skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, no, it can't, unless you code all your business rules into the db as well.

Well, you can code all your business rules into the DB, in the form of stored procedures. But even if you choose not to, I don't see why that fact prevents you from enforcing a wide range of consistency constraints in the database.
Complete Credit Repair Guide « Micha101’s Blog
I didn't make the law, but technically, what you describe is not lawful. I think, technically, you can do it... but vendors can't distribute the compiled code that does it without a license from the DVD consortium folks.
I would not be surprised if Amazon does not soon offer faster EBS at a premium. They ought to be doing the RAID stuff, not the individual EC2 user.
Principles for a Black Swan-proof world
We created the site with the assumption

Why not create a site with a data-gathering model that prompts updates in design, and then test the design with real-world data?
"Really? Because you almost pulled out in front of the guy? Why is he the one apologizing to you, again?"

I don't know about where you live, but here in FL I go very slow when backing out of a parking space because the visibility is bad. If I had a nickle for every time someone flew by in an attempt to be "first" I could quit my job. Would it be that hard to yield to the drive in the blind position and make sure you both go safely on your way? That's what I do and it usually takes only 3 to 5 seconds.
Recipe for Rump Roast
Why are you apologizing? Did you make reality this way? Are you God?! Or are you just condescending me?

If you think that there is some objective morality that is inherent to the universe, the burden of proof is very much on you to show that, not on me to disprove it.

I'm going to disagree with you on this point, because not only the existence of objective morality, but the existence of object truth of any kind depends on its falsity.

As you say, my brain makes certain a priori assumptions about reality. Among these, are the existence of object morality, the utility of the senses, and fundamental correctness of human reason. My belief in these are the default. If I am to doubt any of these things you must provide me with a concrete reason to do so.

All reasoning proceeds from assumptions and unless we make allowance for assumption, we must assent to solipsism (or something equally silly.) For, if we are to assume that all premises are false, unless proved otherwise, then what premises are true? People who hold the stance tend to make all sorts of assumptions that they don't realize are assumptions. Thus, I will maintain that rather than arguing from a 'nothing is true until proven' stance, that it is better to argue from a 'default brain state is true' until disproved stance.' Which, would then place the burden of proof on you.

* I am 100% certain that you cannot give a definition of "morality" that both meshes with what's expected of the term and that implies the existence of some fundamental objective framework for determining what's right and what's wrong. Just think about it for a while.*

As you state, expectations can be wrong. However, for the sake of sanity, it is better to presuppose that they are less wrong than more wrong. The people nearly universally agree that both theft and murder are wrong, that they disagree on whether lethal force is justified in defense of property can be attributed to bias of experience.

Or, alternatively [and not equivalently, but evocatively]: we're all just particles. You can give any brilliant argument you like about the morality of an action, and my particles are just gonna keep on doing whatever the fuck they want.

Except that I'm not a physicalist. If I were,I would already agree with you.
That's a no from me too
"Being a scientist is still a comparatively low-stress, high-pay career"

Compared to jobs done by those without college educations, sure.

Compared to the many career options open to anyone who is in the position to become a scientist, not at all.

The author, like Obama and all the others demanding that (other) young people become scientists and engineers, are living in a fantasy world where a) science is an amazing career path an b) there is a shortage of scientists and engineers.
Or a positive story about Google that upsets an IBMer...
There's a couple of lovely Mexican ladies who have a small restaurant in Wellington (Viva Mexico) that is absolutely fantastic! Otherwise, yes, NZ Mexican is rather abysmal.

(I often think that good Mexican would be an awesome business opportunity here...)
From my experience, the bland prose that begins with "Hi, my name is X and I'm .. from your town/neighborhood" is absolutely killer. It performed better for me than an expensive copy I paid an agency for.
Thanks for the support.

I've been spending a lot more time lately reading up on this type of stuff for a huge scraping/data mining project. My background is mostly in Physics so depending on what I happen to be working on at any given moment there's always some catching up to do.

Anything particularly interesting gets posted here for others to enjoy and comment. :)
If the story as printed is true, the Google employee in question should be fired.
probably a good lesson - basically where-ever possible - register the .com, probably the .net, the twitter,gmail,hotmail,yahoo,wordpress,blogspot names as well.
No registration required to read it here:

http://money.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=798993
I'm doing the same right now. Massive scraping plus "gisting" or document summarization. You're pretty much on the right track; half of those papers are industry standards (my browser marked them as "visited" automatically :-)
Ditto X 1 million.

Does anyone know is this is possible?
I don't think this would fall under a treaty definition of slavery. The people are not owned, they are not bartered as property, they just have zero rights.
Seriously this time, the new language on App Engine: Java
One reason: they've pulled some of the links out of the current page. The wayback machine has the original links to the other archived sites.
Also no registration required if you copy and paste the headline into Google News, which results in: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5d5aa24e-23a4-11de-996a-00144feabd...
I wonder if it will run all Java bytecode. Scala and Clojure would be great.

Plus PHP (via Quercus) would convert a lot of developers.

Edit: looks like it should!

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/runtime.html

App Engine runs your Java web application using a Java 6
JVM in a safe "sandboxed" environemnt. App Engine invokes
your app's servlet classes to handle requests and prepare
responses in this environment.
if their runtime is standards-based, I don't see why not.
booted in 5.4 seconds on my computer!

Acer Aspire 4730z
Intel Pentium dual core T3400 (2.16GHz, 667 MHz FSB, 1MB L2 cache)
732MB Mobile Intel Graphics
2GB DDR2 RAM

Using the USB boot, version xpud-0.8.9

wifi didnt work with my Atheros Communications Inc. AR928X Wireless Network Adapter 802.11b/g/draft-n but i havent had a chance to fiddle with it.

this concept is a good one, but it is obviously still in infancy and has a long way to go. I will personally be watching this distro closely to see where they go

one thing that concerns me, where on earth is the community?
I would have loved to come, but I'll most probably be visiting Ottawa mid July. Good luck with the talk and let us know when your slides are posted.
Java coming to App Engine
Nirmal (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nirmal) has an RSS feed from Hacker News with inline articles (http://hacketal.com/#hnrss)

This article didn't load for me either, but it's in Nirmal's RSS Feed, very handy.
Agree,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgusHV4vIT8
I used "Hi, I'm Josh" - I think it adds a personal touch. I'd think that "are you single?" is probably the best part about his ad though...
Coral CDN worked for me:
http://www.thelogofactory.com.nyud.net/logo_blog/index.php/s...

Summary: The author took the trouble to contact the stock art company, talk to their lawyers, and track down the specific pieces of art in question. Now he's unsure who copied whom, though he didn't find any positive evidence either way.
Teaching Autistic Teens to Make Friends
haha fair enough, let me rephrase.

"I would love to drink my meals, and still be a healthy human being."
I hope this goes over well!
Hire Niftylift at Panther
Hire Niftylift from a secured website like Panther
I'll be posting my paper and slides as soon as I'm finished speaking.
I'm guessing that among people who make, say, $100k+ a year, 95%+ finished college. So it's somewhat interesting that the trend reverses for larger values.
"The only rule should be that you would actually take out your credit card right now and pay for it if someone offered it."

ok here goes,

1. New replicas of old computers like the ZX Spectrum, Comodore 64, Amiga, the lisp machine, the Newton

2. The above, but in a handheld form factor

3. A kindle that reads programming books perfectly, has no drm and can handle pdf without conversion.

4. A website that would pay me for learning (hey we are just thinking creatively! A man can hope!). SO say if I finish all the non research problems of each chapter of Concrete Mathematics, I'd get 20 $)
A couple other seminal favorites:

Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdf

Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis

http://www.cs.brown.edu/~th/papers/Hofmann-UAI99.pdf

Kleinberg, author of the first paper, is quite possibly my favorite computer scientist. He's been on the leading edge of a lot of largely disjoint areas of research on the information structure of the web and almost always drops in some really smart stuff. He seems to hit new fields and drop in some big ideas and move on, so a lot of the more concretely applicable stuff comes in refinements of his work, but sometimes I feel like every time I cross into a new problem domain he's already written three papers on it. Beyond that, he writes in a very readable style, which is frustratingly rare for top-notch computer scientists.
Believe it.
[update]
Alright no one likes TinyURL. I get it. Here's a more informative tutorial about running Clojure on GAE.
http://elhumidor.blogspot.com/2009/04/clojure-on-google-appe...
...wwwwwhaaat?
Also be sure to note the submitting author on this post. May have to do with the upmodding.
This is one of the best posts I have ever read on HN. Kudos to the author
I moved to Toronto last year. One thing that I still can't wrap my head around is that a huge number of ATMs are open to the street. I always feel VERY uncomfortable getting money from them.
people working on appengine really want java? Isn't write webapps in java unproductive? I would figure developers would rather have ruby,php instead.
All right, I think I sort of screwed up my first post, because it failed to convey my most fundamental feeling about "morality": I think that the word "morality" (also "ethics") is, to a truly ridiculous extent, not well-defined.

That's why I asked you to define the word -- I can't argue about it otherwise. I really don't think there's any good definition other than, "A system of judging actions to be either 'right' or 'wrong,' such that actions that I am uncomfortable with are designated 'wrong'."

Well, there are variants of the above (change "I'm uncomfortable" to "some group of people, possibly directed by arbitrary external rules, is uncomfortable"), but the point is that I think any definition that roughly corresponds to the meaning we intuitively attribute to the word needs a lot of subjectivity in it.

As long as "morality" stays undefined, I obviously can't refute your premise that objective morality exists. I mean, it's your fucking premise.
Man, this site would have been great. A lot of people I know (myself included) have previously had bad landlords.
What are the risks?

You can't trust the hardware or the network, for one. Did you check for a hardware keylogger?
Bryght, the first commercial Drupal company, is shutting down.
"I do not think that phrase means what you think it means . . ." oh, wait, who was the author of the article again?

The article is strange to me. First, I thought Taleb scorned the FT crowd. Second, since when did he start writing in bullet-pointed pop journalist style? Maybe this was an experiment or a joke. Or just a bad day.
Yet another example of why we have lawyers and courts.
It has everything to do with "new atheism".

Theists, for the most part, have their moral outlook determined by their respective religions. Which is stupid, but at least it's standardized.

Many atheists believe that their morality is determined by reason. Brooks' point is that there's no such thing as morality determined purely by reason. There are necessarily some subjective premises in there.

All that this observation does is counter-refute atheists' refutation of the idea that atheists can't be moral. The idea that atheists can't be moral is still stupid (IMO), but not for the reason that some atheists say.
I understand that you're probably angry, perhaps a little confused too - but insulting the intelligence of people who have in the past proven that they are anything but stupid, isn't going to earn you any brownie points.

I see YC as a tool to be used in helping your startup achieve it's goals, there are many others out there of varying qualities - you shouldn't see it as the destination of it.

Personally, I'd love to hear about your startup in 6-12 months time (if you've continued with it) and how well you're doing, so if you do continue with your idea and you're a squijillionaire by that time, drop me a line. My email is in my profile. Feel free to call me all sorts of four letter words and tell me I was wrong :)
people working on appengine really want java?

After more than 8 years of coding in Java, I had to pick up Python (and Django) so as to start using GAE for my startup.

Now, looking at those sample code in Java (and JSP) and the related XML configurations for GAE, I don't think I want to go back to Java - unless I am paid to do so, say for services.
I used to desperately want a hoverboard. Then, sometime in late middle school or early high school, when I was getting into physics, I realized that a hoverboard would have no way of stopping or turning. I was quite depressed.
In that case, you will want to read:

http://olabini.com/blog/tag/gae/

which includes:

* Dynamic languages on Google App Engine - an overview
* JRuby on Rails on Google App Engine
* Java on Google App Engine
Blogging about Blogging
Your kid breaks his leg skiing, just like a trillion other kids every winter, and you march up to the guy asking for what sounds like evidence you can take to court, wtf do you think his reaction is going to be? That he's going fall all over himself to admit that he screwed up when he probably doesn't remember your kid and probably honestly thinks he did nothing wrong? Like he hasn't seen a million assholes just like you who do want more than an apology?

You have just laid out the causality dilemma of this whole situation. Before the ski shop owner will own up to his mistakes, he must be convinced that the average patron is not confronting him to gather data for a lawsuit. Before the average person will forgo a lawsuit, he must be able to get a straight story from the ski shop manufacturer. Both parties enter into the confrontation with a defensive posture, expecting it to escalate, and so that is precisely what it does.

The author's point is to diffuse this sort of reaction, by explaining that all of this knee-jerk defensiveness is counter-productive, expensive, and becomes more about sabotaging the other person and less about resolving the original issue with a minimum of fuss. The problem is that when you start from the presumption that your customers are "a million assholes", the conclusion is already set in stone; you have already made it about these people being litigious assholes, and so that's what they will become. There is another option, but someone has to be willing to risk that option, go against conventional wisdom, and be the one to diffuse the tension before it escalates beyond repair.

By the author's own examples, going against conventional wisdom seems to work well. I'm not surprised, it usually does.
the Google employee in question should be fired.

That should read...

the Google employee in question should be fired, out of a cannon, into the sun.

If this story turns out to be true, I think this might not bode well for Google, given their current position with antitrust and their dominating (monopoly?) position in online advertising.
It's called Bookswim, available at http://www.bookswim.com/ , and I have no idea whether it's good, because I cannot conceive of using them over the library.
The ambiguity of language reminded me of a Demitri Martin joke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PLa_MpNGQA 4:15ish.
A Great Resource for iPhone Game Developers
Why did you choose to have a grey text on a white background ? It's not very legible.
Finding the Right iPhone Developer: A Developer's Perspective
http://twitter.com/relevantstudio :

"Everyone's calling for my proof, but the lawyers say I to keep it to myself until we go to court. Screwed if I show, screwed if I don't. --about 5 hours ago from TweetDeck"

I have a feeling Jon isn't going to like the internet after he's made it angry.

UPDATE:

1. MetaFilter == Win

2. TV posters Jon claims to have designed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrzarquon/sets/7215761640034318...

3. "Interestingly, a look through the 'network television' section in the flash interface at Shoolery Design shows that the Veronica Mars poster, the CSI:Miami poster, the CSI:NY poster, and the CSI poster come from there. (Can't link directly to flash, sorry.) --posted by Upton O'Good at 9:52 PM on April 7"

4. http://www.shoolerydesign.com/sdi.html
For when TinyURL dies:

http://fragmental.tw/2009/04/08/clojure-on-google-app-engine...

And, why use TinyURL here? Your destination URL isn't long; there's no constraining limit to comment URL sizes.
The last line in the article is "In other words, a place more resistant to black swans." I bet an editor "amped up" the title to "Black Swan-proof" without asking the author.

And he may despise the FT crowd, but that is also exactly the crowd his message needs to be in front of.
> FBI spokesman White says the equipment seizures were
> necessary.

> "My understanding is that the way these things are hooked
> up is that they're interconnected to each other," he says.

Well, talk about competence (err... the lack of it). I really hope they won't come to pick up my machine, because it is also interconnected...
All good links. Thanks for sharing.

Another list of books for IR http://researchonsearch.blogspot.com/2005/12/information-ret...
Because it's already easy to do this. The browser portal to your website is the easy thing to solve.

* Network connectivity
* Computers (& physical considerations: space and tables)
* Web store

Those are the hard things to implement, and would cost a business a fair chunk of money, even for a bare bones offering of those.
Processing Time - Processing Code Jam @ MIT
Ask HN: How to tell Google Adsense tags for images?
I am developing a small site that is mostly an image gallery. I would like to show Google Adsense ads that are related to the images. I know various "tags" associated with each image, but these do not appear in the text of the page.

Is there a way to put those tags in the META description/keywords, or will Google Adsense ignore those?

I am not trying to fool the Google page ranking to appear higher in searches, ... I just want to show relevant ads to my visitors.

Any recommendations?

David Jones
I always get a little tingle deep inside me whenever I hear about this black swan theory, whats more, suggesting principles for a black swan proof world (I know it's just the title, sensationalism never solved anything) is like pissing into the wind.

It will only come back to haunt you.

"black swans" are just one of those facts of life, The sun rises in the morning, water is wet, shit happens.

Best anyone can do is attempt to minimise the factors that cause Black Swan events, you can never completely eliminate them.

Offtopic point, the black swan is actually the symbol for the West Australian flag (my home state)

http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media//21/5021-004-C61F...

So these topics always give me a giggle, because I've seen many, many black swans in my lifetime (actually, probably many more black swans than white swans)
I'm intrigued by "capitalism 2.0", but I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to get from here to there. There's a lot of government intervention required in Taleb's bullet points that won't happen for decades, if ever. His proposed interventions don't have anything in them for the government in the time spans they talk about and don't leave a lot of room for governments to collect more power and exercise it for their personal gain, which seems to be about all they are good for lately.

What might work is a lot of people voluntarily adopting the aspects of Capitalism 2.0 they can control. The downside is they won't grow as much during the boom times, but come next bust they'll be the only ones left standing. If enough people do that, will the point be made? Can people who eschew leverage and survive during the times nobody else is? If not, Capitalism 2.0 may be beautiful but is fundamentally unstable in its own way.

(It's beautiful to imagine a world where a magic authority can enact perfect legislation to make capitalism 2.0 a reality, but unfortunately, every significant nation-state on earth would have to be brought on board at once, lest one nation-state start leveraging and gain a temporary-but-huge advantage. A full transition would be a boil-the-ocean approach; an interesting question is whether there's a more personal approach that could do some good. The only other halfway realistic prospect would be new colonies that could implement these economics from scratch. Since a new colony would by necessity be on a frontier (space or ocean), they might be open to these ideas. You can't breath leverage or use it for delta-V.)
The word "Java" is misleading; it's really the JVM, which means most of the mainstream web programming languages, in their JVM versions.
You only need a PIN to withdraw money from ATMs. Most debit cards can now also be used to shop, without specifying the PIN
I don't think it even does that though.

if the ability to absorb a system of ethics is an inherited trait, then atheists have presumably inherited the ability as well and would therefore be (from a statistical perspective) as ethical as everyone else.

the basis of his claim (snyde corner of the mouth slander, really) undermines the claim itself. the whole thing cancels out rather nicely.
Check the last bunch of techcrunch 50s. I think there was something along these lines, but I can't remember what it was called.
Taleb's point is not to reduce the probability of having a black swan, which he essentially assumes to be fixed, but to reduce the impact when they happen. His point is that if you are leveraged 30:1, there will always be black swans that your model says will virtually never happen, but do, and cause your assents to go down by say, 5%, and wipe out your equity and cause you to default.

What Taleb is getting at is that you just shouldn't leverage 30:1, and so if you hit a black swan, maybe your assets go down by 10% or 20% instead of 100% and then defaulting to bondholders as well.
Leechblock + NowDoThis is my solution to this. I don't actually use NowDoThis, but it's default is to have it's own name in big letters, which is enough to remind me to stop slacking.
Here is a gem (Twitter) - http://snaptalent.com/company/100/

p.s. more descriptive (company name in) urls would be awesome?