skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's not so much the specifics of linking real world accounts to HN accounts, but increasing the investment cost of accounts, such that people want to be on their best behavior.

Another approach is to remove identity from posts. The underlying idea is not unlike the idea behind the ITS "crash" command.

It may also be useful assigning downvotes to users not posts, to keep users unaware of totals, and possibly the votes on their articles.
Congress needs Google to find out where stimulus money went
twi.bz either needs to fully follow redirects, or have a global ban list of short url services. Eg: http://is.gd.twi.bz/b/explain
Any northern European country? Again purely personal experience but the only northern European countries I've felt to be similarly puritanical as the US are the UK and Ireland.

The Scandinavians, the Germans, the Dutch, etc, far more... libertine, imho.
The demo video is just an image you can't click? Why didn't you embed the vimeo stuff directly?
Basically a lightweight, handheld, kiosk computer. It is what Microsoft's Origami should have been.

Although now you bring it up, I don't know the biggest reason behind Origami's failure. Maybe I overestimate its usefulness. I can see Walmart and such taking a big interest though, for inventory control and also modified for in-store use. But you may be right.

As for the packaging, unless Apple is truly the one that started this kind of packaging (which I doubt, but could be wrong, but also wouldn't care), it doesn't strike me as an Apple rip. To me, they're all obnoxious... to hell with the "experience" :-P
They changed the version name to 5th edition, thereby skipping the 4th edition.
What would stop google to add a couple of lines to Analytics to match that functionality?
I think it could last. I wouldn't expect celebs to answer every message, but there's something inherently appealing to the 140 character limit that makes it feel more manageable.
SVD, PCA, all kinds of matrix transformations, all for bioinformatics.
TellHN: Founder of Kiva.com to speak at Northwestern University (Chicago)
Hear ye, hear ye!

Just got notice that the founder of kiva.com, Premal Shah, will be coming to Northwestern University to speak.

Saturday, April 11, 2009.
4PM, Louis Room in Norris University Center

Directions: http://www.norris.northwestern.edu/directions.php

A bit more information here:
http://www.northwesternges.org/

Come one, come all!
You should strive for level 4: O(1).
Fascinating.

What would be illuminating is if you would point to the competitor and the copied product instead of just listing Microsoft products.

also, what does the line "Apple:iPhone" have to do with this?

(admittedly, Singularity is very, very cool)
already doing that
Why not use Clicky (http://www.getclicky.com)? It gives you both the ability to track users in real time using the Spy feature and get the same level of detail that Google delivers.
You know, as much as I dislike any attack against civil liberties in general, attacks like this don't bother me as much as, say, unreasonable seizure or firearm confiscation.

A quote comes to mind: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." John Gilmore (EFF)

In my mind, news like what is described in the post will only spur greater attempts an anonymity, encryption, darknets, etc. They fight and hamper us, we hack around it.
Yes. How about an O(1) category above log(n)?
Windows Live Hotmail Service Disruption Locks Out Users
If it's only $200, I would say the price is the big difference.
Mom, Davey stood on my tablet and all goo is coming out of it
If you can't convince at least one person that your concept is good enough that they should devote their time to it the idea is most likely not worth pursuing.
Check what information the UK government has on you
As someone who was previously obese, I tend to believe that there is a good argument for genetic variation being a cause of weight gain. I'm sure that some people gain weight easily even on small amounts of food, but I think variation in food desire is a much larger part of the problem.

While I have lost all of my excess weight, it's been a challenge keeping it off. I really love to eat, and I sometimes fixate on the thought of eating some chocolate/cake/whatever to the extent that it becomes hard to concentrate. If I do give in and have some I need to eat a whole load before I'm satisfied - and I've been this way ever since I was a little kid. My wife, on the other hand, experiences much rarer cravings and is satisfied even with a small amount of the food in question.

I wonder if the weight gain in the US can be partly explained by higher availability of extremely fattening foods combined with greater societal acceptance of obesity - has the commonly accepted portion size gone up, for example? This makes it easier for those with greater food desire to satisfy their urges.

edit: removed extraneous word
This would make an awesome test question - show the animation and name the algorithm.
Microsoft Silverlight for PHP
I thought that silverlight is only for MS products. This blog post shows how to use it with PHP and illustrate many samples
You can save a ton of time by formulating a linear algebra problem as a shortest path problem; you can end up using dijkstra's algorithm to enumerate the possible solutions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem
I have a Sony e-book and the battery discharges without page turning, even when the screen is off.
You've singlehandedly made me reconsider the appropriateness of the -8 karma loss limit.
Your assumption here is that Bill Gates was born with "off-the-charts intelligence, business savvy and entrepreneurial drive" and nothing about his upbringing affected this in anyway. I think even the strongest genetic determinist would have to concede that's not true, which throws doubt on him even having these qualities if he'd been born and raised elsewhere (ghetto, communist state, refugee camp etc.)
No. D&D can be played as a dungeon crawl series of encounters, but for me the best campaigns are ones with narrative arch and great characters with strong, cohesive, and complicated personalities.
The road less traveled: Advice for YC interviewees
Time Warner: Unlimited Internet for $150 Per Month
I messed up my code example for Object.create above rather badly (I haven't done JS in a while), so I'll redo it here:

var constructor = function() { };
originalobject = new constructor();
originalobject.prototype = ...;
blah = new constructor();
blah = foo.prototype

In ES5 this can be replaced with:

var constructor = function() { };
originalobject = new constructor();
originalobject.prototype = ...;
boom = Object.create(originalobject);

It's worth adding that the ES5 standard implements getters and setters, although I don't believe anything implements it yet (IE8 implements a subset but only for the global and HTML objects apparently):

var foo = {};
Object.defineProperty(foo, "bar", { set: function(arg) { alert(arg) } }); //replace the built-in "set"
foo.bar = "test"; //alert appears printing "test".
Object.defineProperty(foo, "bar", { set: undefined }); //undo our overloading
foo.bar = "test"; //sets foo.bar to test, as normal
Agreed. I think this type of patient explanation is what people need to learn CSS well. Too often, sites that get linked up offer specific "css recipes" without any guide as to what is happening. It works sometimes to just copy and paste, but does that really "teach you how to fish"?
Gradient descent is a good solution for approximate SVD, I'm using it as part of my data mining final project (working on the netflix prize). I'm using this guy's code: http://www.timelydevelopment.com/demos/NetflixPrize.aspx, modified to print out the singular vectors when it finishes. It took about 32 hours (can't quite remember) to find the first 64 singular values* on the netflix dataset (480000x18000, 1.2% non-zero (or is it 1.8%?)) using a 2.2GHz Opteron and ~2 gigs of ram.

I'm sure there are better methods, but this one is easy and is producing great results. If you have any questions, you can shoot me an email at sbuss at cise dot ufl dot edu.

As for hadoop, I don't know of any parallel implementations of this that exist, but I don't think it would be /too/ hard to parallelize the gradient descent approach. Just split up the error calculation into several smaller chunks. If you get it running in parallel, let me know.

*edit: changed "vectors" to "values" in first paragraph.
As long as the 100 vectors fit in memory, it shouldn't be too bad. I think the commonly used algorithm to find the first singular vectors is Lanczos iteration, where the key operation is multiplying the 100 vectors by the large matrix. I don't know if there's an existing library for this though...
if they aren't planning to release, why do they already have packaging manufactured?
-- We know that something like 30% to 40% (some experts say 45%) of the features in a software system are typically never used, while another 20% are rarely used. That means over half the code written for a product seldom, if ever, actually executes. --

I agree, but sometimes we don't use a feature only once or twice but using it is necessary. + if 90% of your users uses only 40% of your software features, why not creating several versions (Permuim, starter...)

Another point, the most our software has features, the better repetution it would get
The big boys may choose not to compete on the low end market, but that doesn't mean the market doesn't exist. Should KIA have never started making cars because they assumed no one wanted a cheap, low end vehicle?
FUD, propaganda, pay-per-post, I hope HNers learn how to spot them and fight them.

In every piece of FUD, check who is attacked and who benefits from that attack.

In my five years analyzing and studying FUD, I can attest most of the time it comes from redmond.

Few companies spend as much money as the one in redmond in faux journalism and propaganda.
Unemployment Rates Are Meaningless for Programmers
The thing is, greater anonymity via encryption etc. is not easy to use for the general public. Sure, you can hack around it but not everyone is a hacker. And of course, darknets etc. won't get around the Permission to Shut Down The Internet bit.
Do you have a link to these stats? I don't think most people in the UK would even know what an home invasion is (I know from Ice-T) and Wikipedia claims it is notoriously hard to get stats this topic since it's not a defined crime in many jurisdictions.
me also i'm not understanding what's the point of this submission
In undergrad we had an intel prototype version of this (can't remember the exact name). It pretty much ruled because it was ~1998 and nothing even close to it existed (i.e. small and lightweight laptops). We couldn't figure out why a market didn't exist for the product either. Apparently after a fully functional prototype, Intel couldn't find a market for it either. Still puzzles to me.

Then big issues in the device then were lack of flash and lack of power. They claim those have been resolved. We shall see.

Will a device like this become ubiquitous? I can see it finding a home in the kitchen, next to the bed or on the coffee table. The key here is making it lightweight and not delicate. I'm thinking something more in between a TOUGHBOOK and a MacBook. Something you can drop in the kitchen and throw on the couch and have the kids play with. Perhaps, with a aim of $200 that doesn't even matter.
I always notice people seem to read this book and assume that it's an instructional manual on how to live. It's just making points about the fundamentals of power.
1 Billion iPhone App Countdown
Distributed, Large-Scale Latent Semantic Analysis by
Index Interpolation. Sebastiano Vigna

http://tinyurl.com/d99779 [PDF]
not if you want to make some money out of it..you need to justify you own domain because your have business tied to it and nothing to do with their brand..and then only you can hold it/may be later sell it..careful, arrington is from domain industry so it is tough party on other end ..so be smart in how you handle.. (assuming you want money..) if not then it is pretty easy just send email
I thought this release was supposed to have ActionScript style optional type annotations and classical inheritance. Not to say I'm sad to not see them here (JS being dynamic and prototypal seems nicer to me), but anyone know what happened to those?
Mass Production Planned For HAL Exoskeleton; Personal Iron Man Conversion To Cost $4,200
I think D&D gets the hack'n'slash reputation mostly because people start playing it when they're too young to really understand role playing.

I play with my wife and kids, and I'd really like to push more roleplaying because that would allow my wife to enjoy the game a lot more (she really only plays because the kids like it), but the kids (ages 7, 11, 13, 15) just don't get it. They get bored with any sort of play that isn't heavy on combat -- a couple of days ago we played through a section of an ancient wizard's keep that was loaded with traps, tricks and puzzles and all but one of them got really bored, though my wife thought it was somewhat interesting.
That is a guide book for a politican or businessman in developing countries.

In Russia, for example, it could be a bestseller. It is the-way-how-it-works here.

Unfortunately, people in Russia do not read books anymore.
thanks to all, you guys are awesome
If it has/can use a pressure sensitive pen, it's the end of the road for Wacom tablets.
The "users" are the site administrators. I think it's fair to expect an administrator to be able to install Flash or SL.
Numbers are probably skewed because people put false relationship data on facebook.
CompUSA Comes Back From the Dead
I probably use multi-linear regression most often, but occasionally I'll encounter a Linear Programming problem.

I'm currently looking for a good Partial Least Squares algorithm in C/C++. Any suggestions? I know R has a popular PLS algorithm, but I was hoping to avoid the learning curve.
We've all noticed when the exponential growth in CPU clock speeds turned into a sigmoid, it's been a while already.

I'm not sure I'd as pessimistic as the article is on transistor numbers. I think those will keep doubling on CPUs. The WinTel duopoly will find a way to twist your arm to keep buying CPUs with ever more cores. It's just that most other applications will not get much use from it.

Then again, video editing is becoming more and more popular, so I think a lot of 3rd party application can make good use of parallelism.
Just FYI, you can clean this up a teeny bit by removing the square brackets to make it a generator expression. Not a big deal but someone might be enlightened.

sum(random.randint(1, 6) for _ in range(3))
I think my co-founder did something with that. I've been meaning to ask him...
Huge Returns Possible On Low Priced Stocks
Didn't Apple file a patent on the back-of-screen touch a few years ago?
There is indeed, http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/svdlibc/ this is a sparse svd solver using the Lanczos approach.

I've used this, it works pretty quickly and produces exact results, unlike a gradient descent approach. Unfortunately, assuming I did everything correctly, it doesn't ignore the zeros in the data. I think this because after centering the data (subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation for each row in the matrix), it just doesn't finish. I must have left it running for two days before I gave up on it. My assumption is that it was trying to approximate all the zeros which, due to centering, now were seen as the average rating for that user. I'm sure you could modify it to ignore those values, though.

edit: Please note that I could be way off in that my interpretation of the program not finishing. If someone knows I'm wrong, please tell me.
Thanks for the timely submission. I was just doing this exact thing last night and was having trouble getting it to behave.
If it becomes a big enough issue, people will write software and protocols that are as easy to use as the rest of the internet. As an example take https: since it was decided that sending credit cards in cleartext was unacceptable, browsers updated to seamlessly use it. The end user sees nothing except an extra character in their URL, but the technology is entirely different.

To extend it to this case, we might see email clients that default to dealing with the messy business of darknets, etc., while providing essentially the same user interface.
Dupe. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=543526
I'd agree with this guy. WIPO is ridiculously quick to snipe away your domain name and give it to someone with a trademark if you don't have a legitimate business or use for the name.

I would highly recommend creating at least some fake company or intention out of the page so you can say you wanted the domain for something else. With a name like "Crunch-Pad" I'd suggest making it a simple Web 2.0 to-do list like pat.io.

At least that way you could let them buy it off you if they were interested.
Microsoft, Yahoo finally talking search deal
This is great and I am glad to see TechCrunch making great strides here.

In my view the problem with the tablet market has been a combination of high pricing and bad timing. The market for tablets now is increasing though and the benefits can be great. I think many of the naysayers here are thinking there is no way a tablet can replace a laptop or phone for various reasons, but I say that the market for a tablet is not directed at them. A tablet is not meant to be a replacement device, but instead a compliment to your current devices and/or a business tool. Here are some immediate benefits/uses I can think of:

1. Faster boot time (great for presentations, looking something up quick on the internet, inventory management systems, sales professionals)
2. Lightweight compared to laptops (remember cost is a factor here too)
3. No clunky equipment inside, making the lifespan a little longer
4. So the monitor sits wide open and may not be durable. This opens up a market for accessory companies to build durable covers. Both my Blackberry and iPhone have screens that came with no protection, but I was quick to buy covers for them both.
5. Can be mass produced for cheap. Take away experimentation costs and development costs, Arrington has said that the cost to produce will be $200 or less. This makes them accessible to everyone.

Before knocking tablets, you must remember that not everyone has a computer on 24x7x365 and easily accessible. Being able to easily check web-based email or surf the web is the entire point of this device. No boot-up, zero to minimal errors, no complex operating system to fight with, the list goes on.
Hunkering: Putting Disorientation into the Design Process
Whoosh back, my point being that if you want real tech innovation it most often takes more than $5k.
I've been using PROPACK lately to perform SVD on a gigantic matrix, and it kicks ass. It's a fortran and/or MATLAB package for SVD of large sparse or "structured" matrices. http://soi.stanford.edu/~rmunk/PROPACK/

You just have to provide a matrix-vector product function, specify a few parameters (how many singular values to find, should it compute the singular vectors, maximum number of iterations, etc) and it takes care of the rest. It uses the Lanczos iteration approach mentioned in sibling comments, and it seems like a far nicer implementation than SVDPACK and SVDLIBC.

Let me know if you want a copy of my C interface to PROPACK.
Thanks for the link - these results are encouraging. I'll think about it - if I come up with anything I'll let you know. Good luck.
Every time I read this article, which I have done three or four times since it was published, I think it has much more to do with UC Davis than with computer science majors in general.
Thanks for the link it was a good read, this is a good one too, it shows some stats as the sorting operation is happening: http://coderaptors.com/?Sorting_algorithms
for that, you need to be a mathematician

like coming up with n(n+1)/2 to sum integers from 1 to n
Yeah, it actually seems like the more people need you, the less freedom you have, as long as you have any sense of responsibility toward them at all.
I currently live in San Francisco but I'm originally from Ohio. The other day I decided to look up programming jobs in Cincinnati on Craigslist for fun, and a search for python yielded 197 jobs in the bay area, 1 in Cincinnati, and 3 in Cleveland. The talent pool for good hackers isn't as deep as the bay area, but I know there are good hackers living in those cities that you would be able to attract to your startup. A hacker could also easily live for <$1000 a month in Ohio if you wanted to do the whole bootstrapping thing.

That being said, I don't see myself moving back anytime soon. Other than that I just happen to like living in California a lot more than Ohio, the other day I went to a javascript meetup held at the Facebook office. Core contributors from mootools and jquery were there, and I remember getting the sense that people out here really are on the bleeding edge when it comes to technology. There's really no comparison for that level of community in Ohio.
No I don't fully approve of them. That doesn't mean I want to scrap them entirely, or that I have a better replacement for them.

I do think it's different - the music industry copyright covers "a song", wheras the software industry patents "a feature". If you asked a band to write you a song, there's no chance they would accidentally come out with music that sounds like Never Gonna Give You Up, the same lyrics, and a singer who sounds like Rick Astley such that someone could sue them for being a close imitation.

But if you asked an isolated small development company to develop a program of significant size and ability to be useful and saleable, there's a strong chance they will include some feature somewhere that (arguably) infringes on an existing patent. e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_patents - The patent relates to a progress bar. Filed in 1989. Probably a new thing in 1989. Not in 1999. Certainly not in 2009.
From the original recipe:

"Our ethanol-water solution is vodka based (denatured alcohol tended to clog the printhead), so don’t tell your graduate students how it’s made."

http://www.ceramicartsdaily.org/magazines/Ceramics%20Monthly...
This has always struck me as kind of strange.

Many, if not all, languages are defined in large part by their communities. Java is for the unwashed masses, Ruby is undisciplined, monkey-patching lunatics, Haskell is friendly, brilliant, and (for the most part) ignored. It almost seems like languages are just touchstones around which to build a community (by writing libraries, frameworks, etc.). The differences between the actual languages seem much less important that the idioms within the languages.

(For the record: I know Python, MATLAB, Lisp, and Java.)
What do you mean by that? At the very least, most PHP devs know that strpos/strstr are much, much faster than a regular expression.
I'll explain, The problem is you seeing the links its that google will index the digg links to your site, people will pass around the digg links to your site. You'll see the digg link for every link you click on too.
Doh! You're right. And I just read an article yesterday comparing the speed of generators with list comprehensions http://ikanobori.jp/weblog/2009/04/08/python-sum-of-file-gen...
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If John Maynard Keynes said it, then I believe it.
Oh, that is interesting. It has been a while since I fiddled with... I think it was Fluxus.

It is one of those things were I became insanely fascinated and then suddenly found myself deluged under a ton of other fascinating things. Hopefully I'll be able to make it back to it at some point. Consolidating my art+music+coding together could open the window to doing something crazy like finishing a project...