skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I apologize. I should have requested Apple to grant me access to real time information on their actual hardware failure rates instead of basing my assumptions on the two sample universes I have access to. My bad.

Put another way, when I encounter anecdotal information about a specific hardware failure I find unacceptable more than a threshold number of times, I tend to base my buy decisions on that. The converse is also true in terms of praise. That's how I bought my Macbook, that's why I am not buying this version of the Air.
This effect can be beneficial. Swap the mercury for gallium and you get a neat way of producing hydrogen on demand: http://cleantech.com/news/1205/gallium-and-aluminum-tigers-i...

Too heavy for aviation but potentially useful for fuel cell vehicles.
If talk's to be believed, plenty of people I went to school with had sex at 13-14, and some of them were very happy with those decisions.

(As a side note, I find it a little funny that I'm 18, which should be the age that I'm finally able to have sex without it being legally weird, and yet my not being sexually active makes me a late bloomer. Society is odd.)
Thanks for setting this up. Should be fun. You'll get my algorithm once the tournament starts :)
That is patronizing and wrong. I did address your point fairly directly modulo the sarcasm.

Public infrastructure provides economic benefits throughout the economy, enabling more economic activity; which more than makes up for the money withdrawn from circulation by taxation.

If you cannot wrap your head around this concept. You have no business lecturing others about basic economics.

Governments are not exempt from economic forces, in fact a very good argument could be made that they are created and sustained by economic necessity. To put that argument in the simplest terms; governments save us money.

My other point is that blind negative rage toward all public spending makes you an easily manipulated member of a mob. A mob that others are adept at using to shelter their favored projects.
That's not how it works, though. The development case is getting in so the school can pay the piper. If you don't admit those kids, then you don't have a kickass school that everyone wants to go to. Think of it as a reality tax.
Major Book Publishers Start Turning To Scribd
Nokia 5800 Themes: Phonograph by Jackpham
I think this article is close, but misses an important player, SSDs. SSDs bring super-fast data rates that can be amplified by traditional techniques (striping etc), but work enough like disk systems so that applications don't have to be rewritten. I believe that we will see SSD speeds continue to increase, along with widespread adoption and price reduction. On the software side, I believe that many commonly used applications will begin to detect SSDs and (un)optimize their code for them. In my opinion, memory will always be the fastest, but SSD gives the reliability and backwards computability that will cause mass-adoption.

I think we'll see (and have already seen) the early-adopters and power users start adopting SSDs at a high rate. Business adoption usually follows after a few years. So my prediction is that we'll see 1TB or larger sized SSDs, that are increasingly faster, within a few years. I think we'll start seeing DB arrays with multiple SSDs in a Raid0+1 or similar, probably up to 10TB or larger.

Does anyone else feel this way.
just for fun:

function copylist(lst) {
return mapcar(function (x) { return x; }, lst);
}

function last(lst) {
if (null == lst) {
return null;
} else if (null == cdr(lst)) {
return lst;
} else {
return last(cdr(lst));
}
}

ugly append:

function append() {
var lst = null;
var i = 0;
for (; i < arguments.length && null == lst; i++) {
if (null != arguments[i]) {
lst = copylist(arguments[i]);
}
}
for (; i < arguments.length; i++) {
if (null != arguments[i]) {
setcdr(last(lst), copylist(arguments[i]));
}
}
return lst;
}

the fun:

function qsort(lst) {
if (null == lst) {
return null;
} else {
var pivot = car(lst);
var nlst = cdr(lst);
return append(qsort(filter(function (x) { return x < pivot; }, nlst)),
list(pivot),
qsort(filter(function (x) { return x >= pivot; }, nlst)));
}
}

function powerset(lst) {
if (null == lst) {
return null;
} else {
var first = car(lst);
var rest = powerset(cdr(lst));
return append(list(list(first)),
mapcar(function (x) { return append(list(first), x); }, rest),
rest);
}
}
From what I know, it's possible, but it's not the kind of thing that I would assume a priori. I'd actually go and check to see if it worked.
Thanks for your answer.

I do know a little bit about gradschool admisions in computer science and you're right, there's a lot more faculty involvement but I know nothing about more popular programs like the MBA. So I should have phrased my question better. What I meant to ask was whether in popular graduate programs such as the MBA, factors such as being the kid of a potential donor or a politician carry equally high weightage as they do in undergraduate admissions.

Based, anecdotally, on George Bush having gone to Yale, it would seem that they do.
I think all genre movies are the same. It just takes good writing, and that usually means 1 in 10 are great, 2 in 10 are entertaining, the other 70% suck.
I suppose in a literal sense, but really, how do you define life when the dead things are walking around and eating? Doesn't un-dead mean "not dead?" Seems like a technicality or minor plot point to me.
EU Referendum doesn't have the breadth of those sources, but in terms of quality, it's the best at the areas it does cover. I don't follow European news that much, but on the American side I have a collection of online sources so I get both breadth and quality. Together, the hand picked sources are far better than the NY Times and the Economist.
Cell phone wardriving/hacking?
So this morning at around 2:30am I was driving back home for my lunch break, and was pulling off Augusta's ring road when I ended up behind a blue sedan with Washington(state) plates. It was moving fairly slow considering there was zero traffic and it was 2:30 in the morning. As I inevitably got right behind it, I noticed that there were six identical cell phones tied to the driver's side head rest, one on either side and 4 along the back, all facing outwards. The rack was connected to a wire that ran out of the car to an ipod-sized antenna on the roof. One after the other each cell phone would dial a random number and then hold the call for about 40 seconds before dropping it and going black for a few seconds. Call, hangup, black, call, hangup, black...repeat. It was rather eerie to watch, and the passenger sitting in the back behind the passenger-side seat seemed to look up and back down every once in a while like he was either controlling them or recording what was going on with them. I was behind them for about 6 minutes before I reached my apartment complex and turned off the road. Has anyone ever seen or heard of anything like this? It just seemed extremely weird and I still haven't come up with any sort of explanation for it that doesn't sound whack.
Some of the other things, AFAIK, are true. Switching jobs and moving, for example. They're probably more important than working long hours. Flexibility, not hard work.
I would assume they do, but have no evidence or experience to suggest so.

Again, admitting really rich, prominent kids is something that just has to be done to keep the school afloat.

If all you have is a bunch of eggheads, then you're an egghead school. For better or worse, eggheads don't run the world. Elite colleges can't ignore kids who might go on to run the free world someday.
I honestly do hope that paint is mercury-resistant. Otherwise, any terrorist-wannabe with a paintball gun and balls filled with mercury instead of ink would be able to cause a LOT of damage.

In the article they mention that it would be dangerous to bring mercury to the aircraft's cabin. Well, I have never seen an aircraft cabin where the aluminium fuselage was exposed. Thus, I thought that mercury would corrode all the way to the fuselage. From that to inferring that it would corrode paint as well would not be unreasonable, right?
That was a stupid comment made in haste that makes no sense as written. Paying apple 30% of repeated micropayments would hurt me more than the alternative, but it's only true in my context - which is probably not the context Apple designed their system for.

I am building a web based service which can also be accessed via an iPhone app. I get paid via micropayments which I aggregate till they reach a certain dollar amount and then process via a payment processor that charges me in single digit percentages. I have the option of using iPhone's own micropayment service but that would hurt me more.
A good designer is a good designer. If someone holds back the company later, that's not good design.

Design is way way more than logo and paint. Interaction design is just plain being able to make stuff that works well for people -- that's the kind of design I'm talking about. Should have made that more clear.
That looks quite interesting, thanks for that.
I approve of people putting their money where their mouth is.

I rather doubt this is an appealing model for publishing in general, though. (Then again, publishing is not an appealing model for publishing.)
John Key says Givealittle.co.nz leading the way
Yahoo.com at a computer being displayed at a tradeshow. I was mesmerised at that point...
hehe, I read the headline the same way. I was thinking, there goes the neighborhood...
Twitter Wit - Life After Valleywag for Nick Douglas
I don't really recall the first URL, but I have a very clear memory of the first time I saw broadband access. My dad's friend gave us a demo of how you could load yahoo.com in "only seconds" with his cable connection. Within a week, we had our subscription.
yes it is worth it. i am reading it right now. I was skeptical at first, as I find books like this pretty shallow (like Freakonomics), but this one is actually good, and backed by real data in many of his points. Especially the hockey players one. The data is right there, the elephant in the room nobody really noticed it.

I have had this saying: You like what are you good at, and you become good at what you like.

When you start an activity/sport or something like chess at an early age, the differences between you and other kids are minor, and if you have even a small 2%-5% edge, you end up winning. And you endup liking it, and work/study/practice harder on that, and you end up really good at it later on, and your performance will be a magnitude better from those kids that were only little bit behind you.

And in sports the day you were born is very important. I guess the school you go (elementary/middle school) is very important too.
It's not like you couldn't always just run multiple native processes on one machine.
Designing the Human Mind [video]
Isn't it correct to say "the plural of invertebrate is not lobsters"?

Similarly, the plural of anecdote can be many things, including data, but it is still correct to say "the plural of anecdote is not data."
Personal Renewal
> To your comment: Wouldn't entrapment laws cover this?

In USA? Ask the To Catch a Predator crew and law enforcement (sic/sigh) agencies doing the on-camera drama.
Yes but will techcrunch and the other blogger really cover your startup again just for the new windows version?

I wonder if they shouldn't have had a soft launch on HN first and then a bit later once the webplayer is available launch on techcrunch...

On this subject I found http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/03/dont-launc... very interesting... It's from this article that I decided that maybe a soft launch on HN before a real launch on techcrunch and the like is better
Otherwise, any terrorist-wannabe with a paintball gun and balls filled with mercury instead of ink would be able to cause a LOT of damage.

I think that it would be easier and cheaper to simply fire actual guns at the plane. A hit on a wing will bring down the plane quicker than mercury and hits will be easier.

From that to inferring that it would corrode paint as well would not be unreasonable, right?

It wouldn't, but I think that the article exaggerated the danger a bit. I don't think that the mercury from a single broken thermometer would eat through the floor and reach the fuselage. At least, I've never heard of it happening.
I've always found beauty in obscure languages that are spoken by less than 1,000 people. However I can't say I've done much to popularize any!
The Evolution of Amazon's Algorithm for Sorting Reviews
For Sale: The $100 House
I might chose something I have a little experience in, or just something so targeted that it has to work. I'll probably end up where experience and focus meet.

Or... I could turn to the wonderful HN community for ideas. Any takers?
Valid point, but people who are just in it for the economics might go for what's classed as an information science or management of information systems degree, which are usually viewed as easier than the mainline computer science degrees.
I've always used the ssh -D proxy as a SOCKS proxy, not a HTTP proxy. It works well, though, and it's dead simple to set up.
I think this one is pretty ubiquitous.
You are totally right and I am a fool for having allowed super exaggerated articles like this one to fire that region in my brain dedicated solely to imagining cheesy James Bond-like movie scripts ;-)
what are the chances that the gold/silver parallels AND the Dark Side of the Moon synchronicity are both coincidence? Part of the joke maybe. If you haven't done the "start dark side on the nth lion roar of wizard of oz" experiment, I recommend it.
That article most definitely should have come with a "dont try this at home kids" at the end.
symbolics.com
Oh, no. Many of us read Navokov's Lolita! (or watched the movie.) We should go to jail.

Don't fall into hysteria. And try to avoid stupid people who are well into it. Same with terror and drugs. Meanwhile bankers walk away with gigantic bonuses, right below your noses.

Also there are tough economic blocks to Cuba and Iran while the US-friendly governments of places like Thailand don't get any trouble at all. I haven't been there but the tales of relatives and what I read are revolting. That's not taking some pictures, that's wholesale slavery, rape, prostitution, and even murder. Why doesn't US media make a reality show on busting US-ians going there for sex vacations?

[Disclaimer: I actually got bored with the pseudo-romance drama of Lolita and dropped it after not that many pages. Overrated as hell. But now I know that.]
The major costs would be the assorted tooling charges:
- plastic moulds: for a tablet size probably $50-70k. I would recommend you get an experienced industrial designer to guide you through this process. Make sure if you get quotes from China that you don't give the 3D model for the quote - give 2D technical drawings with enough information for a quote but not for full production (your industrial designer should know this).
- PCB boards: nowadays tooling charges are quite low. We use OurPCB.com for a smallest circuit board and the tooling charge is in the low hundreds. We source the important components and get them to ship it to the PCB makers. they then send the completed PCB's to us.
- packaging: allocatae a few thousand to set up your box or plastic packaging.

Stage your production:
- pilot run (say 10 PCB boards to get all of your component logistics sorted out).
- 1st run (100 PCB's with 100 plastic shells and packaging)
- production run (1000 PCBs, 1000 plastic shells and packaging)

Assemble, program and test your devices close to you (ie. your garage :). This allows you a) to keep your IP close to you and b) iron out any production bugs, processes etc. so you are ready to outsource the whole production and assembly (if you so wish).
Wow, that's fascinating. In the current absence of non-whack explanations, what have you come up with so far?
I need an internship for immigration issues. Basically, I am a student currently, and it's easier to go in and out of the country if I have a F1 visa as opposed to an OPT. Since, I plan to make a couple of trips in and out of the country, having an internship makes things a lot easier for me at this point. You can checkout my resume to look at my programming experience.
Saw Shaun of the Dead, felt guilty for wasting my life, but not as guilty as I would have watching a "serious" zombie movie.
The minute you standardize something, you make it meaningless.

Indeed. Expressing units of measurement in terms of feet or meters? Standardization makes them meaningless. Instead, I'll just wave my hands in the air and say "roughly this long." And (X)HTML standards? Don't get me started. Lets all just throw angled brackets to the browser, that's far more meaningful.

Incidentally, your actual complaint seems to be that some existing standardized tests are poorly designed. This is a problem of test design, not standardization.
I used to be in the "Hollywood scene" and my son is a professional actor. Let me tell you this, now you and every small time director wannabe is making a zombie movie. And there are hundreds of wannabes in every city in America.

Why do people do this? Cause it's cheap? Worst idea ever. If you want to make a movie it's because you have a story to tell. If your zombie movie is about zombies coming to life and killing everyone, guess what? It's been overdone.

The last I looked, about two years ago, there were no less than 5 zombie movies being put together in a two week period in my area. What an imaginative bunch.

I'm sick to death of zombie movies (and never liked them in the first place).
Honestly, I don't know what the interesting startups that are hiring for the summer at this point. Since I have good credentials, I figured this is a place to help them find me. Is there a way to find companies that are hiring for the summer?
The guys over at the New York Times sure seem to thing so. They've been beating the "switch to paid subscription models online" drum pretty hard recently. The real differentiator is absolute top-shelf content. As far as I can tell (and my own surfing habits reflect this so I may have a personal bias) most folks don't much care where they get their content from as long as it's thoughtful, well-written and at least bears the appears of solid fact-checking. YMMV. The one thing that I think everyone in the industry agrees on is the kind of vanilla content that's coming off the wire these days is absolutely insufficient to attract users to an online portal. That crap is a commodity freely available on any number of aggregator sites.
Find it yourself if you care. I don't, especially. It was on Reddit within the past 6 months, but it's impossible to find things on Reddit. I'm not about to go googling about for it, personally.

Edit: Ok, ok, "fake" found it: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9899151-38.html?tag=nefd.l...
You're wrong actually, and I'll tell you why.

I have a hunch that people who are early adopters of things online are usually the same kind of people who are into Zombie films. The whole point of putting this onto HN (as opposed to a movie site) is that I would get intelligent discussion, with people articulating what it specifically is about these films that appeals to them (or not) - which is the exact type of data I'm seeing.

The reason I left it as a simple binary choice was so that I could gauge to what extent my hunch was correct (as a rough percentage). So far, the results are about what I expected, so I'm fairly pleased with it up until now, but I'll wait until a few days to pass final judgement.
> You see, anti-capitalism and a populist distaste for financiers are nothing new.

No surprise, financiers ripping us is nothing new either.

> The tiny, unthreatening banks did not have the margin of error to wait out the financial chaos. Meanwhile, places like Canada that allowed large national banking conglomerates avoided bank failures almost entirely.

Perhaps they didn't set the right limits, kept them too small. Because we failed to get it right once doesn't mean we should stop trying and just accept being ripped off as a cost of doing business.

Either we figure out how to regulate the market such that this won't happen in the future or we nationalize the banking industry like others have done and admit that the only thing that's really to big to fail is the government.

> There is also danger in drawing simple, neat lessons from a messy crisis.

That, I agree with. But our current system has clearly failed, something needs to be done, time for another experiment.

> We ought to pause before giving in to its mellifluous rhetoric.

Talking about possible solutions on a website is pausing, it's not like we're implementing policy here or anything. It's just an interesting things to speculate about.
We limit freedoms based on cognitive ability -- that's just common sense.

This sounds like a slippery slope. I'm all for helping to protect innocent people who are incapable of defending or protecting themselves, but there's a reason why, in the US, you're considered an "adult" at certain ages, rather than based on the results of some test that determines your cognitive abilities.
Cheers for that. I haven't been in a comic book store for about 17 years, so I'll have to go check it out.
In a strongly typed language one would normally want to reify the number in the type system whenever possible, i.e. the use of (a,b,c,d,e) rather than [a,b,c,d,e] in Haskell (that's a 5-tuple rather than a 5 element list).

I think that people used to dynamic programming languages would normally pick the list rather than the tuple simply because it at first appears easier. I think Dijkstra had something to say on that particular subject :)
Winnowing is not a terribly esoteric word. This whole comment thread is a discussion on winnowing. It's often used in literature, and I believe it is used in certain translations of the Bible.
See PyCon talks in Boston Wednesday
Hopefully they will use the money from this deal to turn their website into something that users don't hate.
Thanks, and yes, that's a really disturbing tactic, and pretty unbelievable that it's actually court-approved.
San Francisco Housing Market Instantly Hot
That was cperciva's point, I guess. I still think it's cool though.
Bat Hitches a Ride on Shuttle Discovery's External Fuel Tank
I've noticed a number of people following the convention of putting the year in parenthesis at the end of a dated article. It would be great if everyone followed this. (Edit: just noticed this article follows the convention; I assume that the title was edited after your comment)
Perhaps this is indicative of low-level PTSD caused by formal schooling. I wonder of a combination of mdma + therapy would help.
I have seen the genetic algorithm demo of mona lisa and its pretty cool. My problem with it is that using genetic algorithm for something like that seems "forced" because there's no real "evolution" involved in it.

Would it be possible to use genetic algorithm to .. say, evolve a face by beautifying it? by "mating" it with anther face? It would be an interesting experiment. Perhaps I'll explore this concept in code.
The reader embedded in the Scribd site drives me insane.
I think the reality is that most early adopters are now mac users. When releasing something new you need to convert what Seth Godin calls "sneezers," what he calls "laggards" can come later.
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Brewer makes green beer (not the St. Paddy's kind)
So then how could a balloon that traveled 100,000ft vertically land within 10km? Maybe the larger mass keeps the wind from pushing it so far.
I totally agree. I now believe that all progress in life and society is the result of informative failures. A job that didn't work out or a company that didn't work out are examples of such failures. The country that tries more things faster will learn and progress more. The US leads the world in innovation and job churn. I don't think it's an accident.