skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a very useful technology, and I don't think anything should be done to prevent people from doing it (edit: publishing that data needs to be done carefully to avoid plagiarism). The web is the web, and any available information is, in my opinion, up for grabs. Of course, there are exceptions, but I think if you post a comment on a publicly-viewable website, it's public domain.

However, having said that, I know someone who keeps very close tabs on people using similar software - and the information he's found about them is actually disconcerting. What he does borders on harassment, I think.
Based on the article, I'm guessing large passenger jets are some time off. BRS is currently working on systems for very small business jets.
I think part of the backlash is coming from developers on web-applications that have business models that require scaling to very large loads before they make sense. This puts a premium on keeping things very cheap (no heavy commercial SQLDBMS), and inherently scalable (hierarchical).

Web developers on these types of projects cannot either a: buy a "real" SQLDBMS, or b: charge their customers so their business model makes sense without a huge number of transactions. This means they are willing to suffer it out with solutions that don't provide flexibility or data correctness guarantees of a RDBMS.

This is just a guess, but it's quite likely that it is the rise of hyper-scale-intensive, speed-intensive, revenue-light business models that drives devs towards deciding SQL isn't worth it.
Some are red...
Really nice overall, but I have one UI issue:

When I go to an example page, it says something like, "Survey says: B! (18 of 33 answers)"

And then I never remember which was A and which was B, so I have to look.

Why not "Survey says: Gmail!" or "Survey says: Obama" instead? Especially for the text ones. For the image ones it kind of makes sense to do A/B since they don't necessarily ever tell you a name for each image (though you could change that), but for the ones that are just text, it would be way more user-friendly to put the name in.
Satellite transponder space is expensive, and you would need a whole lot of it. Even if you somehow got the capacity, who would pay for it, and who would collect the data? There's also the problem that satellite communication is difficult to get right (to the level of reliability required by FAA regs) with any degree of consistency. It's also worth mentioning that when a plane is in a state that you'd want the uplink to work, it's generally not flying in a level straight line - it will be experiencing huge turbulence, buffeting winds, and random dives and climbs - which would make keeping an uplink very difficult.

There's also a practicality argument: when a plane is flying along normally, you don't need consistent satellite information - you've got radio communication, radio data-links, and controllers watching. So the usefulness of a satellite uplink only comes when something is not right with the plane.

If we're in that situation - that there's something wrong enough with the plane that you'd want to know about it via the uplink - what makes you think the uplink will still be working? Air planes are designed with huge levels of redundancy and overengineered margins: are you going to take all that, double it, and then put it into a satellite transmitter (which probably won't have that much data to send anyways if the plane is in that state)?

So no, I don't think we need constant satellite uplinks. Black boxes (especially ones of the newer generation) are very well-engineered, and the NTSB guys are masters at getting things off broken ones.
Postgresql is free.

I'm not going to claim it's perfect, but it's pretty damn good, and postgres + intelligently used caching (such as memcached) goes a long way.
Hulu Full Screen Video Dropping Frames
The "polynomial-time nondeterministic Turing machine" explanation has the following strengths:

1. It explains where the "N" in "NP" comes from and why.

2. For someone learning P and NP towards the end of an automata theory class, where nondeterminism and NFA-DFA transformations have already been introduced, it seems like a more elegant and meaningful development of the concept.
That's why they have radio beacons
what is the speculative price?
Its hard to believe it will sell for <$200 / without being locked to some sort of contract or homepage with ads etc ... If so - this is truly an amazing achievement, not to mention its amazing that its techcrunch.
On the other hand, you could make the whole plane float and just let the blackbox sink ;-)
It sounds like this will be fun^H^H^Heasy to googlebomb...
When a plane is flying and not transmitting anything, is the reason that nothing's wrong, or that the system that sends updates when something goes wrong (possibly among others) is broken?
I thought heat rises ?! ; I would've thought of below ground level before - I thought of putting them over head and cooling the room below them ..
Well, it's good for a laugh.
There's a bit of confusion here. Saying the traveling salesman problem is NP-complete means more than simply it has a P verification. Saying the traveling salesman problem is in NP implies it has a P verification. But saying that it is NP-complete implies that, in addition to being in NP, any other NP problem can be (deterministic-polynomially) translated into it.
A few months ago I attended a talk by Alon Halevy (of Google) on the algorithms behind this. There are several papers with more details for those who are curious. Check his publications listed at http://alonhalevy.googlepages.com/, specifically those about WebTables and dataspaces.
What's irritating is the "Discussions" section on your front page.

It makes it seem as though the user is commenting on your site; not that you're scraping it off of another site.
It's mostly just a technicality of the definition. NP (and P for that matter) can only contain "decision problems," i.e., problems for which the answer must be Yes or No.

So the NP formulation of the Traveling Salesman problem is "does this graph admit a route of length less than K?" For any constant K, that's an NP-complete problem.
Assuming that there was a part of the plane that could open to create a viable jump platform (which there isn't in current designs), it would seem that the situations the plane has a problem, but it's stable enough that you and your 2-500 friends can get out your chute, read the instructions, put it on correctly, get to the exit point, and safely jump out and your plane has enough of a problem that you'd want to jump out are mutually exclusive.
It'd be great if it (or v2) has one of those Pixel Qi or OLPC XO screens. Better compromise between E-Ink's (sunlight) readability & low power consumption, and LCDs' refresh rate & color production.
What about consumption and/or heat dissipation? I'd hate to burn my hands while playing youtube videos...
I was wondering the same thing myself today. My first argument would be that if data is getting into a black box, there's no reason it couldn't also get into a satellite transmitter and out into space in the same amount of time and with the same reliability. As for available bandwidth, how unrealistic is that bandwidth availability? How much data is being fed into a black box during a flight?

The idea of a distributed network among commercial aircraft and ground stations as a method of transmitting the data also seems like an exciting prospect, and perhaps less expensive than relying on satellite communications, though I know nothing of the range or viability of such a platform.

In any case, a system to complement a black box would require large expenditures by governments and airlines. But, how valuable is that data? Pretty valuable, I think.
I wonder if it bears any relationship with the view sonic thingey that is unavailable on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/ViewSonic-airpanel-V150-Smart-Display/...
New ones are solid state, older ones are continuously-looping magnetic tape.
One big bonus for the kindle is the battery life (2 weeks? vs a few hours). Obviously, the crunchpad has lots of other things going for it. I guess my point is that they're really meant for two different purposes.
Well, emacs costs $39.95, and XEmacs costs $74.99, so maybe that's just as well.
Microsoft needs to stop this genuine validation shit before they get a class action against them on it. I paid for a PC two years ago that worked up until last night when I got greeted with this:

http://social.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/genuinevista/thread...

Never mind the recovery process now that they don't even ship some computers with the OS disk.
Some of the tools look like great implementations, but if I ever saw a website use the "expose" tool (http://flowplayer.org/tools/demos/expose/index.html), I'd be pissed. It doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose, except perhaps for a first-use help screen, and even then, it's disconcerting.
I imagine Daniel wouldn't have trouble getting a job with a YC company, if he were so inclined. If we were hiring (couple more months...), we'd certainly talk to him.
Baby chimps, raised responsively by humans, ace IQ tests
$300 last I heard. It creeped up from the original $200. But $300 is still well within the realm of "awesome".
I understand what you're saying but you gotta appreciate it's rather difficult to get round. Plus, I still feel it's discussion based on our content and rather reasonable to have there.
The software demo from April is pretty interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP-0Nce5oTQ

Everything goes through the browser. It remains to be seen whether that is the brilliant constraint that makes a category, or a crippling limitation.
It works fine for products, but in that capacity it's just a slightly different layout for a Google Product search. (anyone else still think of that as "froogle"?)
It sounds like it never even crossed his mind that the relational model is a good fit for some problems.

98% of programmers think the word "relation" has something to do with links between tables. I doubt the OP has ever even heard of a concept called "the relational model".
OK, valid point. I have a Game Boy and a Nintendo DS for composing chiptunes. I only have to charge the Game Boy batteries every two weeks or so. The DS has to be charged every couple of days. I pretty much only use the Game Boy. And, it has almost nothing else going for it...it's bigger, crappier screen, noisier audio, etc. (The DS is emulating a Game Boy, though, and it has quirks, so that's another negative for the DS.)

One does expect "books" to just work.
Bing sets New Record in Horizontal Scaling
My original comment was maybe a little harsh on him. I empathize that he lost his job, but his tone is a little condescending.
if object.nil?
puts "Object is nil!"
else
puts "Object is not nil."
end
I dunno, combine it with a little animation on the element and you got yourself a nice little lightbox.
Seriously?

This is a blog post (and I'm being generous there) AND an HN submission?

A google query for "Hulu dropping frames" (which auto-completed before I was even done typing) shows that this is not an isolated incident.

Sorry to bitch, but the blatant link-whoring is annoying (I'm going to presume link whoring here, as your 4 submissions all go to the same dark-corner-of-the-web blog).

An HN-worthy submission would likely include a little more digging, some more composed thoughts. Actual tests and data, suggestions, etc. This is a good reference example:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976
I don't know if I agree.

The old generation of online project management software (see: dotproject) was awful, had no UX design, and probably was less efficient than a wiki. However, new programs like basecamp and thymer are much easier to use and add a lot to one's productivity. Certainly, it is much faster for me to create a thymer account than it is for me to use a tool that isn't meant for project management in the first place.
I noticed that price wasn't mentioned this time. I'm guessing that means it'll cost a lot more than $200.
It's useful for videos to minimize page clutter when you're not watching full screen. Hulu does a similar effect when you hit "Lower Lights" next to a playing video.
Webnumbr: Follow interesting numbers from anywhere on the web
"Philips did invent the CD"

A refinement on the laserdisc.

"Sun did invent Java"

A refinement on C, C++, and Smalltalk.

"Xerox did invent the GUI"

A refinement on Doug Engelbart's work at SRI. (Edit: Though many of the researchers working for him later went to PARC, I find no evidence that Engelbart himself ever did.)

Now here's the real question. If inventing a new type of laserdisc that's five inches wide is innovation, why isn't inventing a GUI-based computer system that costs half as much as a Star and a third as much as a Lisa? If inventing a new object oriented language with C style syntax is an innovation, why isn't inventing a smartphone with a multitouch screen and unprecedented amounts of storage space?
The answer is yes, with some exceptions. The iPhone has a camera, GPS, cell phone and G3 capability, bluetooth aNd a built in microphone and speaker, which the iPod Touch lack. The app store is device aware and will only sell you applications you are able to use on your device. So you won't be able to use any applications that require the above features, but you'll be able to use all that don't (for example, most games.)
i think that is what a lot of normal users experience on twitter.

Social network contribution by normal people is based on you broadcasting or publishing content about yourself and getting a quick response. for example, with facebook you can post pictures of yourself and get a response from your friends.Which people get addicted to.This is basically called the celebrity affect, where you feel like a celebrity among your peer group.

But on twitter if you are not some sort of celebrity or well known brand you will not get any followers or responses. Since no one sees why you are special or why your social content is interesting.
SUGGESTION: Have a limit on how far down (and across) you'll recurse

I got the same error when trying CNN.com
So because someone talks about what you've written you feel it gives you license to do as you please with THEIR content (i.e. their comments)?

By that logic, you give Google, Microsoft and everyone else you write about permission to reprint your content. That can't be your intention, can it?

I'm saying that it looks misleading the way you have it on your page. I don't really care one way or the other, I'm just telling you what it looks like.
RoamBi; a Slick Enterprise Business Intelligence Platform for iPhone
Yeah same here and recently went back to Fancast where I found they have larger library with cable channel content (batman/robin cartoons, showtime, hbo and other stuff not all on hulu i enjoy).
I meant in the situation that black box floats.
I don't know whether it does, but it would be stupid to let it sink and send a signal.
Hey, a mild form of socialism is great in many ways.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the rights to "Life, Freedom and Pursue of Happiness". In particular, I don't think the founders meant the right to Life to mean "right to not being killed by direct unjustified violent action". If you have the right to Life, you should have the right to the means to stay alive and healthy.

My critic to the Welfare State idea is not that we should not care for our own people. It has more to do with keeping the citizenship disempowered. If you cannot provide yourself with basic needs by your own means and work, because the barriers of entry are so high... then the only option left is to have someone bail you out of the mess.

As techies, I feel we are very vulnerable. Think Spolsky's Development Abstraction Layer (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio...). We can fall in a comfort zone by being productive within a larger organization that extracts economic benefits from our creations... but once we become severed from that infrastructure, many of us become helpless.
You're absolutely right. In my project, we were using a Java API to get some numbers from a huge database, but the calls took up way to many resources (time and memory). As an experiment, I tried querying the database directly in my app (bypassing the abstracted framework) and it was lightning fast.

My code was hard to understand (and very hard to write, at times) but the result was a much lighter, much faster application.
What a gorgeous digital photo frame this would make! I look forward to pointing this at a Flickr (or other) slideshow. In fact someone in another corner of the country or the world could keep this pointed at your Flickr photo stream and will be able to see your latest photos without doing a thing. Similar to what Picwing was offering.
well, thats a simple consequence of having more income though!

Question: what is the right decay rate for the utility of each additional dollar of income in terms of overall buying power (assuming sane spending habits/hobbies)? I'd think it be zero up till some range, then sublinear, then some moderate polynomial, then a slow exponential?

Any thoughts?
Doug Engelbart was working at PARC (Xerox PARC).
conceptual designs to first working prototype is often a time fraught with problems. I seriously doubt this will be a few weeks and even more doubt the price. It could sell for much more, so why make it so low?
I expect that in a few years what was the real problem with RDBMS is going to be very clear, even if now it can look confusing enough and there are different alternatives and it is very hard to meter the relative value of the different solutions proposed.

I expect that in a few years antirez will study relational theory and conclude that he's been incrementally, unknowingly, implementing an RDBMS this whole time.
We looked at using Qualifications a bit, but quickly decided that it wasn't worth our time to deal with them, at least for PickFu in its current state.
As I've mentioned publicly and privately to you so far. All that it would have taken to prevent this difficulty would be a single reply to the email you received saying "just checking that you're working on this". That would have highlighted the fact that pratik forgot to tell you what was going on.

Instead we find ourselves here. I'm sorry that you feel so let down by the process, and I realise that you feel you've followed the right process. But fundamentally you've assumed malice where there was in fact a simple error. Had you taken a few minutes to check before doing this, we'd all have been better off.

Having said all that, we obviously need a more clearly documented "what to do when you don't get a reply" policy. We also need to move the email.
Very good comment, similar to what I too have experienced.

Perhaps a better comparison to US history is the Kent State shootings, a protest in 1970 in which 4 people died at an anti-war protest. While awful, you would be hard pressed in 2009 to find an American hanging too much significance on the event; it was an isolated incident in a period of intense social change.

The situation, I think, is similar in China, whose own social upheaval is occurring at a far greater rate. It is difficult to think of any precedent, in fact, in which a country of such size and diversity has managed such a wrenching transition without a lot more bloodshed than that.

It's because of this, actually, that my position on the government there has softened, too. Chinese society sits on a powderkeg the likes of which it is difficult for westerners to understand. The govt's actions might seem heavy-handed, but their stewardship of the change process has undeniably been impressive, even exemplary.

And if you don't think the US Govt would temporarily pull the plug on a few websites in order to abate what they considered a genuine chance of widespread civil unrest, think again.
Gullible Mimics
Really? I think "falling like a rock and spinning like a top" would cause problems with your satellite uplink.
Hmm, would you pay more than twice as much to target a demographic segment that was less that 50% of the population?
It's easy to sing to the choir. It's also boring and badly written.

Microsoft has made a LOT of innovations. A massive amount of modern computing is based of how accessible microsoft made computing - if we still had to recompile our kernel to enable sound, I don't think we would be near as far as we are.
>> Hopefully it's still early days for all of these kinds of tools.

Definitely - I think each product is a great concept, but they need to learn a lot from the way people are actually using the service, and use that to refine their programs.
But fundamentally you've assumed malice where there was in fact a simple error.

No, he assumed incompetence, which you seem to be intent on proving by continuing to attack him and give this non-apology apology.

Had you taken a few minutes to check before doing this, we'd all have been better off.

Or you could've resolved this a week ago had you had a more mature process. The guy laid out the issue, presented a fix, and e-mailed you and the rest of the Core Team several times. How many more "few minutes" does he need to take before it stops being his fault in your opinion?

Stop attacking the guy, it's really poor form. Just admit you guys screwed up and move on.
A black box captures human perspective of extreme conditions. Telemetry, flight control, and maintenance data is more than enough to figure out what happened to an aircraft. But, they don't tell why it happened? Data in a black box answers a critical question: "Is it human error?"

Having said that, your question does resonate well with me too. How much data does a black box store that we can't send it over satellite (or even to other aircraft nearby-- think of a distributed storage) in real-time or near real-time? The purpose of such distribution is purely redundancy. I haven't seen any concrete numbers or engineering barriers against this idea, yet.
Nice, thanks for the very useful dissemination.
"If you're so smart why aren't you rich?" If you've got a metric with higher s/n than the VCs and seed firms have come up with, you have alpha, and that's always in demand. YC and its clones are a consequence of the history and development of the tech industry thus far. Without them, without the embedded cultural nous that's in the Valley, Boston the barriers would be even higher.
Or even better, you could have them produce a sonar ping that search and rescue could listen for... which is what they already do. :-) [ http://trueslant.com/milesobrien/ ]
Two things killed Hulu for me: a) TheDailyShow.com has no ads. b) I'm paying for Netflix now and love streaming.
Redis can be the most useless piece of code in the world but it is very hard looking at the command reference to state that Redia is going to be an rdbms in my humble opinion
The Human Capital Bubble
And it's also a veiled warning: "Don't even think about it". Read the comments below, though, for some discussion on the nuance in the situation, and why it's not really a subject anyone should be getting too outraged about before they understand the environment in which it's happening.
> 1. modern programming frameworks all abstracted away SQL because people found it hard to understand

No. Not because it's complicated. Because they wanted higher level facilities for getting/setting data. In other words, they put in abstraction because abstraction is good, not because they are dumb.
Rails Core Team Response to HTTP Digest Security Issue
Ask HN: I need some good web app focus group questions
I'm developing a web text book swapping appliction for students at a local college and the University is having a focus group in a few weeks. I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for good usability focus group questions.
Reading the Surface of the Brain
Probably "feedback", "contact us", and "support", roughly in that order.