skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now I'm on the lookout!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5066721
Mind dump of thoughts/sites:

http://www.fitbit.com/
http://nikeplus.nike.com/plus/what_is_fuel/
https://jawbone.com/up

Lots of hardware devices and some software integrations, but need to think outside the box.

www.dietbet.com/ - Gamification of working out is a great idea/starting point, but what about taking it further. Choosing what you eat can be more important than working out.

A food/photo sharing/tracking software of pictures of everything you eat and possibly automated/encouragement via mechanicalturk based on does it look healthy would be cool. Also could align with friends/groups who are trying to eat healthy - people could comment and say WTF/Seriously... or better yet, ask wheres the photo or have you not eatten?

Some other directions would be more in line with a chrome plugin that goes off ever 30min for you to do a pushup or something.

Just some thoughts.
Is that the same one that shows someone burning gas coming of their faucet, which was debunked a long time ago as a result of poor well construction (or was it ground contamination).
There's a qualitative difference between our brain and cat's brain. We can do abstract reasoning, and with it we can "close over" ourselves and talk about how to improve. If we reach the point when we realize our brains are "unable to comprehend the universe" (and won't blow ourselves up before), we'll redesign our brains.
We've tried this. Banks won't loan unless you have prior success in that business. Only a few do Purchase Order financing (where you show them a list of pre-orders that you need money to service) and it's expensive and also requires prior success. All would require a personal guarantee. I had one tell me they wouldn't loan unless I had the amount of the loan in an account at their bank. What's the point of that? Generally speaking, U.S. banks are worthless for startups, unless you want to fund your business with credit cards.
From the article:

> to a disturbing degree

I dislike it when government-run media tries to tell me what to think about something.
And guess what, they're also two of the most widely installed software.

The truth is that sandboxes are effective in mitigating the attacks, because they add another level of security. Even safari added a sandbox a couple years ago.
token_type or lexical_type would make more sense to me. On top of defined? not returning a boolean, it has other confusing semantics. In particular, it's the only keyword I can think of that appears to exhibit call-by-name semantics. I don't know if this is just a special parser case, but it doesn't evaluate your arguments despite looking like a method call. So the return value can be doubly confusing.
Texas Hold'em, contrarily to chess or Go, is a game of imperfect information.

So psychology comes into play and that is basically impossible to "solve" unless we have real AI (not anytime soon and the implication would be way broader than "beating Hold'em").

Fixed-limit Hold'em is easier to play because the decision tree is trivial. It's still an imperfect information game but the best bots can already beat some of the best professional players.

But No-Limit Hold'em is another thing entirely: the decision tree is so huge that it's impossible to bruteforce. Impossible as in: unless a major scientific discovery we'll never ever be able to bruteforce it (there's not enough entropy in the know universe to do so).

So we're stuck and waiting for amazing discoveries in the AI field (and psychology field).
Nicely played.
That's if he was found guilty and given the maximum sentence for all charges, which a lot of people seem to be missing.

The key words there being "could have."
You like guns, right, God?

God says...

and Abednego, over the affairs of the province of Babylon: but Daniel
sat in the gate of the king.

3:1 Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, whose height was
threescore cubits, and the breadth thereof six cubits: he set it up in
the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon.

3:2 Then Nebuchadnezzar the king sent to gather together the princes,
the governors, and the captains, the judges, the treasurers, the
counsellors, the sheriffs, and all the rulers of the provinces, to
come to the dedication of the image which Nebuchadnezzar the king had
set up.

3:3 Then the princes, the governors, and captains, the judges, the
treasurers, the counsellors, the sheriffs, and all the rulers of the
provinces, were gathered together unto the dedication of the image
that Nebuchadnezzar the king had set up; and they stood before the
image that Nebuchadnezzar had set up.
Another way to think about it is why run if a F1 car beats any human runner?
Why?

A trillion times more solar energy lands on the planet every day and is wasted.
Biz Dev: A Lesson Learned About Commitment
+1 for PowerPivot. It kicks butt with large data sets, leverages your existing Excel skills, and extends those skills with DAX.
Having spent the majority of my teenage years studying and playing tournament level chess, too, I must say that the fact, that computers breezed by the best humans disenchanted me with the game somewhat.
I would not play in a tournament where I cannot be sure that my opponents aren't more than straw men for their computers.
I suspect chess is on the way down the bicycle lane, as much as it pains me to admit this.
I'll give you Go, but Texas Hold'em?

I am only a casual player of both chess and poker, but I don't see any way that the difficulty in building an extremely good automated Texas Hold'em bot is anywhere on the same order of difficulty as building an extremely good Chess bot.

What am I missing? Isn't the rage with Hold'em lately that the internet players who play mostly straight are cleaning up vs those who try to read people?
*Mars mission.
Is this really disgusting? There's very little context given at any point during the article. My understanding is there are around 85,000,000 barrels produced per day globally. Is ND now responsible for 10% more gas being burned globally? 0.5%? It's great that it shows up at night but there's a reason they have to circle the thing. It still pales in comparison to the intensity of Chicago nearby let alone the East Coast or Bay Area.

Fracking worries me and the wild west mentality that shows up whenever there are quick riches - be it energy, internet stocks or real estate - always leads to an ugly hangover. I just think it's better to take a step back and wonder about context vs getting sucked straight to this point.
Example? I don't understand what is meant by this.
Alcohol and Health
Maybe I'm the ignorant one but are you conflating gas from oil with natural gas, which actually has been driven to record low prices[1], so much so that utilities have switched from coal to natural gas at such a fast pace that it reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by a considerable amount in 2012[2]? "Prices as high as ever and destroy the environment as a bonus" may be doubly wrong.

[1]http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/12/abundant-natural-gas-lea...

[2]http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/02/us-emissions-idUSB...
The problem is not that computers are better per se, but that help from computers is getting harder and harder to detect.
I would more liken it to the development of doping in the endurance sports.
Ford Seeks 10% Gain in MyFord Touch Quality | ceoutlook.com
Yeah, design is a separate discipline from programming and has to be considered on it's own. It can't be boiled down to just a set of techniques (Photoshop techniques, in this case). It's important to learn design theory (what you'll get from those Peepcode play-by-plays or from some good design books) and the practical techniques (what you'll get from sites like http://psd.tutsplus.com).

I'd recommend tackling both design theory and Photoshop techniques, unless your only interest is in implementing other people's design work and you just need to know Photoshop techniques to translate that work from PSD to HTML/CSS.
Kickstarter has been responsible for funding Oscar nominations, museums, and countless creative projects. Their 2012 summary is full of stunning success stories.

The goal of this post is to kickoff a discussion about alternative crowdfunding models that work better for hardware startups. It's clear that Kickstarter is moving away from these and focusing on creative.
There is already a term for it -- spear phishing attack.
You say it's "ridiculously lengthy," and I say it's not.

This is what we have procedures, judges and juries for.
I seem to be one of the few persons commenting so far who actually lives in the region and regularly reads local reporting on issues in North Dakota (a state neighboring my state). Western North Dakota, where the Bakken Shale oil boom is occurring, is very sparsely populated and historically had minimal infrastructure. It takes TIME to build pipelines to move the natural gas brought up by oil drilling operations to natural gas customers. Pipeline proposals are currently in regulatory review. There isn't even pipeline infrastructure in place yet for all of the petroleum production in North Dakota--much of the oil produced there is brought to broader markets in tanker trucks, and the truck traffic volumes are putting a lot of stress on highway roadbeds until the highways can be upgraded.

Right now there is a boom economy in western North Dakota, with extremely high wages, low unemployment, a shortage of single women,

http://www.twincities.com/national/ci_22382285/north-dakota-...

and established businesses in the region importing workers from as far away as Illinois just to keep up normal operations as workers quit to join oil field crews. There hasn't been time to build infrastructure yet to move away the natural gas to markets that will pay for the gas--especially because the price of natural gas all over the United States has crashed because of the huge increase in production in the last few years. But given time, yes, there will be infrastructure in place to transport Bakken Shale gas to other markets, and I'm sure that we here in Minnesota will be as glad to have North Dakotan natural gas to supplement our nuclear-powered energy grid as we already are to have North Dakotan petroleum brought in by truck. Once more pipelines are built, the entire United States energy economy will become more flexible.

Still to be figured out is the economics of converting natural gas deliquefaction terminals (those cost BILLIONS of dollars and years to build or convert) along the Gulf Coast into liquefaction terminals, so that the United States can get into the business of exporting liquified natural gas. It could happen. North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula used to flare off all of their natural gas incidentally brought up during petroleum production--there was no local market for it. It took a long time to develop natural gas liquefaction; now there is international trade in natural gas that was undreamed of when I was growing up.
Show HN: My first Android app - Hacker News reader
Building an SSH client as a Chrome app doesn't introduce attack surface from web content. The SSH client and web content run in different sandboxed processes and don't share resources. For the web content (or another Chrome app) to break into the SSH client, it would need arbitrary unsandboxed code execution, which means it could manipulate any process running in the user's context. So, the threat model doesn't change from a standalone SSH client.

The bugs Mark found in NaCl several years ago don't alter the threat model for a standalone SSH client either. And for context, Mark's work was done while NaCl was in alpha development, years before it shipped in Chrome; were performed as part of a Google sponsored contest and later a Google paid audit; and applied to the NaCl validator sandbox, not the outer process isolation sandbox. So, even the more nebulous threat you're implying is grossly misstated.
> The design portion was "how can we make a case that has the least amount of plastic, is easy to clean and access for service". That's as far as it went.

Are you sure?

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2012/technology/1202/gallery....

"The glowing light ring of this MRI scanner is meant to distract patients from their procedure and sooth their nerves. The entire unit was designed to help improve the workflow of technicians and caregivers."

But I have to say, when I asked google images for "mri scanner", with exceptions they mostly looked more or less the same to me, so I guess everybody designs them with similar goals in mind. Now, to make an MRI scanner that looks like, oh I don't know, maybe that plant/vagina thing from Pink Floyd's "The Wall"; that would be truly bold design. And altough I'm not really fond of Giger, he should make one, too.

> There is no place for a designer as they don't understand how to keep things easy to clean and repair.

Uhh.. ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design
Motivating Startup Quotes from Industry Leaders
Yes, but entropy is not self-correcting. We're wasting (as in, destroying, foerver) easily extractable material and energy. It's much easier to drive 10 000 tons of aluminium out of the mountain with trucks than to collect and melt enough scrap to get the same amount of metal for your factory from junk.

Economy is a leaky abstraction, it is ultimately subject to physics and it will break down if we push it too far hoping that market will correct all side effects of bad decisions.
Not a lot of intelligent and talented software engineers know about it, so they put up with that shit. I know I did.
I didn't see the movie, and I'm sure it sensationalized things as movies have to do (matt damon!).

But. You're saying "oh that won't happen unless people screw up". Guess what, in the real world, people screw up all the time. Screwups should be a major part of the math when people make decisions about fracking.
That was said about Chess vs. Dames. And along came Deep Blue.
Friends and family is an important one. It's not a lot of money, but investors are a little like sheep, and if you can show that you've been able to convince some investors and are committed enough to beg and borrow from your own family, then they are more likely to be interest.

Getting paying customers is the best way to raise money. No equity given up, proof of your business model, and that looks great to investors later on, too.

Incubator programs aren't all created equal. Do a LOT of work to vet them first. Many will offer a small amount of money, offer very little support during the incubator, have no connections at the end of the incubator, and then dump you with no support after the incubator, but kindly taking a percent of the company. There are some good ones, though.

Angel investors and VC are an option, but those are not easy to get and you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.

The best thing to do is build your product and keep building it, and talk to as many people as you can. Resources will come out of the woodwork slowly, and connections will be made that will lead organically to what you need.
Chess bots don't know the 'perfect' move for most of the game either (only start and end games), that doesn't mean they can't beat human players.

Can you be more specific as to what is so impossible about building a smart betting poker bot?
It has nothing to do with a superior sense of right and wrong.

If we are going to meet up at 1pm and you roll in at 1:20pm that makes me think you have absolutely no value for my time.

What do you think I am stuck doing for those 20 minutes? If it's at a place to get lunch or something then I'm sitting there doing nothing.
This sort of logic is supposed to already have been done prior to granting the patent so I'm assuming you mean that, for each patent granted, this is to be performed before granting the patent. Are you saying that you want this done also at the trial/hearing?

I'd further ask:

- Who are these 'experts' you mention?

- How are they identified as such

- Who pays for their time?

Let's take the case of a drug patent - walk me through how they find an expert who doesn't work for either company, how long it takes the person to do discovery, how much they charge, and who pays.
World’s most industrious lazy man outsources all of his work to China
What is next, "scissors" - a solder-it-yourself kit?
The prosecutors piled charge upon charge. If they didn't want 30 years, why pile on so much? If they wanted 6 months, they could have stuck with a charge whose sentencing wasn't so extreme.
Read the article, thought it was a bit wooly and vague. Agreed with this comment which points out the obvious nicely.

http://www.techinasia.com/mobile-strategy-is-bullshit/#comme...

All nicely wrapped up.
Review of Python Requests...for a literary journal
I agree it is disheartening. I stopped playing in tournaments shortly before Kasparov's fateful defeat by Deep Blue. But I still love the game and am always up for playing a friendly match. However the suggestion that we give it up because machines are better is, in my opinion, insulting. If people still want to play in tournaments against humans, then they should be allowed to.
5 Startup Marketing Actions to Impress Investors
Sucks, but I suspect you're right. He's not alone in that though.
I'm not an expert, but I believe the difficulty with Texas Hold'em is modeling the other human players. "Heads up", where there is an optimal strategy, is essentially solved.
The Evolutionary Biology of Star Trek
You missed a principle:

3. The punishment must be enough to deter him--more precisely, to ensure that he switches from illegal to legal means for achieving his goals.

The whole point is that #3 might well be incompatible with #1 and #2, if Aaron was sufficiently committed to his goals and legal means did not offer enough of a possibility of achieving them (which is what appeared to be the case). Obviously if you leave out #3 there's no problem; but Kerr specifically included #3 and talked like he thought it was important.
"If it were only a '6 month low security setting' being discussed, why wouldn't Aaron have been told of this?"

He was told. If you can even imagine that he wasn't, you need better news sources. This kind of anti-reality nonsense sounds an awful lot like Tea Party conspiracy crap. To effectively critique the law, everyone needs to learn how it works.
Show HN: Simple tool to manage time on projects for developers and freelancers
Too bad you probably can't get a Honda Civic GX and fill it up for free up there and drive for free. :)
I would pledge between $5 and $10. No thinking. At that point we may even start to talk subscription.
Remarkable, isn't it? That doesn't even qualify as convoluted legalese; that's simply atrocious style.
Makes me wonder if Google shouldn't require apps that access user information to provide an explanation of why the data is being accessed, how it is used, and how long it is kept. Then allow users to click through the notifications to get more information.
It's essentially a problem of corruption. If you want to 'beat the system from within', for instance by joining the political stage or by becoming insanely wealthy through some corporate scheme so you can use your power to lobby you will end up being such an integrated part of the system that arguing against it will argue to a large extent against your own interest. That's why the situation persists. If you could convince large numbers of voters to vote their own interests instead of being tricked into voting based on inconsequential talking points you'd end up with Ralph Nader for president instead of a democrat or a republican. Fix that and you can fix everything else with relative ease. But that's a very hard problem to fix, if it is even possible. So you get individual fighting windmills at a level that they can relate to instead.
It is extremely difficult to program a computer to respond well to bluffing and other betting patterns. Poker is not just about betting on the probabilities of the cards in front of you but there is a huge element of analysing betting patterns in conjunction with estimated probabilities. This impacts on psychology in addition to maths so is hard to model.
How to Build a Startup
But if I start of owning both the land and the mineral rights, surely I can sell off the mineral rights and continue to "own" and farm the land? It would seem a surpising legal requirement that the land and the mineral rights always remain part of the same item.

[NB I come from somewhere with quite remarkable land ownership issues, so perhaps I'm introducing complexities where they don't exist].
Censorship is censorship.
If you think US Attys prosecute people because they organize peacefully against copyright laws, you're living in a different world from the real one.
Elsevier In Advanced Talks To Buy Mendeley For Around $100M
Whoa, already down from 500 problems per 1000 vehicles (last March) to 400 in 1000 now, and pushing hard to 360 in 1000? I'm definitely curious the structure of their metrics What would that performance translate to if iOS or Android had similar "problem" levels?
Aaron Swartz and the Corrupt Practice of Plea Bargaining
http://apc.io/media/apc/img/products-slide1.jpg?135843314774...
One can always stop typing and simply scroll down and check.
Finding Your 'Plus Plus'
The 30 Years War was that era's WWI/Great War in it's aftermath. It forever shattered the idea of a general Christan commonwealth and so depopulated areas in which it was fought that many Germans think it was worse than the worse of WWII and I'm inclined to agree.

It was a stark object lesson in the potential fate of unarmed civilian communities, and I'm sure it was an input into the Swiss system, which of course includes conscription.
According to http://apc.io/specifications/, the third product is called "8750", which somewhat damages the pun.

But seeing that the Paper has an accessible JTAG port, they could really sell a JTAG adapter under the "Scissors" name.
There is a European wide law with regard to warranty, see here. http://www.consumenteninformatiepunt.nl/page/en/themes/Kopen...
Well, of course, and I still love to play sometimes. But I would not play in any game where the stakes are high enough that I would suspect my opponent to try to pull an Ivanov.
`defined?` is actually an operator: http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/tut_expressions...

That may make things actually more confusing on first glance, but it does give a technical reason why it doesn't follow method naming conventions.
Searching for an app to organize a potluck dinner, and failing miserably
Are filters for images of child sexual abuse written into law? It is a industry standard in Europe, but I never heard that UK actually made a law to force ISPs to use it.

as for the linked content-code, it is true that its is not a industry regulation but a rather a industry practice code written by large ISP themselves.
I guess it simply takes up too much space to practically store. Liquefied gas would take up much less space, but the equipment to condense it and keep it chilled presumably costs a lot more.
"I drink your milkshake!"
Bit annoying that that button resizes...
Man secretly outsources own job to China
> He broke the law. Which means he is a criminal.

It really isn't that simple.
If it had been a "Ruby WTF's" list, I wouldn't have had any issues with it. While many of those items are like that for good reasons, I'd understand them causing someone reasonably new to Ruby to get confused, and worth discussing.

When it's called "Ruby mistakes" on the other hand, it just gets silly.
If the government couldn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he intended to distribute the public-domain part of the archive, he would have won the largest part of his case, or at least received a very minimal sentence (with no prison time).