skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have all email go through your email servers (instead of directly to the users email box). Since you know which emails are being sent, automatically stop any emails from reaching the sellers that are obvious duplicates (eg. someone sending 100 emails from bob@bobscam.com would not be sent to the seller's email box).
The App Store Crapshoot Strikes Again
American students think the Palestines are the occupiers...
what bothers me is why this isn't more like 90% (in other words, why you don't check all items in and out - anything else is pretty lame supply chain management)
I disagree, as do some of the commenters:

http://www.raphkoster.com/2009/05/14/the-perfect-geek-age/#c...

Cultural climate changes with time. And it is worth asking whether all of the changes were for the better:

http://yarchive.net/physics/effete.html

Sometimes "nostalgia" is not an empty illusion, but is instead a longing for the days when actual progress based on original ideas was taking place. This longing can be a productive one, if it motivates you to invent, deviate from prevailing trends, and otherwise fight back against enforced mediocrity.
Presumably because they're shooting for acquisition by one of the two big OS'es?
A simple digital low pass filter certainly has uses, I just don't think any of them are applicable here. Averaging several values per reading certainly wouldn't tax the resources of even the smallest micros.

I was including the sensor in the 'analog system'. If full range is 0.2% BAC (optimistic), thats a step of over 0.01%! I'd expect more from a sensor that's supposed to perform "beyond a reasonable doubt".

I don't know if ASM would have really hindered analysis. Certainly it's easier to deliberately hide malicious code with ASM, but naive code is generally readable and I doubt the audit firm would have given up. Chances are an ASM programmer would have paid better attention to detail, too ;).
I've been hacking in Java, Ruby, and Haskell for some time and when I started learning Scala, I quickly came to the conclusion that it was much more like Ruby than it is like Haskell.
Company's like Zuffa (UFC) have already started cracking down on JTV their ppvs were once a common thing, now they are removed pretty swiftly.
It seems he may have some good points, but he definitely tried pretty hard to make some of the examples ugly. The way currying is generally done in Scala is much cleaner-looking than this, as the first several google results for "scala currying" show. Also, he seems to throw in some extra unnecessary stuff (sealed?) in the case classes example.

I appreciate informed criticisms like this, but he is definitely representing Scala in as poor a light as possible.
Michael the CEO is speaking about justin.tv's money-making strategy at the Google campus on Monday. A couple of other 'community status' style companies will be there too.

Search 'Monetizing Web 2.0' on meetup.com if you're curious.
Am I in the minority in being unable to guess what this article is about from its title? I thought maybe "Magic" was some new programming language, and I didn't know that the PHP community (such as it is) hates Java.
It seems like a lot of new languages have macros. Lisp is moving on to phrase four of it's diabolical scheme...
Oh God, the horror. Almost every time neural network library I've seen manages to obscure a very simple idea in piles of useless objects.

"Neural networks" are just the composition of several nonlinear regressions. There's nothing particularly "neural" about them.

Here's a typical 3-layer network:

f(x,Wh,Wo) = tanh(Wo * tanh(Wh * X))

Wh, and Wo are the hidden and output weight matrices respectively. Fix some loss function (ie, L(x,Wh,Wo,y) = || f(x,Wh,Wo) - y||^2), get the gradient of this function, and a take step down the gradient. There's your learning rule.

Now, I understand the desire for flexibility/modularity, but (1) what's the sense of trying to house supervised and unsupervised methods in the same hierarchy?
and
(2) what could possibly justify Connection and Weight objects?
While registration, it is not allowing '-' char in the email address. (I am using yahoo address guard thing with disposable email addresses)
...not that there's anything wrong with that. I love the conciseness of Scala compared to Java and, even if it's not as elegant as a pure functional language, it seems like a great language for Getting Things Done.
Voip router
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That's a very candid interview Owen, thanks (I'm assuming you'll be reading the comments!).
I wish the graphs of weight seized had been normalized to some sort of dose unit. That I can't do so with my own knowledge shows how far removed I am from the issues.
May be tangential, but:
1) I've never read of Lisp graybeards (or, actually, any graybeards) advocating testing. Ditto for open-source projects. Is the constant evolution and experimental nature of pg-style Lisp coding a replacement for testing?
2) How much testing do you bother to do in an early-stage startup?

In my own limited experience with UmBus (http://mbusreloaded.com/umbus, it's a free, local service), my testing is limited to ensuring that it Works For Me when I implement it and monitoring for unusual and failed requests.
Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
The Sunday Times review of the book
"The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better" by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
I would say the big no no in ruby is requiring extensive configuration files. Which I think is also because of Java and its heavy reliance on XML to set things up.
If the hello world code cant be done on one line then we won't bother with it.
Just dropping by to say Hi!
Great site! http://www.g2gmart.com
They're not really software resistors; they're hardware that's controllable from software. </pedantry>

And this is very useful; this will definitely save some resistor wiring. Now if only there was some easy way to debounce a switch in software....
Re: development time, you must have a pretty fast compiler. One big argument in favor of dynamic languages is the shortened edit/compile/test cycle; it's down to edit/test.

Re: speed, I think the prevailing wisdom is "write the damn thing in Python and if it's too slow, we'll profile it and write the tiny bit that needs to be fast in C or C++". You still have to do this with C++ -- native code does not magically make your application bottleneck-free.
Do you know it doesn't leave the users machine?
(I'm not asking that to be smart or anything.)
My point is that you are trusting the backup providers that it doesn't.

My main point is that you are trying to protect your data from the backup providers or their sloppy security. You aren't trusting them on one hand yet trusting them on the other that they don't store or save the key on their servers.

One popular online backup product can recover the key if you use their generated key. Which of course means they store it on their servers.

Honestly implementing private key encryption is trivial. My hesitation is that it only adds a level of security if the backup providers are trustworthy. The lack of trust of the backup providers is kind of why it is there.

Here is the scenario I envisioned that made me question it.
Let's say client X performs backups of their computer using service Y.
Service Y provides private key encryption. Client X types in his secret phrase and thinks that his/her data is secure.
Service Y must either require the secret phrase to be typed in each time the software is run or must store the key locally. They store it locally.
Someone comes with a court order demanding every reasonable effort to release the data to the court. Service Y may WANT to comply to catch bad guy client X. Or they may just not want to be held in contempt of court and get fined etc. Can they reasonably recover the key? My answer is yes service Y can reasonably recover the key. I don't believe the answer is yes if it is encrypted with a third party tool.

There are of course holes in the above scenario. You might need to automatically update the software to upload the key for that user etc. Perhaps they don't do automatic updates. They could also require an update just for that users account to function. My main point again is you are back to trusting the backup provider.

I found it highly ironic to be writing code to protect my potential customers to gain their trust without disclosing the inherent holes in that process.

My hesitation to adding private key encryption was purely on the side of NOT wanting to pretend that backup software with private key encryption protects their data against all scenarios.

But having written this post and explaining it frequently. I think I probably should just add it in.

Thanks,

Rasch
Excellent interview! Congrats Owen.
Sorry,

Yes that is a limitation I will remove shortly. You can use any user name you want. I didn't make that clear either.

I have lots of work to do thanks to all the good feedback from everyone thanks again!
I think we already tried this experiment ... Communism vs Capitalism
It's not too bad: keep an exponentially decaying average of the pin state, and use some hysteresis (different levels for on/off) on that value. You should be most of the way there.

It'll take (worst case) 8 bits for the average and 1 for the current state. You could probably still get reasonable results with a 7-bit average so that the whole thing still fits in a byte of RAM.
According to Malcom Gladwell's book Outliers, 1955 was the best year for geek births. (Bill Joy, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates)
const uint numBits = 3*numPieces;
const u64 lowBits = ((1ULL << numBits)-1);
const u64 highBits = lowBits << numBits;
const u64 allFours = 04040404040404040404;
const u64 allTwos = 02020202020202020202;

// Flip around horizontal axis
flippedIndex = index ^ (allFours & lowBits);

// Flip around vertical axis
flippedIndex = index ^ (allTwos & lowBits);

Is my fix for the first two, but, as you point out, they're significantly easier.

The patterns are pretty neat, but I can't figure out how they result in any sort of rule for diagonal flipping.
Lost robot crosses city by asking directions (video)
After reading a button press, wait a while for the level to settle (say 50ms or so). This kind of thing is normally done from a timer interrupt that polls all buttons and saves their state for the foreground thread (I'd think this would be in the Arduino library somewhere).
I actually think it's a good idea. I don't know about fantastic or if it would make much money but I can see potential in it.

I don't think they had the right team for it. I did not see much creativity or innovation going on here. It's a very difficult proposition to sell someone something that they can't keep. They should have tried other methods. Maybe allowing towns to pool money together to get pricey famous art to spend a year in their museums? Or allowing anyone online to purchase a fraction of art in Iraq so that it is protected from looting - it can be toured worldwide and returned to the country when it can actually be protected. I can keep going. But they apparently chose not to.
Ranked by who? As the community grows this ranking body is going to become more burdened. If the community is doing the ranking as well as the answering you are talking about X sms messages per question where X is the size of the community that responds to the message. I really can't see someone going along with answering some question then dealing with voting on 200 responses for very long.

It could work but I don't see it working as posed. You probably need some way to limit the scale and have some sort of incentive.
He speaks to the currying syntax directly in the comments. The important distinction is that the "nice" Scala syntax for currying requires that you allow for it when you write your functions. That's not really broadly useful, though it can pretty up some applications.
http://common-lisp.net/pipermail/slime-devel/2005-September/...

This is a discussion on the slime-devel list about a scheme48 backend. Reasons are discussed as to why SLIME (should)|(could)(n't)? support scheme backends.
Today My US Investor Visa Application Was Denied
Yesterday I left my wife and 3-month old son

to come to Singapore for my US investor visa

second interview.

Today my application was denied

because the visa officer thinks my $65,000

startup investment is not substantial.

This application has cost me countless number of

hours and $10,000+ to prepare

that I wanted to ask her if I could have

invested that time and money in my startup

would it make my investment substantial?

But I wasn't given a chance to dispute.

Today is a long day

that I wonder why America does not welcome

entrepreneurs

and have to rant from a hotel whose desk is

smaller than my laptop.

But tomorrow I will return to my wife and son

and continue to work on my startup

then write a much longer rant someday.
I had to stop about half way through because the woman speaking is so painful to listen to. If one is this inarticulate, she should use a teleprompter.
Does Announcing Your Goals Make them Less Likely to Occur?
I had assumed that Owen was in his 20's. Whoops. Very cool.
Detecting Liars by Content
How does this compare with RescueTime?

(RescueTime, for one, tracks URLs in Firefox. The Wakoopa FAQ says a FF extension is too complicated. Right.)
That's an extreme, but it's certainly common economic knowledge that income inequality -- in rich nations -- tends to promote economic growth. Of course, common knowledge is sometimes wrong, but I think it takes more than one article to disprove it.

One example of such common knowledge: http://www.springerlink.com/content/w26530m1x3163184/
good interview, but I don't recommend watching it, just listen. The audio is horribly out of sync.

The "your ip" website idea, just goes to show you, that digg was a fluke.
This is another sad example of the US's twisted immigration policy. Brilliant entrepreneurs, scientists, and academics want to come in legally and are rejected, while thousands of others come in illegally.
You have no idea how many times I've seen variations on that sales graph -- a few years in the coding salt mines with gradually increasing but sporadically up and down sales, followed by new version and a step function increase.

Incidentally, contra the article, if you get advertising on the Internet right its a fairly low-stress way to make a lot more money than you would otherwise for a small software company. Sure, Google gets 50 cents on the dollar from my last $1000 of sales every month... still, 95% gross margin exclusive of advertising, you do the math. (This is a complementary strategy to wowing customers and having an unpaid sales force of fans. You now have more customers to wow and more unpaid fans. What is not to like?)

Another note against the article: if you're doing software over the Internet, I beg you, please get over your hangups about SEO. You may think its about being an evil spammer. It isn't. (Well, OK, it doesn't have to be.) You can do great SEO for your business and still touch holy water without suffering 3rd degree burns. (In a nutshell: publish useful stuff, get linked, win. You'll note how this dovetails very nicely with constantly positively surprising people and extracting value out of folks who are unwilling to pay you money.)

I'm still in the salt mines but 3.0 is coming out any week now. I'm cautiously optimistic. ;)
Well, this article isn't even refuting the "common knowledge." Economic growth != health and crime rate.
Yes, but the problem of knowing where your fingers are at a given moment persists. Especially when reaching for the touchscreen.
There could be some sort of extrusion(s) on the surface peripheral to the screen, like on f and j on a keyboard but still it can't replace the feel of individual buttons, switches etc where each one's surface area is clearly distinguishable.
Malicious hackers completely destroy flight sim site
I believe the authors is confusing correlation and casuation.

Do you see any rich hacker belittling the little poor startup guys? I think it is more like the rich, successful hackesr is seen as a community resource. They constantly day in and day out give advices to startup newbies on what to do and how to avoid their mistakes.

It is as if each hackers are expected to face obstacles, learn, and then eventually win.

Maybe the inequality problem is more of a cultural thing. Maybe it is about how we deal with inequality? It is kinda like comparing the immigrants to native Americans.

You know, the Vietnamese are famous for their nail saloon and their beef noodles. The Italians specialize in Italian foods. Indian specialize in computer programming.(Note, not all indians want to be programmer, etc) Certainly the field of computer programming and the arts of nail were there long before those immigrants came to America.

Do people rise up to the challenge and overcome poverty or do people hold your head low and envy the rich?

Edit: I just realize that I am just trying to rationalize away the inequality. However, I am still very worried about the potential solutions to this problem.(Assuming it is indeed, correct.)

I know the effect of the mininum wage laws that was supposed to help the poor have a damaging effect on upward social mobility of the working class.

I am very worried that this capped wage proposal would have undersirable unintended consequences.

Perhap the solution to the inequality problem is to lower barrier of entry to the poor such as reducing government red-tape and regulations allowing people to start up business easier, as well reducing labor regulations to open up jobs that were not previously availiable due to labor cartelization via unions and occupational licensure.
For me, google search results appeared without the usual formatting (5/14/09 9PM CST) this was even before the Google glitch happened.
One more thought on a very high level.

I thought, what would I want to be told if I was the customer?

1) The truth that there are holes in the process and here is a better solution if you need it.
or
2) That it is super secure unbreakable private key encryption.

I chose "1". I'll still stick to the story line but I will implement it in the next release.
http://identi.ca/notice/4231184
Decorators to pass an initarg to a class? I don't think so.

This guy wants dependency injection, which would solve his problem, and is as non-magical as it gets.
Having been living in the Django world for a while now, I knew what the title was referring to.

I disagree with the author, however. I think that magic is a bad thing, but this is really an in-house debate. Django and Zope are on the extreme ends of the spectrum of Magic to non-Magic, and I have worked in both frameworks.

Magic does not necessarily mean "poorly defined" as some people presume. Zope does an excellent job at defining the magic that it does. I just do not like the concept of a framework that changes the essential nature of the language in which it is written.

I think of a framework as a way to avoid writing the 80% of the code that any given web application needs. One could say, well, that 80% is magic, because it just happens, but there is a fundamental difference between a framework that changes the nature of your code, adding behavior that you would never suspect from the language itself, and a framework that provides functionality that you either invoke, or add to.

Magic is great for some people, but a real PITA when you don't want the magic to happen in the way it does. Suddenly you find yourself delving deep in to the guts of the framework, reverse engineering the decisions made by the developers, finding workarounds. Suddenly the magic becomes an impediment - you are now expending much time and effort working through a system whose entire point was to save you time and effort. The framework is no longer the elegant helper taking away a lot of work that you would otherwise have to do. It IS the work you have to do.

Again - this is an in-house debate, and no doubt a die-hard Rails developer will disagree, as is their right. But for me, I much prefer as little magic as possible.
Google Chrome Gets Add-ons, Closes in on Firefox
Identity thieves can get your personal information in a number of ways
Moments after stepping out of the taxi, Rachel plunged through the entranceway of the hotel lobby eager to put behind what had been a terribly exhausting day. Flight delays due to weather had caused her LAX-MDW-BWI trip to take nearly eleven hours to complete.
Lean Startup IV: I am pleased to report our first failure
Building a Django CMS for the Spokesman Review
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. Are you saying both Java and Ruby require extensive configuration files?
Face Paint Recall
Come to Canada! Seriously think about it.

Give these a read as well.

http://www.ictc-ctic.ca/en/Default.aspx

http://investincanada.gc.ca/eng/default.aspx
I feel for you -- I live in Japan and visa issues are near and dear to my heart.

If it makes you feel any better, you can have a successful business without being in the US, and should you later want to move the startup to the US having a successful business and all the fixings (such as a good immigration lawyer) will make the process quite a bit easier than it is when you're "just somebody with a gleam in his eye".

Immigration officials in both the US and Japan are not set up for tech companies, by the way. I used to work in a governmental unit of the prefecture which, ahem, zealously advocated the national government apply its immigration laws in the best interests of our prefectural high tech industry. If you're interested in trying the visa thing again in the near future, see if you can find yourself a stateside advocate like that. (I'd be kind of surprised if California doesn't have at least one state office which does something like that, probably sort of quietly for the obvious reason.)
Obligatory reminder:

Back up your system. Now. Automate your backup process.

That is all.
Well, FWIW, I backup my machine every night via both of Connected Online Backup ($995/yr) and JungleDisk, (about $350 a year to Amazon) and I won't use any of their competitors who can recover their own keys--so the story of enhanced security sells me. (I do trust these vendors not to transmit my password from their client applications to their servers, that's easy; I don't trust them to secure my unencrypted data on lots of machines for decades, that's much harder.)
VMware Warns Away ATI Users From Installing Mac OS X 10.5.7
I really wish the ATMega chip family had built in usb functionality. That would make them a good competitor to the Microchip PIC 18F family.
what's stopping you from doing a web(I'm guessing) startup outside of United States?
I'm wondering why you're surprised, or if I'm reading the wrong material. The first link on Google is to a site that says only 3000 investment visas are set aside each year, to investors of $500,000-$1,000,000 and(/or) employers that will be create 10 full time jobs in the US.
A Preliminary Analysis of the Yahoo Pipes Community
Willie D Facing Serious Time | Hip Hop MVP
Http://mintywhite.com is really good for Windows Guides, and they have an active forum for noob's.
Tell HN: Digg has co-founder? now that's interesting
Of course. Wondering if there will be a backlash. I tried not to take more credit than was really due me and also tried to avoid coming off bitter despite the bait waived in front of me. I'm clearly better off because of digg, even if not comparatively to some others involved. An argument could be made that I'm better off than a couple of different people involved early on, but if I had my way, they would also have seen more.
And it is. We have computers for this. Specifically, RFID chips, and readers.

Surgeons are very very expensive, so their time is too.
If you can figure out a way to make me be in my twenties, you can have all my digg shares. ;-)
He drinks like he is :), and he's one of the most down to earth people I've ever met.