skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've all been using Google (and web search in general) for so long that it has fundamentally shaped the questions we ask of the Internet to the point that we don't even think questions that we could ask, but don't. We filter them out of our thought process. Just as the people of 1980 didn't keep saying to themselves "Curses, if only it were 2005 and I had the service that will eventually be called Google!" every time they thought of a question. (With a few exceptions, but only a very few.)

The question is, will Alpha expand our capabilities and thus expand the questions we would ask? Of course you don't have any questions that could be answered by Alpha but not Google; you've been trained out of asking them for over a decade now. Can Alpha change that?

Beat me. I certainly trend skeptical. But an important part of being a skeptic is being able to change your mind with more data, and I am ready to try it out and see. We can't really have an informed opinion on this question until we live with it for a while, which absolutely nobody has.
If Adams is correct, this could be good news for Facebook... or something Facebook-like for families.
They already do that on google.com. I thought it was clever, and if you've used Chrome you'd probably get it. But you're right, not sure the general public would "get it." On the other hand they could start a multi-ad campaign. In these types of campaigns, creating the buzz is usually the first step. You're vague on purpose. We'll see if this is their intention.
Just a slightly associated random data point. Across the 10 yard border Canada announced their own surprise - 35k net job increase in April:
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/631083
Lala Invents Network DRM
That's the first time I have heard of that... is that official?
I do. The last of my Microsoft friends switched recently. A lot of the best .Net development now happens in VMWare, believe it or not.

Although rather than "dowdy and unsexy" I'd say the signal you're sending by pulling out a PC laptop is that you either can't evaluate good design or you don't see it as a priority.
If you run Seaside in a VisualWorks server, you can load the old DST packages and do remote debugging with the GUI debugger.

If your code isn't compatible with that library (it is kind of old), then you can run your server under VNC. This gives you a nice "pseudo-headless" mode but still allows you to debug and tweak with the full development environment.
After trying half a dozen solutions to fix the odd mouse acceleration curve, I found an app called SteerMouse that actually does the trick. If you're one of those odd people who's sensitive to this (like me) I'd definitely recommend it. http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/
I was wondering today what the average/median string length is in programming. Google hadn't a clue. I'm curious if Wolfram does have an answer.
How to Raise Capital as a First Time Entrepreneur: An Interview with Brad Feld
How To Spot New Startups and Talent, From Early Amazon Investor Tom Alberg
Maybe such moves shouldn't be started after an attack is demonstrated, but as soon as something better arrives. Researchers who publish their findings are not the people to fear. Those who find successful attacks and not make it public are the dangerous ones.
What you say makes sense, but I still think shares a big fallacy with the book. To convince me you should not concentrate on examples of cases where less copyright would be better - you and me both agree they exist. What I want to hear is how a world with no copyright would be better in the areas where copyright is considered especially useful right now. Like the map example, or the pharmaceutical company. That would convince me it can be better overall.

As far as the arbitrary length of the copyright being wrong, I fully agree. But I do not think throwing the baby with the bathwater is a solution. If a way would be found for the market to dictate it that would really be great... but in a way it does. There is commercial lobbies that push it up, and voters who push it down. We definitely need more pushing down lately.

About programming... I make my living writing software (freelance). All my clients "rent" my software, and I constantly work on it and update it according to how their business change (and it changes surprisingly often). The model works for both of us because:

1) They do not pay upfront for a big software, which may or may not turn out to be useful. They get much better value for their money, and make me directly motivated to keep the software always useful.

2) I do work more in the beginning, for practically no pay, but for each project I get a new source of income, and overall I make more money (over several years) then if I'd just write a software and leave. Also I like working with people I know.

Now, how does this depend on copyright? If, by any chance, the source code of the software would be leaked, the fact that I own the copyright would still force my clients to keep working with me. In a no-copyright world, anybody could take the software, add a few (useful) features and get the contract instead of me. Now I know what you will say. This is better for everybody, right? It's better for the client, because there is more competition, it's better for the guy who could take over because he will get business by doing something good, and it's better for me because it will force me to keep improving my software, right?

No. In such a world, I would simply not start the whole thing. EVER. It wouldn't pay. The whole thing depends on me working my ass of in the beginning, and then getting the reward in time. Without copyright, neither me not any other freelancer would start doing the work only to lose the contract in 6 month. Income security is a very direct factor in my decision to do it.

And this is not a big evil greedy corporation. This is me working for clients who usually become friends, or at least partners. I worry for their business, because I have a stake in it. And they know it, and value it. And this wouldn't be possible without IP.
I know what you mean. Yeah, I could do this, or I could just rely on automated iSCSI snapshots to seamlessly and automatically backup the entire machine whenever I want.
And that's tame compared to the live IRC channel at the time, which was just brutal.

I think it's unfortunate; I understand that Tim Ferriss's style rubs some people the wrong way, but he's got a lot of good things to say. And even if you detest his substance or his style, there's no need for such mean-spirited vitriol.
"Lots of keyboard/keystroke mapping differences.
Home/End do what they're suppose to instead of what everyother computer platform I've ever used does.
Page up / Page down, seriously WTF! Why would anyone ever want them to work that way.
Various other oddities like ctrl arrow"

You can customize this if you like. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448218

"Half the typical ctrl bindings are Apple key which is in the alt-key position."

You get used to it eventually. I've come to like this more than what having only the control key for most mappings because it allows for more consistent shortcuts (e.g.:, ⌘ is normally used for App/OS shortcuts, while Ctrl is used for Emacs/text-editing shortcuts in all apps)

"No consistent focus follows mouse. No raise on hover"

You can use this command to enable it for Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES

For other apps, I found this with a quick Google search http://atomicbird.com/mondomouse (haven't tried it myself so I can't say how good it is).

"Can't for the life of me figure out how to get an icon that will open term and ssh into a particular box."

Try this:

vim logmein
i#!/bin/bash
ssh my-box
<esc>ZZ
chmod a+x logmein

Speaking of that, here's a nice app for automatically inputting passphrases for ssh: http://www.sshkeychain.org/
> Prop 13 has nothing to do with the volatility of CA's income tax revenues.

It has nothing to do with the volatility of income tax revenues, but it has everything to do with volatility in the budgeting process. By gutting the ability of local governments to fund themselves it pushed all of the taxation up to the state level (and the state turns around and hands most of the money back to the local jurisdictions.) Since the primary revenue generators at the statewide level are income and sales taxes this introduces volatility that is directly tied to the general economic condition, unfortunately the new burdens placed on the state budget as a result of Prop 13 are mostly independent of the general economic condition. This lethal combination leads to a never-ending cycle of boom and bust in the state budget.
I am curious: does she edit her programs on Windows or Mac? The reason I ask is that I felt the same way until recently.
It does indict the idea that we can just wave regulation at a problem and solve it.

Think I'm making a strawman? Oh, how I wish I was. A challenge for you, the reader: Over the next month, keep track of how many times someone calls for "more regulation" in some form, without putting one word into actually saying what that regulation might actually be, which would certainly be the bare-minimum requirement for examining it for second-order effects or other problems. Once you start looking for this, you see it's not the exception, it's the norm... and the laws we get out of Congress certainly reflect this.

It's transparently irrational to call for "more regulation" with no further elaboration, but it happens all the damn time.
I think chancho is pointing out the effects of the crash of the housing bubble. So yeah, I should have said generally far less procyclical.
Some caveats, by the way:

- it IS a preview: not everything is switched on
- it's NOT pretending to offer natural language processing for general queries
- they're NOT pretending to be a better Google or Wikipedia
- I don't know what I'm doing: I'm in Fisher-Price mode, and there is a learning curve.

I am quite impressed, and also confused.
Twitter And FriendFeed Battle For Downtime. Scoble’s Head Explodes.
Great to see Brian worked in a shout-out for http://repsheet.com an open source, dead-simple local political lookup tool.
New Pattern Found in Prime Numbers
Exploring iPhone's Killer App
Those who are trying to reinvent data search are underestimating Google and the Web at its present form. The fact that a search on any famous film director or actor returns IMDB, or the fact that "When was JFK shot?" (mentioned in another comment here) returns a highly relevant Wikipedia article, tells us that the Web has already adjusted itself to be the semantic Web, and most importantly, a simple and predictable one. In simple cases like I mentioned above I know what to expect from Google, because I know how it works and also the Web constantly fixes itself to be searched easily. So this is a simple, very democratic and predictable system we all use successfully.

On the other hand, it is always hard to deal with systems that we have little knowledge about. I suspect WA is the "hard" case.

So, what problem Wolfram is trying to solve? Anyone has any problems with Google?
If it's intellectually interesting and hasn't been posted before, why not?
Nginx and Passenger (for running Ruby apps)
For the uninitiated, what does that mean?
Indeed. Security researchers who embrace responsible disclosures should be thanked instead of being feared. Moves like these and the recent move towards eglibc from glibc really make Debian pretty progressive as a community imho.
You can't do computation with those results. At the first level, this means you have to click a link and load a page. But it also means that you can't ask compound questions ("What films did Orson Welles make that star Ruth Warrick?"). And you can't use the answers in other programs thru an API.
Ask YC: My school wants to shut down my app. How should I respond?
Few hours ago, I received this letter from my public uni's CIO: http://www.scribd.com/doc/15099510/i-letter1

The site can be seen at http://www.classhunt.com

Full story:

I launched ClassHunt about a month ago. The campus newspaper covered and ~500 people are using it so far. Many are totally in love with it("ClassHunt is AWESOME! I give you serious props for creating this site. I've already told a couple of friends about it and one of them has had the same luck that I have. You're going to prevent a lot of headaches with this system! :)").

The technology behind is in python. It queries the uni's server for every department on campus and parses the course data. At first, I was querying every minute, so ~130 requests/minute. Now I am querying every 15minutes.

Few days ago I received an email that my server IP had been blocked. The lady from IT dept was very nice and willing to work with me to find a resolution. For now, we agreed to increase the interval to 15 minutes. Still they could not unblock because they were still having issues with the load and people higher up won't approve.

Having been a student here for a few years, what happens is towards the end and beginning of each semester, our course registration system starts crawling. This is because too many folks are checking grades and signing up for classes. It lasts 3-4 days. This is what seems to have happened this week as our school year came to an end. It seems like they are blaming my app for their years of issue with system overload.

I am confident it was not my app causing the problems. Nothing is bigger proof than the Chancellor's staff writing to me that they are still having problems even after blocking me.

Still, I don't want to get in a verbal war with them and rather just find a solution that works.

How should I respond to this letter from the school's CIO/Chancellor for IT?
the same thing he tried with "A New Kind of Science".

Which is, it turns out, the single most important book about science in the history of the printed word. In fact, it might be more important than the printed word itself. It's a new kind of printed word.
I don't know. What do we say about niche markets?
PGP is not in especially much danger due to the new results against SHA-1. The new attack is a birthday attack, not a preimage attack. PGP uses SHA-1 in several places, including some where it's "hard-wired" (i.e., parties can't specify any alternative hash algorithm), but there's only one where a birthday attack does any good: signing others' keys; this attack would work basically the same way as the one that produced the rogue SSL CA using an MD5 collision. Even here, this further requires a chosen-suffix attack, which this new advance is not; though I would not be surprised if one were discovered in the near future. Every other use of hash functions in PGP depends only on their one-wayness, not on collision-resistance.

Nonetheless, in light of the new results, the IETF Working Group on OpenPGP is likely to reconvene to produce a new version of the standard that doesn't depend on SHA-1. They're also currently discussing my suggestion to include a random salt at the beginning of the data that gets hashed for key signatures, effectively rendering the integrity of these signatures immune to birthday attacks. If this is done, and it likely will be, then PGP could probably get away even with using MD5 everywhere (not that I'm recommending this!).

If, in the interim, a chosen-suffix attack against SHA-1 is discovered, then signers can protect themselves by migrating their keys away from it as dkg advises. Also, only newly-made key signatures would be vulnerable. Key signatures made prior to the discovery of such an attack would not be compromised.
Didn't Andy Grove say something like this? However he couched it in terms of paranoia.
I tried to point out areas where performance and elegance still matter and where customers more often don't know what they need, that is, areas where developers are kind of ahead of customers' immediate needs, contrary to the point of the original post. So my comment wasn't really about the business side of things, i.e. who pays, when and how.
Yeah it was in the iPhone 3.0 announcement: http://i.gizmodo.com/5172200/iphone-app-store-revamped-for-c...
If the question is a commonly asked one, someone will build a service to answer it. And that person could also provide an API.
Are those reliable for a database, though?

I haven't done enough at such a low level to really understand how that would work. I mean, the database application layer typically promises to be atomic, sure. But at any given point in time are the bits on disk truly atomic? Does a database not sometimes take 2+ writes to fully change data? And does an iSCSI backup really copy the entire disk at a single point in time? I thought that was magic specific to something like ZFS. Because if it doesn't, couldn't you have a database backup that isn't really usable?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that application level DB dumps exist for a reason - and I'm no expert so I'd love someone to explain how full disk backups work re: databases.
Adios Wordpress
It's funny that you'd talk about "straw men" in this response, which addresses neither a call for more regulation nor an plea for regulation in the abstract.
Members of Chatterous groups can search through chat history.
Snipping Credit Lines for Small Businesses
It seems like you're asking for something like what Wolfram has built.
Just tried your query and got perfect results in Google, right at the top. And I'm yet to see how WA answers that question. I think it may be able to answer it, but only if it was designed to understand this particular kind of questions and if particular pieces of information were selected for inclusion in WA's database.

WA, to my understanding is not entirely self-regulating like the Google/Web bundle and thus it will be difficult for WA to catch up. We'll see.
The current economic mess is an example of too little focus...
Ask HN: Is is possible to sync two atomic clocks via the Internet?
Since I've read this story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=598090

I've been thinking about this problem. It sounds impossible but I'm starting to think it's possible. It goes like this:

Is it possible to synchronize or to measure the time difference between two atomic clocks that are far away from each other via the internet?

Take into account, of course, that we're talking nanoseconds of time in the atomic clock, and around 100 milliseconds in Internet latency.

Can you describe a way to do it, or explain why it cannot be done?
Economist Debates: Copyright and wrongs
Can you elaborate why you say getting into debt "is the right thing to do"? Why do you think it's unreasonable to reduce spending when tax collection goes down?

Personally, I find the parent's commonsensical prescription appealing. The parent probably meant was that if govt gets into debt, "higher and more ubiquitous taxes" will have to collected in the future to pay for the debt.
What does what mean?
The Central Valley (Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, Visalia, Bakersfield) has been one of the hardest hit areas in terms of the real estate bubble. Home prices have dropped 50% in some areas. Property taxes are based on property values, and aren't going to be that stable.
It's coming...

http://sixleaf.com
It looks like the article was taken down. I'm getting the following message.

The article requested can not be found! Please refresh your browser or go back.

The story was covered on Slashdot though, so you can get a summary here: http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/08/1438221&...
I think you should take it down then ask for the course schedule via FOIA. They're a public school, no?
I am already using the data under the premise of FOIA. Even if I request it explicitly, they will need to provide it electronically and will have the same supposed problems with traffic overload.
Actually, what I'm describing already exists. It's the way the Web works today.
The problem is one most people don't know they have, unfortunately. Google only lets you talk about crude keywords to find prebuilt data. If WA lives up to the hype, you should be able to formulate a hypothesis involving arbitrary supported datasets and have WA build you data tables and visualizations.

Will most people realize the sorts of questions they can ask? Probably not. Do most SQL datasets get used to their fullest potential? Probably not. Imagine what it does for the curious student, journalist, or professional, though.

Some things I'd like to see:

1. Percentage of population in African countries with HIV/AIDS over time. Regional, or demographically coded information would be interesting as well. I'd also like it sourced. I could go look this up somewhere... or I could just ask WA.

2. Fertility vs. per capita GDP for countries/regions in the world.

This is not to mention all the historical event, chemical, physical, etc. data.

Imagine NYT data visualizations built on WA data. Private data sets that people slice and dice with WA and then sell specific visualizations, etc.

It's a problem we don't know we have. Success will critically depend on flexibility, ease of use, and accurate and broad data sets.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/touché
You mean, how long is a piece of string?
That is exactly what 1 client of mine does for Postgres.
Niche markets pay my bills, so I'd say they're great.
It's easy to blame this issue on California's politicians, but the problem is the way the system is set up.

The way California's budget process works, we have to have a super-majority to pass a budget, tax increase or cut. So, if the minority party can get 34% of the vote, they can block a budget from being passed.

Couple that with a bug in the system that allows politicians to put a budget item on a ballot initiative. If it passes, it must be funded.

So, it's easier to amend our state constitution (simple majority on a ballot initiative) than it is to pass a budget (67% legislature vote).

And, our revenue base is weighted heavily on sales taxes and income taxes as opposed to property taxes (because of ballot initiatives), and we have really big boom/bust cycles in our tax revenue. It's amazing that California does as well as it does with such a ham-strung system.
They seem to be living in fantasy land when they say:

"These numbers appear fairly grim, but there are encouraging
signs that the State’s situation is reaching bottom. Although
sales tax revenues were down by more than 50% as
compared to last April, consumer spending increased by 2.2%
nationwide in the first quarter of 2009. Additionally, retail
sales have stabilized in the first three months of this year on a
seasonally adjusted basis."

Maybe so, but your state sales tax revenues are down 50% YoY! So what if the Feds want to say that consumer spending was up 2.2% in April (a number that is suspect precisely because of state sales tax numbers).
I wrote a short Ruby script that does a similar operation with Subversion - it's somewhat Rails specific in that it takes the username/password from RoR config files, but that can be easily modified.

The code is (ironically) here: http://github.com/niryariv/dbbackup/tree/master and some background here: http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/backing-up-mysql-da...
Maybe switch to appengine?
Can you explain how that'll help? Thanks!
My mom taught me how to hack back in the early 90s :)
Twitter Inventor About To Launch His Next Project, Code-named Squirrel
At first, I was querying every minute, so ~130 requests/minute.

Wow, that's not nice.
I've used a bunch, but right now it's all about Nginx, and sometimes Lighttpd