who wrote highly optimized (literally - he had counted every system call, every buffer) web server with proxy functionality - http://nginx.net/

It is another example how one fanatical (and a little paranoid, of course) person could change the world. It is a brilliant work! If you will take a look at its source code - it is like poetry to those who understands.

This server is being used mostly on extremely high loaded adult or dating sites around the world.

It is also good example of how to do optimizations in general - modify a weakest (a slowest) component, test and measure, change the next one.
I think balance is good. As a jewish person, not really religious but raised by a religious mother, I really cherish Yom Kippur. A day where I do literally nothing. You're supposed to just think and be sorry.

A day that is different from routine makes you think about things differently, makes you consider different things.

Should I dare to suggest that mindless routine is bad?
Look, I created this thing for myself and figured it would be useful for others, too. I don't intend to steal your "great next killer app idea", and I already have more ideas than time anyway. Ideas are essentially worthless, everyone has an infinite number of them :-)

Furthermore, the mockups on my site are not password protected, so they're essentially public (although there is no easy way to find them). In other words, yes, don't use the site for secret stuff.
OP said:

"How much business did I lose?

I have no idea how many potential customers tried to buy our JavaScript Performance ebook through Google Checkout and saw a message that our account was disabled."

The irony of this whole issue is the complaint is resultant from the site attempting to sell an eBook on JavaScript.

What possibly happened is that this particular "technical error" was resultant from some kind of conflict between the eBook's syntactically sketchy JavaScript references (perhaps there are code examples within the eBook) and the way that Google Checkout wants to handle JavaScript.

I would think somebody touting and attempting to _sell_ the "performance" virtues of JavaScript would also be aware of the potential evil that JavaScript can do.

"Don't get me wrong: I don't hate Google or people inside Google . . . rather, the way Google's abstract, corporate algorithms have treated me."

It's probably a very good thing that this "technical error" was indeed preemptively caught by the "abstract, corporate algorithm."

After all, JavaScript can be evil.

I would say. . . score one for Google Checkout. Sometimes better safe than sorry.
This might work... unless the thief is smart enough to not boot it without wiping the hard drive first.

It's possible to install a rootkit as a hypervisor. So what if you installed such a rootkit which had this functionality on your own computer? It could track your laptop long after the thief reformats it, greatly increasing the chance that you'll eventually be able to track it down.
You're absolutely right, and for people in the same office, I'd use paper, too. But I have to collaborate with people who live far away from me, which is why I created this web version of pen and paper for myself.

The idea is that several people open the same mockup and move stuff around on the screen while they're on the phone, talking about the mockup, similar to what you would do with plain old paper when sitting next to each other.
Where are you? The site you referenced in the post is registered in the UK, which may or may not make pursuing copyright infringement feasible.
A Blatent Stack Overflow Ripoff
This book is not about NLP, it is about that language is a key, about gule-governed behavior and about understanding and modeling of this behaviour.

The great idea is about using linguistic methods to understand and model a human's mind activities, which are based on language constructions.

NLP itself is just a trend, an attempt to sell these theories to the masses.
I think the idea you propose is a good one, but there is no need for a firefox plug-in.

It can just be a site where content providers post side by side articles detailing their content was ripped off. Just as you did. Also the community of said site can thumb up or down the poster's argument; labeling who the real jerk is!
Like everything, it would depend on the circumstances. You can't directly compare emotional and sexual behaviour with business trust. So I would draw a pretty "hard" line, in the language of the article.

The sex part is almost irrelevant. What would matter is how they did it, just like anything else. If they were a complete asshole about it, I'd "note" that, just like I'd "note" any other obvious asshole-ish behaviour, which is obviously bad. If they were discrete, good natured, trying to meet their needs while keeping everyone happy - isn't that a good thing?

Hell, I'd be inclined to look negatively on someone who didn't cheat if they obviously wanted/needed to. Stuck in a passionless marriage and unwilling to do something about it out of fear/devotion to "tradition"/don't want to upset parents, etc? That would lead me to question their ability to act and take risks. If they wanted to but thought they couldn't get away with it, I'd look down on that as being insufficiently devious. Etc.

Look, marriage is not perfect or even unambiguously good. It's an artificial institution which, in many cases, is imposed on people by society. We could discuss this all day but bottom line, it's a complex and "tainted" subject and almost completely different from other types of trust and honesty. You might as well ask if you "trust less" someone who cheats on video games.

On the other hand, this article rings of self-righteousness. In my opinion, those who make a big deal about the moral deviations of others usually have plenty to hide themselves. So reading that article certainly makes me trust Mr Casnocha less, sure, now that I'm wondering why he feels the need to loudly proclaim his virtue. Regardless, I could certainly do without his sermonising, and lack of understanding of the human condition, if I ever had to do business with him.
telling the users to fix the bug themselves and send in a patch will never ever fly

Did someone say it would? We are talking about open source projects here.
I'm not sure what you mean actually. Divorce can be just as easily initiated by the woman as the man. The social stigma and familial pressure is there, of course, but it exists against divorced men as well (although the degree may be less).

Plus, if you think there is a lack of visible disagreements in arranged marriages (both happy and unhappy), you should come and stay next to out some of our neighbours. I'm not basing happiness on "lack of visible disagreement". We know our neigbours quite well and it's easy to see who is happy and who isn't.

Let me clarify: all I am saying is marriage works if both parties are committed to it. That factor is bigger than "getting what you want" out of it.
Aubrey Jaffer: Optics for Passive Radiative Cooling
I always find it interesting when articles like this take the stance that piracy is bad, but articles about copying movies/music/game piracy take the opposite stance (piracy is good).

Perhaps I am missing something? Content is content, if someone copies you and shares it without you getting the payola, how is this any different from what happens in the movies/music/game industries?
"It's not like Jeff has a copyright on his CSS, javascript, or design"

Well, actually he does (and so do you). Most of the world (all the signatories of the Berne Convention, in blue at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Berne_Convention.png) grant you automatic copyright on anything you create. You don't need to file any paperwork, you don't need to have a little disclaimer, it just happens.

Now, usually it isn't worth the trouble of pursuing legal action, but you can.
Man, If it were a programmer who read my resume, then according to this it would kick ass! Unfortunately, it must be some one in HR who thinks LaTex is something they make gloves out of, because my job offers are not so hot.
Who argues that piracy is good? Perhaps inevitable and uncontrollable, not worth it for big industries to peruse. For music it's convenient, in this instance it is not.
There are sites like this that already exist in the web design field.

http://www.pirated-sites.com is one that I remember.
I kept waiting for it to be funny, but it was merely true.
People who download movies/music/games do not edit the content to make themselves appear as the creators and artists. Quite the opposite, warez releases usually come with a synopsis and background info on the distributed work.
What do you do? You exercise the rights that deep-pocketed copyright holders have acquired through lobbying Congress.

Send a DMCA complaint to the CSJ's ISP or hosting provider. The ISP or hosting provider gets safe harbor from the DMCA, but only if they promptly remove access to the infringing content.
Sigh. It's 2009. This has been going on for like 15 years now. Just assume it's going to get stolen if it's on the net.
I too could've sworn that handwriting analysis was some wishy-washy pseudo-science. I remember watching a TV program on the subject here in Switzerland; they had the head of the Swiss psychology assocation on, with him basically stating that it's a feel-good construct for PHBs wanting to sound important (this was in the context of whether you should apply for a job with a hand-written letter, or a typed letter; it was the early 90s...) :)
I think CNProg just copied the design. Chinese companies copying American design is not exactly anything new.
The net result is the same though - revenue is taken from the content creator.
I like that you're trying to tackle the specific problem of real-time remote collaboration and made a tool to address that - that's great! The difference for me is that I rarely see value in it, compared to just scanning in a quick sketch and then collecting input via IM or email, or even with getting other scanned sketches back in return.

For example, here's a quick sketch by Jason at 37signals to get across the overall layout of their new home page:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1629-preview-of-the-new-3...
The net result is not the same. Revenue may be taken from the creator, but credit is not.
There's a difference between expecting students to overcome adversity in a tough curriculum and making things pointlessly painful.
I don't think you have to be really really good - I know plenty of people who are do similar work (myself included). Maybe very very lucky? (I wouldn't consider myself very very good).
To add to that, the offenders here are not only lifting content but presumably profiting from it (with AdSense) as well.
Sure, but the same can be said for those holding an MSc or a BSc or whatever. So I don't follow how the degree itself could be a negative metric.
I don't think it's a case of this one's wrong and this one's right, but rather a funny 'cause it's true kinda thing.

And the punchline's of course the tabs and spaces item.
Iowa State University, right? I'm a student there right now. They've improved since the Microsoft dark age, moving their server infrastructure to Linux and clearing away the legacy cruft except in the humanities departments. No, the big problem now is that the computers are so locked down you can't install software on them! This isn't so much an issue on Linux or MacOS -- you can install everything to a folder easily -- but the Windows machines are a pain in the bum when you need some software you don't have. Even if you have standalone exe files they sometimes refuse to run for permissions reasons.

This is a major software issue. In the happy land of Ubuntu, I can just use "./configure --prefix=~/myroot", and everything will work out more-or-less fine. On MacOS I'm just dragging around application bundles. But on Windows this whole process is colossally painful, and the situation would probably be dramatically improved if you gave everybody the damn Administrator password and carte blanche to use it responsibly.
> I also use a text login, fvwm2, and install things from source (albiet in Gentoo rather than Ubuntu). As a 19 year old kid, should I feel hard done by? :)

You're accustomed to using a command line, you probably chose fvwm2 because you were looking for a no-frills window manager, and Gentoo's emerge system makes basic installation from source as easy as using apt-get. People who aren't as nuts as you and I have every right to be ticked off at computer labs that act like your computer rather than computers for mortals.
People ssh'd into a computer are seldom using all of its power. A big multicore server with plenty of RAM can support quite a few users more economically than individual computers. This is part of the reason why people invented timesharing OSes in the first place.
Berkeley's Air Bears Wi-Fi works pretty well most of the time.
Mininova make 1million pounds per year, probably more. What's the difference?
It's worth adding that Stack Overflow has licensed their content under CC-by-SA, and so has cnprog.com, which suggests to me that they may be operating under that license and may not have even broken copyright law.

Moral of the story: if you don't want people to use and build on your work, don't license it permissively.
Another tweak: keep a locked-down simplified version of the operating system on a separate partition. Post signs telling the newbies how to get to it if the main OS got broken by some student. Hard drive space is cheap, right?
I look at this as a reality that has to be adapted to rather than fought. It would be terribly inconsistent to preach that the MPAA and RIAA have it wrong, and then get in a rut over someone copying your article.

Now, to be fair, these guys are trying to make a profit off your articles (unlike the average joe downloading a movie on BT), but I doubt that many are succeeding too well. I have yet to see one of my own successful articles be supplanted by a clone in the Google search results, and sites like Reddit or HN are usually pretty good at rooting out blogspam. These guys are more like poor sods trying to sell a photocopy of your book for $0.10 on the street corner, than like organised pirates making tens of thousands off illegally copied DVDs. Even if one of them occasionally manages to get some real traffic, considering how hard it is to monetise even when it's on your own site, how hard do you think it is for them?

Getting angry about this seems, to me, on about the same level as getting angry at someone for paying attention during your speech and then going around giving that speech to others without crediting you. Yeah, so they're copying you. So what? The minute the content leaves your computer and enters the internet, it is publicly available and copiable, in the same way as the moment your speech leaves your lips, anyone with a good memory and delivery can copy it.

I'm not one for fighting fundamental reality with papier maché laws. I've summarised my feelings on the topic in my blog's repository, at:

http://github.com/swombat/danieltenner.com/tree/master

All code is open to use for whatever purpose you have in mind (though I’d prefer if you used it for a good purpose!). You can copy the content and images too (though I’d really rather you didn’t copy the content, or if you do copy some of it, please include a link to my blog). If you want to use the danieltenner.com look/CSS/etc as a basis for your look, that’s fine too (though I’d appreciate it if you evolved it over time rather than keeping it looking exactly the same).
The LaTeX says "this person is sincerely nerdy enough to actually become comfortable with LaTeX."