skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I imagine that's probably a limitation of the technology (and not an arbitrary design choice). Like most storage issues, it will probably become exponentially less of a problem over time.
and now you remember me. worked.
Is this writer serious? He thinks Twitter might charge a whole $100 to companies like Comcast and Starbucks... but only if the software is really good! I mean, come on. What happens when you run out of those top 20, or even 500 companies who might be willing to pay for your best product? $50,000? Half a developer's salary? Probably a third or a quarter of what they are paying the product manager they hired to lead this effort? No, this writer has no clue, or I hope not, for Twitter's sake. Twitter has the capability to create far more value than that for its "pro" customers.
I know...business partner anyone? Thats a niche market!
I second the Yerba Mate suggestion. It jolts the mind without giving you that over-caffeinated coffee feeling.
How do you tell the great spirituality books from the bullshit ones? Are there spirituality books that an hardcore atheist such as myself can read? Lack of religious terminology would be a start.
Do you build the same dependency on it that you do with coffee?
This is gonna get killed again. This is at least the 3rd posting of this letter today.
Latency is not a solved problem. Lag problems in Warcraft 3 games are very common.
Knowing Conway as I do, this is not only par for the course, it is actively to be expected. If there weren't comments like this then it would be a spoof.

And there is no semantic confusion about "Free Will". The naming of the theorem is stated in those terms, but the work itself is independent of the precise meaning. That's why this is such an interesting result. The care taken to make it independent of the semantics attached to that term is, again, entirely to be expected, and makes the result compelling.
I'm asking if the credential is important or competence is adequate.

Lots of folks make it in the US who aren't "fluent" in American or even English. However, I don't know if Japan requires credentials.
Freeman Dyson: Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society
>> the downside is that it's significantly slower and more resource intensive than comet.

Any data or story to back that argument? Just curious.
Quoting the great Bertrand Russell:

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

Interesting how so many people who know NOTHING about Science are SO sure that global warming is caused by man. Such dogma reminds me of the times of the 16th century Inquisition: no amount of evidence will ever convince the nutcase warmists that there MIGHT be a possibility that global warming is not caused by humans.

Dyson is a top physicist. Just because he dared to go against the mainstream dogma, people seem to want to lynch him. I thought that we, humans, had evolved from our tribal and primitive ways. But we still get carried away by mass hysteria and delusion.

There's no place for politics or ideology in Science. Only observation and experiment matter. Dyson is not alone. Many other physicists have been cautious and warned that we should not jump to conclusions based on noisy, ambiguous and incomplete data. They, too, were ostracized. So much for tolerance...
I found mine on adaa.org.
Exploring Educational Excellence (College Admission Officers Travel to Recruit Students)
I just posted an essay where Freeman Dyson explains his own views about the topic (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=532426 or, more directly, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html )
Agreed.

I've found that martial arts (Tae Kwon Do in may case) are great if you're not a gym person. With Tae Kwon Do I didn't have to think about "a plan". It was all pretty much laid out for me. First I get yellow tag, then yellow belt and so on. Having these goals is a great way of keeping motivated.
A QUESTION

Since all the stuff about HFCS started coming out, and all the implications that fructose is the problem, I've wondered about fruit. Fructose is fruit sugar; that's where it gets its name, after all. And yet fruit is generally considered to be healthy stuff. So why is the fructose in HFCS a problem, while the fructose in fruit is not?
Analog->digital converters often do have code. They can be implemented using HDL to program FPGAs, or the HDL can be compiled to silicon. ADCs definitely embody an algorithm. (There are a variety of algorithms you can choose, providing different tradeoffs between low cost of the device and accuracy.)

Note that protozoans are capable of significant data processing so that they can navigate and find food and engage in reproduction. It is now thought that the synapse evolved from these data processing mechanisms.

It seems like you are still using the "a neuron is a neuron, a synapse is a synapse, the significance is all in the interconnects" view of the brain. This is outmoded.
Eat, get back to the desk (check email or some low intensity stuff), then about 30 min later, go for a walk. Get out of the building and into sunlight for a minimum of 15-20 minutes. Hot, cold, doesn't matter. Get out and walk.
Perhaps I will remember not to read any links with paulstamatiou.com in them ...
I love the name!

In case anyone missed the reference: http://www.armory.com/swallowscenes.html
Their lack of (supposed: I don't know how well read either mathematician is in philosophy) philosophical credentials might justifiably invite scepticism.

But surely we can only dismiss this if their argument has a flaw. And the burden of disproof is on us, not them.
As other posters have said, avoid starch and sugar.

Walking quite far to lunch is good. Then you have to walk the same distance after lunch.
Nope. Email opening confirmation is not reliable, and is more useful for trends of certain demographics than for absolute numbers.
any chance for you coming out to Hawaii?
Look at viewer count in the directory. I'd guess 95% illegal or more.
Let's Open up Venture Capital
No, general public needs to learn about his integrity, erudition and impeccable scientific standing.

This is important because Dyson's opponents as a rule try some sort of character assassination instead of sticking to the subject matter.
March 18th - they ought to know at this point.
http://www.justin.tv/officecam - thrilling tv
OK, I'm sold on the ease of use. However, I'm looking to host a SAAS application that requires a separate database for each subscribed client. How does AWS handle the isolation and privacy of the database(s) - so that the likelihood of one of our clients accessing another client's data (even accidentally) is minimized, and access from outside our framework (our support or clients)? There's also the issue of minimizing downtime in the event of a restore request to a specific client - so not all clients are affected. Finally, we have health care and public sector clients who have very stringent data protection and privacy policies and issues. Does that kind of protection exist in AWS, or any shared environment, or does it require a dedicated solution?
you're not helping me get the US government to send me a check? what do you do? make it more obvious.
I'm not sure if I'm following... we've got:

EA -> HA + HB
HA -> EB -> HC

With HC expecting HB to have run. My reaction would be "don't do that". If HC relies on HB completing, either put in a check in HC and keep trying until the environment is right (write a higher-order function if you're doing it often), or (better!) make your event system handle the logic you are trying to describe: HC is triggered when both HA and HB complete, like so:

EA -> HA + HB
HA -> EB
HB -> EC
EB + EC -> HC

This is all trivial in JS, since handlers are just functions assigned to variables!
Latency is the biggest issue when it comes to competitive gaming. For the casual market it's fine. But for the hardcore competitive players, it won't be popular. It is also impossible for a up and coming player to get to a high level of technicality when it comes to gaming. It's just not possible even with the slightest bit of latency.
They seem to think free will is a part of physics, not philosophy, and reductionist physics at that. They didn't address any actual problems in the field. They missed the point. That is a flaw in their non-argument.

The burden is on them to say what is a problem in the field they want to address, to know something about the history of the problem, other candidate solutions to it, and how their solution differs, and then say what the answer is. They simply haven't done that.
GCalCron Automates Your Linux System with Google Calendar
Sound like much more fun that the ammonium tri-iodide that we made in high school chemistry lab.
The non-marketing name is Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), but I've never been impressed with SMT performance. I think the emerging processors that use many simpler cores will have more impact.
This is a company that I am just very uncomfortable with. Just so much pirated content. If they get anywhere close to popular, they are going to get sued. I hope they have a big war-chest.

I know the immediate answer - YouTube. Just because they got rich (Google still doesn't seem to have made money on the deal) doesn't make what they did right. Right and wrong, yeah, I know, very "quaint" notions.

After all, Wall Street investment bankers got very rich creating toxic waste and ultimately unloading it on the tax payer. I met a dude recently who was in that line of business, and he said it wasn't like they didn't know what they were doing. They all along knew what the game was, but their attitude was "I am getting mine, so who cares."
sorry to use comment for personal message, but email me :-)

(email in my profile)
I don't see how this can work... yet.

Right now, even with broadband internet connections, players consistently experience game-ruining latency, and that is sending magnitudes less information.

I seriously doubt that OnLive could work in the U.S.; the broadband infrastructure just isn't there yet. Korea and Japan, on the other hand? Sign me up!
I've been assuming that somebody inside Google was busy porting Python to run on top of the V8 JavaScript engine. Turns out some Google guys are working on refactoring CPython into a VM with dynamic compilation instead. Go figure. (Strictly speaking these two alternatives are not mutually exclusive, of course.)
These two are not even in the same business.
Similarly, honey is somewhat like one of the variants of HFCS in its chemical makeup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup#Honey). However, I have heard (ie don't have time to cite) that there is something else in honey that makes one sick if one eats too much of it. Thus the built-in limit switch in honey that is lacking in HFCS.
"A group of scientists will be sitting around the cafeteria, and one will idly wonder if there is an integer where, if you take its last digit and move it to the front, turning, say, 112 to 211, it’s possible to exactly double the value. Dyson will immediately say, “Oh, that’s not difficult,” allow two short beats to pass and then add, “but of course the smallest such number is 18 digits long.”"

So how did he know that?
In my current project, I've implemented a source-to-source compiler. In the places where I emit C code, I usually don't have a handle to the scopes above me. I could get one, but it would take more work.

The code I generate has no indents and no newlines. Not having to keep track of these makes life simpler. To make my generated code more legible, I just run indent on it.
Not that it matters, but I'm from Norway as well and chances are we wont be getting what the people in the US gets for free even if we pay. The question about if non-G3 subscribers will be able to preview/stream full tracks as opposed to only 30 seconds (like they can in the US) has been left entirely unanswered by the last.fm staff. I'll take the lack of an answer as answer enough in itself.

I'm not using last.fm radio-streaming enough to warrant paying for it, and I sure as hell refuse to pay for a service inferior to what others get for free, simply because I'm not born in the "right" country.

And as some ex-last.fm staff member comments down there, there is no way advertising alone can subsidize the US, UK and German markets, so in effect the rest of the world will be subsidizing the G3 countries, which also gets the best service, for free.

Absolute bullocks and I refuse to support it.
The title is very misleading. It is not saying that Justin.TV outside the US is bigger than Hulu outside the US.

The article is saying that Justin.TV (global, including the US) is bigger than Hulu (only available in the US).

That is a true statement, even if it is also worth pointing out that Hulu only reaches US consumers, so in percentage terms, it reaches a larger percent of its audience, even though it is smaller on an absolute scale to Justin.TV.
Twitter Business Models Are Afoot
Even if it worked, here in Canada most ISPs have a monthly bandwidth limit (usually around 20-30GB, which is ridiculously low), so it would be really expensive for the end user.
U.S. companies waste $2.8 billion per year powering unused PCs
Unfortunately can't make it as I'll be out of town.

Will try to come to the next one though.
After airing the idea of paying to use the toilet they've apparently received loads of suggestions for other charges, so they've started a competition for people to suggest the next discrepancy charges, the winner gets €1000.

http://www.ryanair.com/site/EN/news.php?yr=09&month=mar&...

Check out the cartoon at the bottom. Definitely c)
RESTful API and HATEOAS Conundrum
Sorry. :) You wouldn't believe how many morons actually think like that when it comes to China though.
Peppermint tea works for me as well (I must admit -- it doesn't have that true allure of a coffee though).
Notice that if you are not from the US, trying to access pandora.com will lead you to http://www.pandora.com/restricted

Yeah. Pandora pretty much sucks too.
I'm not sure that applies here. Protectionism is not about keeping people from goofing off at work.
Google Chrome - interview with Ben Goodger
... And, if it's with a friend/colleague it's a great time to talk and un-muddle your thoughts.
Ask HN - Best way to pick new skills
What, in your experience is the best way to learn anything new? I'm learning RoR, using Railsspace book. (I'm just taking RoR just as an example, could be anything from programming to cooking) Obviously it would be nice to learn as much as possible in the shortest possible time. I understand that what works for one person might now work for another. Still, it would be interesting to know how the hackers here learn new things.
They've missed one very important point; one that Hobbes, Hume, and others realized long ago. The utterance "free will" is literally meaningless. What would that even mean and why would you even want that?
It sounds like you have already read some of these books and find them useful to find possible "bugs" in your mind making you anxious. If so, maybe you'll find my comment a bit naive.

What I've decided is that the only way to find out all the "bugs" to annihilate is by ignoring all the easy to get suggestions made by other peoples (who are smart enough to do that without any assistance). It's important that you should find out where the roots of your problems actually are and how to get rid of them by yourself. I beleive that no one knows about you more than you do.

Why don't I consider such books as a good point to start from? In fact, I'm a bit afraid of such books... They look like ones about patterns: they don't always turn you into a good programmer, but there is a chance that after reading you won't be able to think in terms other than you have already read about (that is actually what I'm afraid of).

Anyways, I'm going to take a look at books you've mentioned (with care :). Thanks!
IBM layoffs continue
I believe the problem with honey is botulism toxin and/or spores.

See:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/infant-botulism/HQ00854
Twitter finally plans to make money
Which is a clone of a Common Lisp search engine ;-)
Dear AIG, I Quit
National Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities
Every once in a while someone says something that exposes just why those past frustrating experiences seemed so similar. Crystal clear, great quote.
Not to mention the music licensing fees. Do people realize that last.fm has to pay music labels every time a user streams a track?
I don't think I'm quite understanding your algorithm. When you say "choose left or right", do you mean to choose randomly between the branches with probability equal to the ratio of the weights of the trees? So that each sample requires log(n) random numbers before you reach a leaf? Or do you mean something else?
Atlanta Gets Its Own Y Combinator In Shotput Ventures
While I think latency will still be an issue to some degree, it's probably not nearly to the level people are imagining due to current experience since this is quite different.

With current gaming systems, everyone's computer/console is rendering a version of the game with all known info. As a player acts, that info is sent to the server and distributed to other participants. If one user is experiencing (or intentionally causing) latency with this exchange of data, there can be what amounts to a "collision" in the state of the game. These problems are solved in various ways (i.e. jumping locations) that affect game play.

In this system, there is one central computer that is managing all happenings in the game and rendering out a unique view for each player. There will be no "collisions" of conflicting information because there are not multiple entities creating and modifying game actions.

I imagine any lag would primarily be experienced as your character responding to your actions in a delayed manner or a drop of video signal. Both would definitely inhibit game play, but they should ONLY be apparent to the user experiencing the lag. A lagged user would just be a sitting duck for any other player, but not change the game play for anyone else. THAT would be a huge improvement.
But then you will have other game companies release console based games that perform better and people will flock to those. I think this is a failure out of the gate; we'll see.
The Future of Open Source Technology and Acquia
Yeah, a lot of sites got slipped in. There are gambling sites, porn sites other than child porn sites, fringe religious websites (like a satanist website and some Christian websites), youtube links, and even a dentist's website.

And there are plans to expand the list.
I try to learn things that scratch an itch I have. I've found that if I try to learn the latest and greatest thing on hacker news on a whim, I end up getting distracted by the next latest and greatest thing. But if I am learning something as a means to an end, I find that I'm more focused and see it through.
Doesn't it make more sense to use the hot, gray shower water to heat the water going in to the hot water heater?
Quoting the great Bertrand Russell

No need to do that. Socrates was saying the same thing two thousand years ago.

I've come to the conclusion from watching other people that some people just have to know. I guess I can understand. It has to be hard to spend your life studying in a certain field and end up with "Well gee. It sorta looks this way guys, but we don't really know."

When people slam the church for all the bad things they did in the past, they miss an important point -- the common denominator isn't religion, it's people. Certain people want to believe their stuff fervently. They want to believe that their belief system holds critical truths, and they want to persecute and ostracize those who fail to fall in line. It's not a problem with religion. It's humans that are the cause of this behavior.

So it's not surprising to see church attendance down and scientific religious-thinking up. All those folks had to go somewhere, right?
The issue is control? As Executive Vice President (note that a conjugation of execution is in the title), if you don't have control enough to stop poor risk management that you're aware of in your own division...something's already very, very wrong.
One thought I had as mainly a non-gamer is on the costs. Since this is being done in the cloud, it'll cost a bit of money to keep a game running - a company can't simply sell you the game, it now has to pay a bit for each hour you play. As a game gets older, it becomes less attractive for a company to support it.

Of course, I assume that the monthly subscription fees could cover it, or perhaps a pay-per-drink model, but I wonder what will happen to the up-front costs.
No, they aren't very good. I think the problem is cultural. Programming Java gets you comfortable with extreme verbosity and tons of structure so its libraries end up like this: http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/apidocs/org/apache/xmlrpc/server... (In extreme cases.)

Lucene was mentioned earlier - it, at least, is very good.

I have the same impression about the numerical computation and machine learning libs too.
non blocking async. Single thread. There's a bit of memory used for buffers, but nothing major. It's been up to around 14k connections total so far in the real world, more in testing.
I think Java is a pretty good choice, especially for doing comet or any other problem where performance is required. Today Java's perfomance almost matches the speed of C or C++... I have some time ago played around with using Jetty's continuations and it's pretty impressive (and highly scaleable).

In my next iteration I'll probably try to go with the long polling model and I'll probably explore C and Java.

Thanks for sharing your architectural notes.
It's absolutely supported.

IE will wait patiently for data to be received, just like other browsers. It'll do keep-alive also with XHR, so you get that benefit as well. You can also remove some HTTP headers in js to get some bandwidth optimization :)

One possibility you may be thinking of is XHR reuse, which is a pain in IE, as far as I remember there's a couple of bugs if you try to reuse the same XHR object. There's hoops to jump through depending on the state or something, and it's just more reliable to not reuse the object on IE.

At the moment, I create a new XHR object for each request, to be sure there aren't issues with IE (I believe XHR reuse isn't an issue on other browsers).
Doesn't it make more fun to wedge a peltier device between the outgoing warm and the incoming cold and use the generated power to light some LEDs in the shower?
Yeah, you're right.

I found somewhat on an update here: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/338/mar23_2/b1223
On first blush that sounds like the way to go, but for most existing homes it would probably be suboptimal.

To reduce costs, a device like this should be localized to a room rather than force you to route the water from your shower all the way back down to a water heater. The latter would necessitate a major plumbing addition.
I want to encourage everybody on HN to submit a talk to this conference, or register (but c'mon, submit a talk!). I know some of the people organizing it, and they're doing some really cool things.
Tell HN: YC Summer 2009 application is due today.
The YC summer 2009 application is due today at 10pm PST. I am curious as to how many of you submitted, or will be submitting, the optional video of founders?

http://ycombinator.com/s2009.html
Actually, many people get those jobs by working hard in high school to get into a prestigious college, and then working hard in college to get into a prestigious banking or accounting firm. What many see as luck is actually 10+ years of hard work.
Here's a hands-on impression

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/57855

The bottom line: the compression algorithm needs some work, and latency, even with GDC's optimal setup, is noticeable.

Sounds like the service is still a few years ahead of its time.