skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me, the planning and density issues everyone's taking about feel like a red herring. Plunk this woman down in the middle of NYC and remove her need for a car whatsoever. Is she really going to let her kid go wherever he wants outside? Is she really going to feel a sense of community, or will she be like most New Yorkers and barely know who her neighbors are? (And before you say 'that's because NYC isn't planned well, either,' would these problems truly go away with more parks?)

I'm just theorizing, of course, but I suspect her real issues have a lot more to do with cultural homogeneity and societal mobility. A community with people from all over the place, constantly moving in and out? Low trust and lots of alienation. My whitebread little Texas town, where every church is full on Sunday and the average person's been here for decades? We're completely car dependent out here, the streets are real wide, and for that matter, there's no sidewalks and barely any parks - but there's unsupervised kids running around all over the place, and I can't get through a supermarket trip without being stopped for a conversation with someone I've met. It's nice, and as far as I can tell, it's all without the benefits of urban planning.
Flossing isn't about your teeth so much as it is about your gum health. Nasties that get in your gums will get into your blood stream, and there's a high correlation between gum inflammation and generalized inflammation, even heart attacks. Some researchers even believe that inflammation that starts in places like your gums is a cause of heart disease, rather than just a comorbidity. This is not a very "out there" hypothesis, either.

Don't skip flossing just because you haven't had a bunch of cavities. Your teeth may be special, but is your heart?
I believe this consume huge amount of bandwidth on your side, mind sharing the stats for the last 24 hour?
To provide a more concrete objection, I'll say that a human-level AI would have to have a general and expandable framework for learning, and I don't think we really have any idea how to build one. Watson is cool and all (and probably the best current counterexample to my point), but it needed a lot of domain experts with doctorates to set it up to "understand" problems in a relatively limited field.
Leek and potato soup with Serrano ham strips and caramelized onion
Unfortunately the mobile version is very poor on Android and does not at all scale to larger screen sizes. I'm sure they are working on this but so far Trello is not very fun to use on the platform.
This must get pretty frustrating for MIT students...
It is cool to learn about dendrites: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:FIejhf3q_y4J:...

I see now, more intuitively, how the brain's nonlinear triggering might come about, and how plasticity can be achieved.

Isn't it worth noting, however: that the singularity may not require 100% replication of the human brain, but rather replication of aspects of it? In other words, mental illness should not be viewed as a requirement... it should be avoided, if possible, in such modeling, assuming we're developing these models to help run our infrastructure.

Creating an exact replica of a human brain on a machine seems an unnecessary goal. What we want is a machine that can think like us but orders of magnitude faster/broader. That doesn't mean we want it to think like us in every sense, but rather to accomplish specific goals: like the end of poverty.
From http://3down.mit.edu/3down/

Tuesday January 22 2013 12:19:

The MIT.EDU domain has been compromised and sites external to MIT are currently being redirected elsewhere. We are working with the domain registrar to get this fixed.
Ruby Manor - love the ethic. Determined to make it this year!
Why Are Groups Such as the NRA So Powerful? [video]
Why is it that organized interest groups such as the National Rifle Association wield such powerful influence in policy discussions? According to Professor Mike Munger, the reason is simple. In politics, small but organized groups win.

Politics is sometimes more complicated than simply having the majority of voters on your side. Prof. Munger explains the three main factors that can allow a smaller interest group to succeed in implementing a policy that may be opposed by a larger (but unorganized) group. First, an interest group's members receive individual benefits from the group's success, which encourages them to act. Second, smaller groups will find it easier overcome the "Free-Rider Problem" since each member's contribution is more visible. Finally, interest groups frequently offer selective incentives that reward people who help support their cause.

This economic concept applies to issues far beyond gun rights. Interest groups ranging from environmental activists to rent-seeking corporate lobbyists all understand that Prof. Munger is correct when he says, "Politics in Washington is about concentrating and focusing power."
Short term, yes.

Longer term, not so much. As word gets around that he isn't a good dentist, he will have fewer customers.
I actually know several languages, on my free time I mainly use C++ and while I've only played with it I like go and Clojure. I just don't have any professional experience with these languages yet (other then some MFC stuff using C++ though i'd prefer not putting that on my resume in fear someone might want me to actually use it haha)
Ask HN: should you have users verify accounts through e-mail confirmation?
I'd like to hear from the HN community what you think about the pro/con of a user having to verify a new user account on a website by clicking an e-mail verification.

So the workflow would be
+ go to website
+ create account
+ click e-mail confirmation
+ login
Let’s send better emails this year
But cities do compete - London, NY, Boston, SF all are fairly viable competitors For attracting the best of global talent.

And areas of cities (I think the term is metro-area, including feeder towns etc) compete within the city - Kent is a lot more expensive than east essex and both are roughly the same distance from London.

I am not saying the micro level analysis is wrong - just that only considering commercial house builders as the only agents with skin in this game is too narrow.

Each city mayor will adjust their regulation mix to get the best out of their towns - if we don't like the results that's probably because local democracy needs more effort from us than traditionally it gets - every city could be a pedestrianised beauty if getting elected depended on it.
mit.edu got hijacked; it's not just CSAIL.
Asana seems cool. Is there a notes/message feature like Basecamp? I like to collaborate on documents and this is a necessary feature.
> Breakthrough after breakthrough already happens today, and happens more and more often due to growing economies around the world, along with more people doing more reasearch with faster computers.

This statement brought to you by the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, ...
Responsive Design with Twitter Bootstrap
LaunchBit Is Ready To Grade Your Email Newsletters
Big Data Trends in 2013
I find that shutting it down and even putting it on standby requires too many actions.

Which is what finally got me to start using the power button, which is still just one action.
Wow... Great reminder to not lose focus of what's really important. Good stuff Sean!
I may be wrong, but I think you are double counting the cost of the maternity leave. The cost to the company is the cost of finding/training/paying a temp. The cost of paying the woman her salary while she is gone would have still occurred if she wasn't gone. Or am I missreading? You would include lost productivity due to a less effective temp worker I suppose.

My general response to letting companies negotiate freely is that it seems important, but potentially destructive at it's extreme. I think there should be certain minimum labor standards applied to all employers so that no one employer is at an economic disadvantage by treating their workers humanely. Regarding such minimum requirements including six months of paid maternity leave I'm not sure how I feel.
Thanks. What other limitations did you face? And what do you use now instead?
I was curious, so I did a quick search - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3313282?start=0&tst...
Urban Airship Meeting Rules
It was in firefox.
What will you do when your PI refuses to pay for open access on a publication?
I don't see anything there (under favorites or subscriptions), but I didn't expect to, either, since I was never asked to log in.

It would be very nice, though, to be able to add videos from my subscriptions to my watch later list, and then watch that playlist while being able to reorder/remove videos.
For me that green button gives steam.deb and not the windows version.

Also did you notice -> "Not running on Linux yet?
Grab Ubuntu 12.04 LTS"
Cherrypicked? He's describing how consciousness currently manifests itself. Which cherries did he forget to pick?

Any cherry that doesn't fit his preconceived conclusion. Kurzweil has eloquently made his arguments in his books and elsewhere, which are summarily ignored here. But it's not like Kurzweil is some random crackpot that nobody supports, there are tons of scientists who agree with him. For instance, Henry Markham and his collaborators have made similar predictions about how their work will lead to human-level AI in the relatively near future.

Yeah, I guess if by "all this pseudoscience" you mean a two mentions of two very minimalistic claims. It's not like he's fabricating Deepak-Chopra-esque word salad.

Two brief bullet points out of a list of six brief bullet points is a fairly substantial chunk of the argument.
> Solr uses ZooKeeper under the hood which implements the
> Paxos algorithm

ZooKeeper does not implement Paxos.
I've used both; I much prefer the new basecamp, it's a vast improvement.
I skimmed through most of the article, and agree to many points the author raised.

However, I find it not convincing, despite the fact I already agree to much of it. It's full of "I think this makes my life better, so it should to yours", with no definition of "better" or concrete example of achieving that "better".

This is unfortunate, I'd also like to believe that one should be able to achieve greatness without working themselves to death, and I wish there is evidence of that. Then I'll be able to enjoy my procrastination guilty-free.
Using basecamp for various project and very enjoying it compared to most other solutions.
The population density in Germany means that there is at least a small village every 1-2 miles. I don't know if that's relevant to the conversation, but it's definitely a big difference between Germany and the US, and affects the culture of both. (For example, the tradition of travelling tradesmen in Germany probably makes sense because of this.)
Great, now build a program to play Go, and have it win every time.
It's all just CSS! A quick

border-radius: 4px;

will bring back the rounded rectangles you know and love.
America is not homogeneous. "Random middle America" I can't speak to, but certainly neither coast fits this article (from my experience). There doesn't seem to be mention of this in the article.
> For example I have to set and square requirements of a technical nature (sometimes down to details) with each of these parties.

Without knowing the specifics of your company, this feels like a needless managerial role. These are the things you want to trust your people with, so you can focus on the bigger picture. I mean, if you are taking away technical planning from an engineer, what real engineering work is left?

Your final paragraph is a better example of the manager's role. To shield the outside world. To deal with problems of the people on the outside (clients, investors, etc.). The team should come to you with problems that arise, but you should generally not need to go to the team at all.
Portland, OR. One of the most bike-friendly cities in the country, also highly walkable, and with a great light rail and bus system. And on the occasions when you need a car, or a truck, Zipcar has vehicles all over Portland.
Or maybe the moral is that young people are generally healthy and thus are not a great population to study when judging the efficacy of health habits?
Why would it not result in a flood of refugees to S. Korea (ROK)? Unless you're saying that the indoctrination is such that they would rather flee to another (more moderately) centrally-controlled regime versus a free democracy - one that shares their culture (ignoring the most recent 60+ years) and language?
I would love to hear how this could have happened. Social engineering at the DNS provider? Unpatched server? If someone knows, please do tell. I love hearing about how people pull off these things.
Maybe even an inside job? a lot of people are sympathetic to the cause, maybe one of those people just left the window open or something?
Design blog 
design blog
There are many factors that affect tooth decay and plaque buildup including the microbial content of your mouth, your diet, and the amount of saliva produced.

But one thing that is clear is that oral health is very important. I've noticed that when I brush around midday, I'm in a much better mood. But don't take my word for it -- numerous studies have established co-incidence between heart disease, mortality, and inflammation and bad oral health. And there are good reasons to believe it is not simply an issue of correlation without causation as local even mild infection can cause many downstream effects throughout the body. And anyways, it's just so much better to have a clean mouth.
It's an ASP.net MVC app, if I recall correctly. The .NET world has a parallel mechanism to .war deployment, though.
Wow, what an incredible hack. Pwnd page well designed and thought out. What a way to make a tribute to Aaron.

EDIT: Imgur link in case it gets taken down
http://imgur.com/3AADDRT
> Towns are an interesting case where the free market system breaks.

It doesn't break. It's being broken on purpose — you cannot own a town.

Towns that used to have an invested owner are often famous for their excellent design. See Zamość[1] for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamo%C5%9B%C4%87
Yes they are types of notations (for different things). The author of the articled lumped probability in with machine learning. Probability is a notion for machine learning as is fuzzy logic. Although they trying to represent quite different concepts.
You forgot Jenkins/Hudson too.
Man, this is really nice. Gonna have to use an alias account though if you are tracking shadier projects like scheduling dates with multiple people, daytrading at work etc.
Isn't that what the Lymphatic System is for? Bacteria do not simply enter the bloodstream, that would be a serious infection.
New music startup looking to take over the online EDM music scene
Genetics, and how much flouride you got as a child, also make a big difference. Some people have to fight against tooth decay a lot more than others. (I'm more in your category, but have to be careful about my gums.)
Funny thing is I was just setting this up for personal use this morning. I really like it. The mobile app needs some work on Android, but the web app is great.
I admire GitHub's organization and structure more than most, but we can't pretend they're a run of the mill business.

The bar to get hired as an engineer, for instance, is not trivial. Once you have the ability to cherry pick your hires, you can also better select for fit (in this case, capacity to be self-driven on a mostly-remote team).

Also on a purely product-related note, their UX has always (personally) felt lacking.
Microsoft Surface Pro Coming Feb. 9
First Sunday Doomsday Algorithm: Learn by Example
You are correct. It is not an implementation of Paxos, but a Paxos-inspired protocol. http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/ZooKeeper/PaxosRun
I don't know hacker culture, but would Sabu really do this and use his own name after his true identity has been revealed and turned informant?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabu_(hacktivist)

Seems like it would jeopardize whatever arrangement he had with the feds.
You found it a bit odd that he's not cynical?
On the contrary, the idea that cryogenics will work is the very definition of speculation.
When is "ACID" ACID? Rarely
A coworker of mine from way back had a dentist who put it this way: It's simple. You just have to floss between the teeth you want to keep.

Flossing twice a day? I thought I was awesome for once a day.
Also plays "The Star Spangled Banner"...
Requests for web-browsable public view:

https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/12

Project lead sees it as outside of scope, possibly to not get into trouble with Github?
I really hate the crapware, and I hate more the "opt-out" crapware. But the "summary" of the article is a little unfair:

Oracle's Java plugin for browsers is a notoriously insecure product. Over the past 18 months, the company has released 11 updates, six of them containing critical security fixes. [...]

The updates and security fixes include not only the plugin, but all the Java runtime that is much bigger and complex. (For example, one of the updates was: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/javacpuoct... ). This is like accusing Chome or Dropbox of being insecure, because they do a lot of updates (that are automatic, invisible and don't offer crapware).
> I know of a few strong mostly Haskell places in NYC alone.

Hedge funds? Or something else?
Almost all of MIT's network administration happens within MIT, so you can't hack it by social engineering an outsider.
There's a saying in Florida.

"We don't care how you do it up North."

Sure some of it is just Southern obstinacy. But some of it is an understanding that with a 67 billion dollar tourist economy and 8400 miles of coastline (more than the U.K.) replenishing beaches is a priority and snow plows aren't.

Likewise, European urbanism doesn't scale to the U.S. California has half the density of Germany. Washington is the median state for density it has 1/6th the density.

The ODP soccer program in Alabama regularly requires interested players from all parts of the state to convene at a single location. Alabama is about the size of England. You'd have to be daft to require all the top youth players in England to come to a single location for a one day training. You'd have to be insane to propose 10,000 miles of railroads for a population of 8 million.

U.S. development patterns aren't a function of bad planning. They are a function of distance. Paris is closer to Moscow than St. Louis is to Los Angeles and doesn't require crossing a continental divide.

That doesn't mean it can't be improved. Just that the solutions aren't a priori. They have to recognize the issues on the ground.
Multiple times I've had someone complete a registration, only to find that they'd mistyped their own email address. Twice. Without their subsequent "Where's my confirmation?" email I might not have known, and they might never have completed their registration successfully.

It's a pain, but it's now reasonably familiar, and it serves a specific purpose - confirming the email address.

If you can get accurate details from people without requiring the explicit test of the explicit function then I'd be interested.
Of course it's not actually hacked by Sabu, the entire message is sarcastic.
One reason I always download the full installer (even to upgrade), rather than using the Java update notification service (it runs, but when it prompts with an update -- if it does so before I manually upgrade -- I use that notification as a cue to go download the full installation; I don't let the service upgrade me).
No. IBAN is one way only - you can only receive money.

The IBAN is just country, bankid, account id + checksum all in one. There in no off by one possible or misplaced digit or two.

When you need to send moneyyou need to just give the iban+name of the receiver. It clears in 24 hours and transfer fee are less than 1EURO.
As a student I don't think its very frustrating. I only visit the main MIT site when I see posts like this really or news articles. I am surprised by how ready people are to exploit given a reason though.
Yeah, they can't see the MIT website they never use.
Have they fired Ryan Singer?
I'd just like to take the time to point out, that this is a direct link to a compromised page.

Sure, the message is championing a tragic victim, but do you see how this isn't exactly the wisest move?

Do I need to call attention to the recent Java zero-day exploit?

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/10/new-java-vulnerabil...
Depth- and Breadth-First Search
http://xkcd.com/932/
Yet another example how misguided modern day internet-cowboys with their tar-and-feather vigilante justice are.
If you think of communication as a tool, something to keep in mind is that sometimes we use communication in lieu of having a better tool. Once you've made your persuasive argument and have to get to work...

An example, when Wave was still an going concern at google, I ran a team doing Enterprise Architecture designs. As an experiment on one project, we decided to use a very structured Wave/Google Docs approach (I don't remember all of the details). But it cut the communication requirements down to a small percentage of what we typically had been up to. A hundred emails a day might turn into 5-10. Project assets were magically organized and Wave became a simple place to capture the work, ask a couple questions, see where each member was with their portion of the work, offer help etc.

I'm finding similar things with Trello (I'm pretty new to using it) when used for things-other-than-agile-development-management. Emails/IMs/PhoneCalls are way down, assets are already organized, everybody knows where everybody else is at a glance (eliminating the need for most syncing communications/meetings).
My personal touchstone for the beginning of the true Robot Age is a fully-automated McDonald's or equivalent being seriously deployed not as a tech demo, but because it is the best solution. Supplies in one end, someone carting the waste out the other, and everything else, including cleaning, should be done by the robot itself. (Though perhaps I'll bend on the cleaning. That does add another very significant level of complexity.)
Doubtful, and what's the alternative? Somebody else hacking MIT in Sabu's name to make life difficult for him sounds much more likely, and hilarious.
Who runs java?
I don't know about VMWare, but last I checked VirtualBox couldn't do GPU passthrough, so 3D effects and games would only be able to chug along on the CPU.
And the page title has a "Hackers" reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21lUsGr6YMQ
I think this applies to many of the "self improvement" articles I've read.

I think these articles are definitely worthwhile, I just believe they need to be read as they are: about someone else's life. If your goals and life situation align with the author's, then I'd consider it pseudo-advice. If not, it should be read as an interesting personal success story, which are still valuable pieces.
Seriously, and flossing undoubtedly pushes some food particles beneath the gum line.
Your comment seems pretty short sighted though, don't you think?
how completely childish.
Microsoft Surface Pro on sale starting Feb 9
"How to screw up custdev" by robfitz
At the Ubuntu login screen, try selecting Unity 2D instead of the default. I run that on my laptop and it helps performance.
How long it took to realize this? A decade?)

Actually, RDBMS folks knew that for ages. There are basically two major types - ones who know nothing but Oracle, a vast majority, and those who have seen Informix or DB2. (SQL Server always considered as a tasteless joke). So, those small minority always knew what a bloatware Oracle is.
Their registrar was probably vulnerable (or socialed), because the nameservers were changed. This is not uncommon.
Disabled to make automation (corporate installations) difficult, perhaps?

I find it mind-boggling that people actually put up with (or defend) user-unfriendly behavior like this.