skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spotify is horrible for artists. In some senses it's even worse than piracy because listeners think it's far, far better for artists than it really is. At least with piracy people know the artist isn't getting paid. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/research/augustconcerts2.jpg

What makes it even worse is that Spotify itself doesn't make money! They are losing tens of millions of dollars per year, it's crushing all other distribution models, and artists aren't getting paid. It's basically the worst outcome for everybody all at the same time.
There's no hidden/default parameters in haskell (records have default values but that's different), that line is eta reduced because those 2 functions always behave identically

number = return

You have to figure what you did in that GHCi session that defined (return) to shadow the Prelude one that everybody knows about, which is the only one in language and "standard libs" with that name

http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=return

I am confident you'd get good answers somewhere where people are monitoring for hsakell questions (SO, reddit, mailing list; on HN threads usually disappear in a few hours)(tikhonj's answers are excellent, but s/he is only one person):

https://plus.google.com/100165496075034135269/posts/UztvNpAJ...
requests is an excellent library to use in place of urllib
The article has a post date of March 10th (2013) but references a Flash zero day that was fixed "on March 15" - following the referenced link shows it is referring to March 15 2011, two years ago. So is the submitted post in reference to an attack that happened two years ago?
You should include some form of timeouting. I purposely have Reddit blocked on my computer, and the page wouldn't finish loading because of that.
Show HN: Cartograph - Generate color coded maps of India with ease.
What do you wish you could do that you can't?

Ah, there's the thing. I've spent too long learning how to deal with Real Life.

Actually, looking at it, many of these are social problems, as I had hypothesized.

* Technical problem

* Technical

* Partially technical, partially an issue of almost deliberately building energy-intensive civilizations.

* High-megabits and gigabit connections are on their way, but come with the social problems of installing new infrastructure.

* Bullet trains, supersonic flight, and that sort of thing, but again, infrastructure and societal preferences.

* On its way right now.

* Memrise

* In the research stages right now.

* Again: social problems of Americans deliberately building energy-inefficient civilization (like suburbs, for example).

* Ok, there's an interesting notion: can we make shipping and delivery better between vastly far nodes of a graph rather than using the center/periphery model currently employed by the shipping industry? The whole reason for center/periphery is that the fixed costs of each shipping vehicle are significant, making it far cheaper to distribute them through centralized shipping and mass distribution to the periphery areas. I've heard someone wants to revive the notion of "shipping tubes" through the ground, which would function a lot like packet-switched containerized shipping, but that's another infrastructure issue and may not be the optimal solution.

* Social problems of building a carbon-nanotube-based space elevator, torus-shaped rotating space colonies, and generation ships. Well, that or teleportation, but the latter is far less likely.
When Newton came up with his universal law of gravitation, he also made an interesting observation. He had no idea why gravity worked the way it did, he could only model its behavior numerically.

It's been over 300 years and we're still trying to figure out exactly how gravity works. But in a way it doesn't matter: his law has given humanity tremendous abilities it didn't have before.

When Deep Blue won the Jeopardy contest a couple of years ago, it was obvious that it wasn't intelligence in the sense that we commonly understood it. Yet it was able to beat the human champions. Deep Blue wasn't a model of a human player, but it didn't matter because for the purposes of its construction it performed just as well as one.

My money says the singularity happens the exact same way -- we are able to "fake" more and more things that look exactly like intelligence until one day we're able to fake intelligence to a degree that it's virtually indistinguishable from our own. We're eventually able to do something that looks like moving our sentience into a computer even though it "won't really" be doing it.

My guess is that we're hundreds of years away from that date, but whether it happens or not, the fact that an expert right now in the complexity of the underlying physical system has an opinion on the computational problem that probably won't be solved until after 2100 doesn't seem to me to be very relevant. Of course it's complicated. Of course we don't understand it. And of course we can't duplicate the structure of things we don't understand. I believe for any layman in the field all of that goes without saying?
“Finding out your real friends”: David Carr on paid content / paywalls
Yeah, it's very basic. If you check out the src, you can see that it is vowel, consonant, vowel... Basic, but it kinda works.
Sign me up anytime for anyone of those projects, but wait will it pay as much as my mediocre average crud software developer job??
That has always been my response to John Searle's Chinese Room [1] thought experiment. The argument boils down to the human consciousness either being magic or not. Magic being something beyond physics.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Off topic anecdotal story:

in 1998 we were working late at a small startup in redwood city. After a long day we decided to go to a bar in downtown RWC to play pool and grab a drink.

While there, two ladies came in and were walking around in lingerie. We had no clue why they were walking around like this, as this was just a normal bar and not a strip club or dance place of any sort.

Shortly, they came over to talk to us and they told us they were selling raffle tickets.

I asked them what they were selling raffle tickets for. They stated that they were raffling off the lingerie they were wearing. That you bought tickets and at the appointed time, they would draw a winner and change out of the lingerie and give it to the winner.

WTF?!

We asked "why?"

They said they were students at "silicone [sic] valley college" and this was a way to raise money to put themselves through school.

We laughed about it and declined buying any raffle tickets.
Well, you might want to change the backend database as well or that could lead to some slightly awkward situations..
Thank you, i will definitely be changing the wording. after i read your feedback, i see the text doesn't add anything to the site. more like it takes away some things.
It actually IS demonstrably true that the brain is made of atoms. That makes it a quantum system, which our modern physics tells us how to simulate. The use of the term "impractical" here refers to the fact that we don't have quantum computers and that we don't have the computing power required to simulate such a large quantum system.

I'd say dismissing thousands of years of philosophy here is relevant, since it was likely produced before we had the tools to understand what we're dealing with. All experimental physics points towards an understanding of how quantum systems work, and that's all we need to model any quantum system. The brain is not any different because it's a brain.
> What you're saying is merely postulation, it's not "demonstrably" true

I don't think the parent disagrees with you. The question of whether or not something is _computable_ in the technical sense of the word does not need any sort of demonstration or experimental results.
Well, getting you somewhere faster.
I think the worry of giving away research is natural, but misguided. Consider these scenarios:

(1) If Earth's population was 1 billion, would it be worthwhile for society to fund research?

(2) If Earth's population was 7 billion, but 6 billion are freeloaders, would it still be worthwhile for the 1 billion to fund research?

The answer to number (1) is an obvious yes. Even with only 1 billion people, humanity gains when it devotes resources to research.

How about the answer to (2)? I think if you answer yes to (1) you have to answer yes to (2). The costs are the same, but the benefits are even greater. Even though freeloading isn't fair, it doesn't mean we shouldn't fund research.
Yeah... I am someone who agrees with most of the statements made by the author (and if you don't, try spending ten hours in one day trying to catch up on five days of email and failing: the emotional response you have to "thanks!" changes pretty quickly; even still, though, I usually can't really fault the sender), but that voicemail example was just inane: if he doesn't want voicemail, he should turn it off... he can even leave the message, but turn off the recording and storage. If he can't for some reason, he should just have the message tell people he can't check messages, and that they should text him (or whatever he had wanted).

Frankly, though, if he doesn't want to listen to voicemail, he should sign up for PhoneTag or YouMail or some other "uses humans to transcribe voicemail" services and then stop whining about it, as the user then gets to leave the voicemail they expected and that he even invited, and he gets the text message he wanted. Technology solved this problem a long time ago, and if he doesn't want to use it, that's really his own fault.
I keep asking Siri "Can entropy be reversed?" hoping she'll respond with that. And Google hoping it'll show just that answer, no links. Wolfram get's it.
It's actually an interesting debate: is it more believable, from the perspective of immersion, that A) the player is a character actually in the world that they're navigating. or B) that they're controlling a character with a video camera.

If you frame it that way, I think B is more believable, because it accounts for the television/monitor, the controller, and the general fact that the player doesn't experience any of the physical repercussions of his/her actions. If B was what was really happening, then of course there would be camera effects, and of course I would need a monitor to view the actions from the camera, and of course I would need a controller. If A was really happening, then why would I need any of those things? So A is a bigger jump to immersion.
> You're writing off thousands of years of philosophy and dozens of years of experimental results in maybe a paragraph, if I'm being generous.

I'm not the parent poster, but I'd like a citation re: experimental results. What are you saying exactly?
Just found the API that reddit uses to check for usernames[1]. I'll be adding it to handlehelp right now.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/api/username_available.json?user=foo
It's a lot easier to just have the government implement a land-value tax and repeal zoning laws than to actually administrate 60% of the "dwellable" land.
Interesting. Here in the US, I can imagine a scenario where the Pirate Bay logo makes it a priority. Our government is sometimes very aggressive about anti-piracy. While it appears that the Pirate Bay logo was just put up as a humorous homage, I can imagine how a government official could perceive a deeper connection between the students and the broader piracy movement. This might be enough to motivate a prosecution.

Also, I can imagine how the state could make the case that the students were actually stealing. I.e. advertisers pay for time on the billboard, and if you take their ads down for any length of time, you've stolen the time they paid for.
In my experience lxml.html is much better.
Food for thought!
The End Of The Universe, The Higgs And All The 'Ifs'
Chess players who can see.
Why Lift is My Favorite Web Framework
> “the brain is not computable and no engineering can reproduce it.”

If you assume this is true then the brain is a physical entity which cannot be constructed by mechanisms that manipulate physical objects.

The question arises "why is a body growing a brain not a feat of engineering? What did the body do that similarly sophisticated machines cannot?"
I am flagging this precisely because I believe the Hacker School experience is valuable and yet you offer a sexist and discriminatory grant to women.

I'll outline this for you as clearly as possible.

Fact: a small, but significant, group of engineers in our field are sexist. They post GIFs that make women uncomfortable, call women "conference hos," and do otherwise lewd or inappropriate things.

Fact: as a result, women are uncomfortable working as software engineers. We know this because many blog posts state this discomfort explicitly. Your niece, unfortunately, may experience this if she decides to work as a software engineer.

Fact: we see similar grants for college attendance; these grants attempt to fight various socioeconomic factors ("old boys networks," among other things) that may prevent underrepresented groups from attending prestigious colleges.

Would you feel comfortable offering such a sexist grant to men only?

Obviously not. Why? Because, as the above facts illustrate, this grant attempts to address the sexism women face in our industry.

The Hacker School team can't drive around and hit every sexist idiot with a bit of reality, but they can try to provide an antidote to this sexism by (a) alleviating financial concerns for aspiring women engineers, and (b) providing a guaranteed non-sexist zone for them to practice their craft.

I can see how one might argue that this grant selects on behalf of gender, thus giving it an "affirmative action" flavor. That person, however, might want to present an argument slightly more nuanced than "THIS GRANT IS SEXIST ZOMGGGGGG," like you've done. You may want to try again.

(Also, a fact for those finding this via Twitter: Jerry does not represent the entirety of HN. (I'm waiting for Danilo Campos to join in, he usually whacks people with a sanity stick when it comes to misogyny in tech.))

(Also also, while I believe with all of my being that you're wrong about this, I didn't downvote you, because your comment fosters some good discussion (in a roundabout, totally unintentional way).)
True, but calling materialist views a "church" while holding a mystical viewpoint oneself is a clever bit of doublespeak.
It is possible that the easiest way to simulate the brain in a way indistinguishable from an actual brain isn't to have something work in the same way.

There is nothing to say that evolution has arrived at the perfect method.
God means different things to different people, from one that watches everything you do, to one that maybe is a force out there, like gravity.
Thinking in Network Terms
The thing about prizes is that negative results are quite significant in real science.
Actually, neither make much revenue from that pool.
But, fine, pick someone else.
AFAIK, nobody has the right to sublicense all the H.264 patent rights to others.

This is one reason, for example, you have cameras and camcorders that ban professional use.
I personally use a mix of BS4, lxml.html and pyquery.
If the first paragraph is correct and the crux of his argument is that the brain is not computable, then there's nothing to see here. Once you assume that, then of course you don't think it can be simulated.

That this further devolves into meandering about consciousness just says to me that even at the point where Kurzweil's singularity has already happened, he wouldn't call it AI. Yes - if you take it as an axiom that humans have special sauce that you can't reproduce with an algorithm, AI is impossible.
Perl is valid if you know it and want to use it. Otherwise, not really.

There is a port of mechanize to Python as well, if that is your main reason to use Perl.

Whatever you can do in "disgusting hacks" can be done just as quickly in a way which won't make you want to vomit when you look over the code again later.
new Func<string>(()=>"foo")();

(function(){return "foo";})();

Oh look - exactly the same number of characters. How awful.
This article is completely off. It completely misconstrues "personalization" as limiting content to just what you are interested in. Facebook still lets you see what your friends are reading/sharing, thus giving you access to more content than just what you would normally consume.
Only on wellformed pages. There are many many many many many malformed pages on the internet. Even those that are created in 2013
Honest question: Do you currently carry a lot of short-term or long-term debt? Do you have a mortgage, student loans, or credit cards to pay off? How many payments left on that Volvo?

I ask because I believe that people have different views on what makes them happy (a small enough opinion), and that this is greatly related to how they conduct themselves fiscally.

The trend I've noticed among people with a lot of money, no debt, and a desire to start their own things is that they care a great deal more about these sort of non-material things. I have no good explanation for this, but could make some wild-assed theories if pressed.

By contrast, many folks I know who have heavy debt burdens and not much money derive great pleasure from material goods. Again, I have no idea why this is--simple sample bias could account for it.

EDIT: Rereading this after posting, there is a suggestively-winking anecdotal correlation between people that like material things and people with a lot of debt. Huh.
I bet Perl-based scrapers run faster ;)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5252581
Drives me nuts when a site's font size is fixed and CTRL+ doesn't work!
For better or for worse, the system is named "capitalism" not "hardworkerism".

In the "you can't cheat an honest man" department, you can be sure that some of the engineers complaining about nepotism now were expecting to cash in on the CEO's connections when they signed on.
Read the linked article: http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/59893.html to see how exactly Google has won.
quantum theory is a hypothesis. perhaps it's the best one so far for what the brain is made from. but it's truth is only as demonstrable as this: it's not yet been falsified.
And ...

I realized/remembered while reading the other comments that knowing what's available is a necessary part of "just use the command line a lot."

So try this, to get a good list of what's available (and for more command line composition)

$ man -k $(ls -1 /usr/bin |egrep -v "\[") 2>&1 |egrep -v "nothing appropriate"

See if you can figure out what 2>&1 does (it's a very common idiom, probably easy to find), and figure out why it's needed here.

That's a long list of stuff, look at it a page at a time:

$ man -k $(ls -1 /usr/bin |egrep -v "\[") 2>&1 |egrep -v "nothing appropriate" |less

That's still a lot of stuff, save it off in a file in your home directory for later:

$ man -k $(ls -1 /usr/bin |egrep -v "\[") 2>&1 |egrep -v "nothing appropriate" > ~/wholelottacommands.txt
By the layout are you referring to the page structure?
Sounds awesome and expensive
I enjoyed two scoops. I appreciated the terseness of it.

If I had one criticism it would be the 'do it this way' style felt a little strong. I would have liked to see a 'some people dont do it this way' star on some of your coding style choices.

I'd quite like to hear about how you marketed it - I seemed to hear about the book from multiple sources all at once - you clearly did a good job there.
> The web was far better before AJAX and client-side javascript.

Ah, yes: Java applets that made your system crawl.

Flash interfaces that likely 'worked', but had been designed by an alien with no comprehension of human cognition or interface design.

Text that was delivered as a set of lossy JPEGs because the designer really, really wanted a font that was only installed on a dozen people's computers. (Good luck accessing that if you were blind or, more likely, stuck behind a slow, unreliable dial-up connection.)

Pop-up ads your browser was too stupid to block.

Endlessly looping MIDI making you forever hate Skye Boat Song and The Entertainer.

Good times, good times.
To this who ask "why not use an auction", there's been some research on that: http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/why_do_ipo_a...

In short, game theory strikes again: lazy auctioneers bid high blindly and hope that others will do the actual research to set the end price fairly, but those others have less incentive to do research because they are getting priced out by the lazy bums anyways. Another problem is that some bidders irrationally assume that a more popular stock is more valuable, so they too contribute to overpricing. As a result, sophisticated investors are staying away from auctions.
That is an interesting position. As one who has been on the worker side of this, I would tend to agree.

How then would someone buying my services end up with the copyright of that work?
You're wrong. A lambda can have a body. Compiles and executes:

new Func<string>(() => {
var foo = "bar";
return foo;
})();
He doesn't suggest that human nature is more than physics, he is saying that consciousness isn't computable. If neural subsystems are a hierarchically arranged and internally generated chaotic dynamic activity, there is the problem of long-term predictions and causal inference.

>It may seem paradoxical that a deterministic phenomenon is inherently unpredictable, but in systems that exhibit chaotic behavior, small uncertainties are amplified over time by the nonlinear interaction of a few elements. The upshot is that behavior that is predictable in the short run becomes intrinsically unpredictable in the long term. As a result, physiologists cannot make strict causal inferences from the level of individual neurons to that of neural mass actions, nor from the level of receptor activity to internal dynamics. The causal connection between past and future is cut.

http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/freemanwww/manuscripts/IC13/90.ht...
The alternative is a proper HDR lighting system that correctly handles differently-lit scenes and exposure changes.

The Source engine does a great job with this, but it can really get in the way of gameplay.Bad "bloom" can really hurt your ability to aim at something when emerging from a dark corridor into bright daylight; depending on the game, this may be a feature--but is generally unfun.
Codecademy and Treehouse need to jump on the bandwagon
Iran blocks VPNs to enforce Internet filter
Out of curiosity, do you use dynamic index buffers to accomplish the geomipmapping, or do you just trample the vertex buffers every frame?
The whole question of whether everything in the universe is computable is usually regarded as an open question, sometimes called the Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis. This wikipedia article has a little more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing%E2%80%93D...
If I had to guess, the network communication design failed when presented with larger then expected number of connections, which showed poor testing being that EA has worked with online games before. There could also be higher then anticipated data errors (corruption from the network stack, cpu errors, memory errors) from the clients not in the beta that are holding memory on the server longer then expected in comparison to the beta.

Beta's don't always give the best information since the participants are self selecting (selection bias).

And making what is historically a single player game dependent on network connectivity for no apparent gain to the user is a design failure.
>Flash interfaces that likely 'worked', but had been designed by an alien with no comprehension of human cognition or interface design.

How is bad interface design a problem specific to Flash? Surely you can create a bad interface with modern tools just as easily?