skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand your point about merit being correlated with income and class. It is obviously true that wealthy, upper-class high school seniors will have higher test scores, more impressive accomplishments, and (frankly) superior academic abilities when compared with their lower-class counterparts. But you must know that this is attributable to differences in upbringing and opportunities, with varying levels of immediate relevancy (e.g. SAT tutoring, better teachers, parents who introduce intellectual discourse into the home). This means that any supposedly "pure" meritocracy, which does not account for those differences of opportunity, is going to be heavily biased towards those who were born into privilege. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle of class immobility that, I think, most people find undesirable. If you don't agree with the idea that two children with equal natural talents should, in a perfect world, have equal opportunities to pursue those talents, then I'd love to hear your version of meritocracy.

When you say "holistic" admissions, I'm not sure whether you mean holistic in the sense that colleges use it (i.e. taking evidence of talent outside of grades and test scores into account) or as a reference to programs which take race or class into account. Either way, you present standardized tests as the more meritocratic approach, which is silly. A perfect SAT score means a student is great at basic math, reading, and writing in an extremely specific context. That can be an extremely useful foundation, but do you honestly think that indicates this student is the "best?" That someone with lower scores who has published a bestselling book or won an international science prize or started a great humanitarian effort is on a lower tier in the meritocracy? Of course, all of these things are biased even more heavily towards rich students, but that's why class and background must also be taken into account.

I suspect I may have misunderstood parts of what you were saying, so please do clarify (if you can make it through my little word dump :P).
some domain registrars give you email forwarding.
An idea does not have to be novel or radically different from everything before it to be revolutionary. Perhaps the best ideas simply build on the old ones.
What about http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_... ?

"As advances in turbine technology allow areas of moderate wind resource to be developed, more than a tenfold increase in the wind energy potential is possible. These areas, which cover large sections of the Great Plains and are widely distributed throughout many other sections of the country, have the potential of producing more than three times the nation's current electric consumption."

(Via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_generation_potential_in_th...)
> The linked four pack of CFLs costs $6.97.

That is very very interesting, for me the price is listed as $2.97. I can post a screenshot if you like.

I'm wondering if it might be because there are utility rebates in my area, and my local store has a lower price.

> They don't exist.

I figured. I don't think the time for LED replacement bulbs has come yet, but we're getting there.

Although I am considering this fixture http://www.ebay.com/itm/170922117326 for a new installation because once I include the costs of the hardware the price is a wash, and LEDs are much better for outdoor use.

I do hope they are not lying about the lumens though.

I think LED specific fixtures are going to be a much better choice for now, rather than edison base bulbs.
No, Minecraft has graphics, and a very specific style of graphics, without which it would have failed miserably.

Minecraft's graphics were critical.

The simplistic graphic style was required to grab basic gamers by literally assisting the gameplay. The '8 bit' looking block building style makes it dead simple for almost anybody to play the game and build things. The graphics in Minecraft are like having a guide rail.
>So it wasn't a "prototype of Gmail" so much as a hack that got people starting to think about storing mail on google technology stack.

That's the very definition of a prototype. Prototype != early version of a product. For one, it's often written in another stack, to make it easier to iterate. Second, it's more often than not, thrown away on the road to the actual product code.

>Wait, is this a part of Gmail? "other people could search his e-mail." o_O

Well, maybe not people, but their Ad serving service can surely search your email.
I think you missed the point somewhat. Those bots were coded just for those games, with human-made models and strategies adapted to them.

This bot, on the other hand, understands nothing about the games themselves besides the input keys and the score number(s). It's playing blind.
No Housing Bubble Trouble (2005)
Here is an actual Hacker tool that allows all sorts of insane CPU close performance work. No comments all day. This is heartbreaking.
The CoD / Quake bots were programmed to play those games.

The emulator was presumably programmed to play those 40 games, too.

But the real measure of intelligence is to throw something at the AI that it's never seen before, and see how it performs. And that's the magic of this one: it's a general-purpose video game playing AI. You can find a new game that it wasn't specifically designed to play, and it will quite often do a decent job playing it.
Some graphics are necessary. Pretty graphics are not.
I don't think anyone would think external dependencies you have control over are "completely different use cases" from ones you don't have control over, if it weren't for having already adapting to the fact that have to think of them as very different things with git's current toolset.

In fact, many people getting started with git get confused about whether subtree or submodule is appropriate, and end up wanting parts of both.
John Cleese - A Lecture on Creativity
When a baseball player swings a bat, in anticipation of the ball arriving just in time to get knocked out of the park, do you consider that time travel?

Is the baseball player's anticipation of the future really all that different from what this program is doing?
There's also the fact that there is zero incentive to use a tumbler unless you're doing something that you don't want being tracked, since using the tumbler has a non-zero cost.
Para Aumentar Glúteos - Glúteos de Escandálo
http://goo.gl/qy9TF - Para Aumentar Glúteos - Glúteos de Escandálo - Como aumentar glúteos, muslos y caderas, gluteos mas grandes firmes y definidos.
Author Confuses inspiration and resassurance.

We may flock to TED and Hacker News to read about what others are doing, but not for inspiration in the sense that we will be inspired to do things, but rather we seek reassurance that people are doing things, things that we feel we could do if we tried.

We want to see people we can relate to doing great things so that we can feel that those things are with in our ability.

When you watch Nascar you think you can drive fast. When you watch TED you think you can change the world. You aren't inspired by Nascar, you are envigorated, excited, but not inspired.

TED and Hacker News is nascar for geeks.
Yes. Pen testers are rattling off the ~60% of passwords that were chosen poorly, all of which were chosen by methods other than the one detailed in the comic.

Just placing an emphasis on password length and irregularity leaves people still with the question of how they generate that long, irregular password. Asking them to do it in their head in any way is going to lead to much success by way of dictionary attacks.

I'm coming to the realization (giving you some credit) that your objection may be to a specific piece of the comic's particular presentation: "random" is often used to mean "arbitrary" and people might think they can do it in their head? Of course I agree that anything people do with their heads is almost certainly insecure - brains are piss-poor sources of entropy. Would your objection be fixed entirely if it called out explicitly that the words need to be picked mechanically (computer, dice, something) with a uniform distribution?

Anyway, the thing that I like about the comic is that it presents a specific means of choosing a password that is simultaneously secure and memorable, and the only misconception involved would be from misinterpretation of the comic (which, as noted above, does seem possible). Anything else someone comes up with on their own is likely to be less secure, less memorable, or both, so referring to the comic as promulgating a misconception bugs me.

Regarding the last, I don't think we were ever arguing about passphrases in general, but about a particular way of generating them... passphrase really just means "long password", more or less, and that doesn't provide a lot of guidance as to how to come up with one, and leaving people to their own devices is how we wind up with ~60% of passwords being horribly crackable.
Thanks! Part of the reason why it was quick to develop was because of past experience + existing site files. About half a year ago, we were reiterating so much that it made sense to just start building a custom template for ourselves that we could tweak and improve so we could reiterate faster. This prototype is quick even for us, but this time we had a really clear idea of what we wanted to build, and how to get there, so this prototype is the first step.
The whole point of the trillion dollar coin idea was that it allowed the executive (aka the president) to create money without asking the Fed (and thus by pass the congressional deb-ceiling debate). This only illustrates the point that president doesn't directly control the Fed - he does appoint the chairperson (Bernanke, Greenspan et al) but he cannot order them to print money. The treasury however does have responsibility for minting actual coins, usually treated as a minor housekeping type matter (because the vast bulk of money is not actual physical coins and notes, of course) and even then only under congressional mandate.

In the case of the trillion dollar coin they had passed legislation that the Treasury was to be given the leeway to print a new platinum coin - if they wished, and at their discretion as to its denomination.

All of which is to say that this whole trillion dollar coin thing only emphasizes the extent to which the president does not control the Fed.

FWIW this is very common in western democracies. Even when the central bank is not a privately owned institution it is almost always managed in a very hands-off way, ostensibly (though perhaps not practically) to stop short term administrations from playing with things in a way that might affect long term currency stability.
NASA plans to capture asteroid and bring it to Earth orbit
Facebook Home for all Android Phones
>To claim that graphics don't matter to games would be like claiming cinematography doesn't matter to movies.

Cinematography (camera work) is not graphics though. It's as essential to cinema as the plot and acting is.

Graphics in relation to games not so much. You can make a great game with very simple graphics, even today (from Tetris and Pacman to Leterpress). You can even make a great game with no graphics at all (all the much loved text adventure games, MUDs, etc) -- whereas you cannot make a movie at all without any cinematography.

If you want to make a movie comparison, visual effects and/or fancy sets would be a better one.
Better start flagging JavaScript as well.
Crikey, just read the paper:

"""
On a scale from "the title starts with Toward" to "Donald Knuth has finally finished the 8th volume on the subject," this work is a 3.
"""
But all the others are stupid, incompetent programmers. It started at MIT.

Just kidding! (sort of). But have a look at the Jargon Appendix (http://catb.org/jargon/html/pt03.html) - especially The Story of Mel (http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html).
FACEPALM

Added later:

Yes, dictionary attacks are more common. A dictionary attack is what converts this type of password from lg(27 ^ number of chars) bits, down to lg(wordlist size ^ number of words) bits. There's no way dictionary attacks can be used more effectively than that. Which is to say, the comic itself takes dictionary attacks into account and this kind of password (uniform distribution over words) cannot be cracked by a dictionary attack any easier than a "random" password (uniform distribution over strings) with the same amount of entropy, while being far, far more memorable.
There are a[1] couple[2] on YouTube.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYluZRwrw9w

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8
>First thought: "Necessary but not sufficient"
Second thought: "Minecraft rather undermines the 'necessary' part."

Minecraft? What about all the text adventure games? Some where massive hits well after we have widespread color graphical games... Even as far as early nineties. (And people enjoy them even now, but I digress).
Thank you. I dropped out in the 11th grade (went to college) which explains why I missed civics in the 12th. (I went to school in California.)

I caught up recently by drilling my Aussie wife for her US Citizen civics test - she learned all 100 questions by heart.

I made her Web flash cards, too: http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/US.html

I dropped out of college, too. Now I don't have an EDUCATION section on my resume. Plenty of work experience though.
No you're right (and nice comparison) - I just wanted to trigger conversation because someone had downvoted the question, which I thought was pretty unfair. I just didn't/don't have time to do any actual research to get hard numbers.
Yes, they told the immigration officer they were coming to participate of an incubator, to one of the partners then officer asked him to show some papers and the demo. Again u have to remember u r not coming here to stay... Yet. U r here for the program, if u happen to be successful and then find the need to stay u will figure it out with the help of lawyers from the program, but for now focus on the problem at hand, been on the program
Why aren't these merged into the mainline kernel? Is it due to possible patent infringement with ClearType and/or whatever Apple uses?
No, but you can't promote an energy source on the basis of some idealized dream where every ounce of waste is properly taken care of, when the reality is different. If the UK has handled waste in this way, do you think other countries have handled, or will handle it any better?
Pretty sensationalist title here. The quote literally says graphics + physics engine + sound design + assets + production values + art direction = 60%.

Given the reality of the statement, it seems very acceptable. Graphics are only a small piece of the puzzle. Adding in realistic physics and immersive sound scores add a ton to a game. Leaving that out in the title is pretty weak journalism imho.
I'm curious, how do such patents hinder basic research? Patents forbid commercial exploitation of a discovery; when I was doing basic research we routinely used materials that were patent protected.

If remember correctly, it is codified into law that you can use patented materials or processes in basic research.
Presentation: Lean Startups
Oh and by the way u don't even need a visa to open up a company in the states, u can do that even online, so no worries on that end
Here's my answer:

I.C.S.W.I.E.T.
Having written real AI's this aint one.

4 directions and two buttons. You could point a crappy machine learning algo at it, and it would figure it out. That is far fewer variables to manipulate than what a Quake bot has to deal with.

I would bet money I could zap a pigeon every time it died in mario and it would learn to be a master in 12 hours. It won't master CoD anytime soon.
Sounds to me like the next big improvement would be to give the algorithm a concept of boredom: If the numbers haven't gone up in a while, consider that very bad. Try progressively more crazy things.

For example, unpausing Tetris. Or having Mario run left.
I imagine for the bots you mentioned, that they are programmed with specific logic for those games. As for the NES emulator capable of playing the second player, I imagine that would be a similar story.

The research here is not a computer program that plays games. Rather, it's a computer program that (attempts to) play any game, without having any understanding of what it means to play that game, purely by watching the buttons that a human player would press while playing that game.
Yeah, they would rather accept the known and quantified danger that kills more people per year than if we had a Chernobyl meltdown every single year. That was my point, its not necessary for there to not be another Chernobyl for nuclear power to the best option and the fact is that it is extremely unlikely for that to ever happen again.
> It's no one's fault but the NIH if their grants don't come with similar strings attached.

That's also an ahistorical comment. Prior to Bayh-Dole, federal research funding obligated discoveries to be assigned to the government. Post Bayh-Dole, universities get to pursue patents even if the discovery was publicly funded.

So you actually cannot blame the NIH; you could blame Congress.
Tetris requires a properly sized view and clear, effortlessly distinguishable artwork.

MUDs require a quality typeface, proper layout, and appropriate coloring.

Pacman would be nothing without its remarkable low-fi charm.

Letterpress wouldn't have gathered a moment's attention if the tiles weren't immaculate and well rendered.

Graphical quality matters in everything, everything, everything visual. And it's a reasonably reliable proxy for how much effort has been put into the rest of the game.
It sounds :-) like you may have more sensory representation than me - as you have some auditory representations.

I remember emotions but I don't remember my bodily sensations.

With regard visual images (in response to words) it is like part of my brain sees it but I have no conscious access.

However, I have had one intense conscious dream where in that dream at least I had full sensory representation in every dimension. It was wonderful! I remember playing with my dreamscape and transforming things visually before I woke up...and so I - at least - have some idea of what being able to visualise means to others
Google, by owning the second largest office building in Manhattan has a major technical presence. I'm not aware of any tech (Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, Facebook, Intel) firm that comes close to having close to this kind of engineering/software presence in Manhattan.
>No, that was a long time ago. Everybody who maintained those files on John Lennon is either retired or dead.

The people die, the practices do not.

Government agencies have Harry Potter long files on all kinds of peaceful activists, from tree-huggers to EFF members, to authors and free press writers, and such. Even more so than back in the day, because they can get tons more info through electronic means.

>Also, I don't think John Lennon would have turned down his opportunity for celebrity if he'd known that J. Edgar Hoover was going to open a file with his name on it.

Lennon might not, other people that would only get the negatives without any benefits of that celebrity, would not.
Go at Google [video]
This misses the point. The comic assumes a dictionary attack - that is to say, not brute-forcing character-by-character but rather word-by-word, whether this is constructed in advance in a static dictionary (possible, for 4 words from 1000; less possible for larger) or generated in a stream (likely more efficient regardless). Cryptographically, it's a dictionary attack - you're confining your search space based on guesses (in this case, we're assuming entirely accurate guesses) about the shape of the password. The point is that in the face of this, it's still more secure than the "variations on a single word" type of password, and can be easily made sufficiently secure for high security tasks (8 words => ~80 bits, and longer lists make it easier still) while remaining comparably memorable.
I've never seen WarGames. After reading the synopsis, the subtext is undeniably intentional.
I would assume that most of this is biotech investment, however, which is sort of outside the purview of the HN community.
I must point on one thing, take this example most of us, have experienced many times of some smart guy, giving a smart talk in your high school/college, and you walk out and say to your friend "woah, that was a good lecture/speech, that guy was awesome" .. after few days you go on with your normal business, but somewhere inside you, you feel the guilt of not applying, what you learned during that lecture. Well you are not always right, our brain is only as much capable of seeing our own improvement, to a limit, going from 18-25, you see a lot of changes, and you don't see a lot of changes, so the point is, that its not necessary for you to always apply, what you just learned immediately. Yes, try to use it soon, but its not necessary to apply, what you heard from that smart guy, starting tomorrow, because his circumstances are way different than yours, and he would know a lot of contingencies related what he said, of course.
I disagree with the core premise. There's nothing fundamentally new about what's going on. Authority is not being undermined more than it was in the past. Technology may be speeding up the process, and enabling easier communication however.

The Christians effectively toppled (or consumed from within) the Roman empire, starting from an exceptionally small base.

Starting from a small group in each country, Communists took over Russia and China - the world's largest countries by land mass and population - and they did it exceptionally quickly considering.

Other examples: Simon Bolivar, Fidel Castro, the Founding Fathers, Khmer Rouge, Saddam Hussein, 1979 Iranian revolution, the Taliban. And those are just a few examples from the last couple hundred years. History is littered with a gazillion more, small and large, of varying ideologies. None of which needed smart phones or the Internet.

These types of things have always happened throughout history.
I haven't used Ruby much, but the Debian approach works well for me in Perl. I like that instead of pulling random packages off CPAN with no testing, I can depend on a Debian package of a Perl module, which is integration-tested with the rest of the distribution and release-managed, especially in terms of which other packages and versions it works with.
(a) working 19 hours a day will ensure you do not have a good life.

(b) to recognize the caste system, you have to go somewhere it doesn't exist. Right now you know as much about it as a typical fish knows about water.

(c) we're human beings, and none of us gets ahead alone; we all have people to help us. We can't even survive infancy without help from other people. The people a kilometer from you who have expensive SUVs without having to work 19-hour days? That's mostly because they got a lot of help from other people, such as their parents, and only partly because they worked hard — in some cases, not at all. Working hard is really, really important, but far from enough.
Might sound a little unorthdox, but I'd recomend Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and impress people". I started university somewhat socially awkward and feel the book helped me better capture social nuances. Worth a shot.

Sorry you feel that way, feel free to PM. Promise I won't ask about the weather.