skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The PS3 has a graphics card"

I mentioned that. The problem is PS3 wasn't meant to have a graphics card. The Cell was envisioned to do everything from the start. Years of planning went by before something inexplicably changed (maybe what they saw in real life didn't match what IBM promised?). The graphics card was added in at the last minute (which essentially resulted in a quick hack for release) or Sony's SDK/frameworks would have made it easier to use everything.

In Sony's defense, MS and Nintendo had some planning snafus too. Wii has that weird system for OS updates / new features and 360 will always be associated with red rings.
The grandparent specifically asked about a 1/4 second delay on all touches

So? The parent post specifically asserted that "feedback to touch is instant", which is plainly not the case.
Dude, you need Tungle: www.tungle.com
Montreal Venture backed startup who have taken on this problem and have done a pretty outstanding job. Have a look at their approach to the problem of scheduling meetings to see if it makes sense. Works with a browser, gcal, or Outlook.
It seems to be missing "Periodic table" as a visualization method.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_or_Girl_paradox
The rendering of web pages is noticeably much faster. On wifi I have seen page load times comparable to that expected for my laptop.
The Post Money Value: Geeks Linked to Business = Success
In computational theory this would be called a zero-knowledge proof. Especially if the inquirer doesn't pick up any return calls... Sorry, just had an exam.
Can anyone confirm this article by Atwood is worth looking at?
Wouldn't it be better to stay tagged? If you are tagged you can set privacy settings to restrict views on photos tagged of you. Without that the photos are still visible.
I'm confused; so instead of using a cellphone he used an application that let him make and receive phone calls, but also allowed him to not pick up the phone and instead make the decision to call someone back based on the content of voicemail?

Gee, I wish my cellphone could do that.
Yes. But if picks the second door, it no longer matters whether you switch or not.

Your final probability in Monty Crawl is still only winning 2/3, because you can't do better than an always switch strategy, and you will pick the winning door initially 1/3 of the time.
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-...

According to the author of the above instructable, it takes about 20 minutes to scan a book.
Bullshit, somebody should ask him why undergraduates and grads from the top most schools in India refuse to work for companies like HCL, Wipro and Infosys. I studied in Bangalore and every good computer science grad I know never even had considered working for these companies.
I wasn't, but thanks anyway ;-) I think Java uses UTF-16 and all those years as a Java developer I was under the impression that it can only use two bytes per "letter". Thanks for the clarification.

It's significant because it messes up the length (or size) property of strings, doesn't it?
Don't forget Boring, Oregon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boring%2C_Oregon
No, in the merge sort example it's not 32n operations, but a maximum of 32 levels of splits, but the number of comparisons, which dominate runtime, is still k * n * log(n). Not so for radix sort, because there are no direct comparisons. By choosing a word length in advance (often hard-coded) the number of items to sort affects the runtime linearly.
I'm just looking for a way I can get Posterous great backend features working elegantly with Squarespace's solid UI features. Both companies pretty much entirely ignore the other aspect and if one or the other caved-in and took a stab at improving in the other area, I'd finally have just the right service.

Note to other blogging startups: If you can combine both of the above things well, you can have my $15-30/month, for what it's worth.

Edit: I'm going to try again and see if I can get them to talk through API layers that aren't exposed, but Squarespace didn't know of an easy way to do it-- ideally one service does it all.
Who uses the analog loophole anymore? Do what modern audio DRM stripping utils do and take the output of the document before it leaves the computer and programmatically re-assemble it. The eBook version of this would be creating a program that scrolls around the page area taking screen shots and reassembling them.
I was kind of wondering, I hope my comment wasn't taken as a criticism, that's why I said that we have to be careful with phrases like that, because I often see them either misinterpreted (like I did) or actually used as bait.

I do agree, the article is totally useless reminds me of the "I don't hate x, I use x, but here's why I hate x" type of articles.
that's exactly the answer I was looking for. Thank you.
Very interesting... despite his best effort, Elon does come off as a passive-agressive, controlling guy IMO.
The Kindle app can run in the emulator, right? Write a script to take screenshots and page through the book. Bonus points for OCR. Is there a reason this wouldn't work?
Maybe Now's Not A Great Time To Spend $95 Million On A New Printing Press
Where was this 2 months ago? I spent way too much time bringing my old WP posts over.
I have sympathies for YCsterous, but that is a standard feature of all serious blog engines.
but you can type http://66.135.60.177/
Kevin Marks' Farewell to Google
[DISQUS - San Francisco] Hiring: Back-end developer (Python), Front-end developer (JavaScript), Systems Engineer
You are right. The guy runs a business and he is looking for a certain type of worker. What I take issue with is the view that it is the responsibility of academic institutions to provide the type of workers that he needs.

If he finds that people from an academic background are not willing to submit to his requirements I would assume that they wont submit because they can find more fulfilling work elsewhere.

Furthermore, it's not how methodologies are called at these places, it is how they are used: an excuse for middle management to look at charts and metrics without having to deal with the human aspect of their team.
Apple store personnel treat iPhones/iPods like cord wood. If it breaks, you often just get a new set of hardware. The iPhone might require a sim swap. Given that, there is a financial/technological fix: insurance plus customer service.

On the technological side, send a signal to erase the contents of the phone and permanently disable it. Apple could then give you a new phone. This could be a service like AppleCare, but which would expire every time you used it.
How Facebook is Gunning for Google
The whole point of DRM is to restrict what the customer can do with digital ciontent they've bought. It therefore follows that if you're in the habit of buying DRM-crippled products, sooner or later you're likely to get biten.

The solution to this is very simple: Just say no to DRM.
http://clearlyso.com
They started the plan 5 years ago, check out the 5 year stock chart.

http://www.google.com/finance/getchart?q=SSP&x=NYSE&...
Nerves of steel? I thought stolen phones would immediately be used to call the most expensive sex hotline possible? So my first move would have been to block the account, not sleep over it in vague hopes of iPhone finder getting it's act together.
We perceive what we agree with to be of higher value. Confirmation bias.
Obviously by Nirmal [...]

Really? But Nirmal has no way of knowing what articles people will see fit to post to HN. How can he negotiate permission with all possible content providers, given that I may link tomorrow to a brand new blog created later today?

I question whether he scan truly be said to be publishing, when it appears that the feed in question simply reformats without asserting any ownership over the content or monetizing it in any way, and involves no editorial selection on his part, something I consider a defining feature of publication.
It's your own fault for not having your lawyer check the EULA for every book you buy on Amazon. sure it adds a couple of $100 to each book but it's the only way to be sure (well that or taking off and nuking Amazon from orbit)
But Posterous isn't a serious blog engine. It is by very loose definitions of "blog engine" but it's a service trying to do stuff that Wordpress and Typepad don't do. I don't like comparing it dead-on to Wordpress. If you did, Wordpress would come plenty short in a lot of ways.

This is a great feature to have, particularly the Tumblr importing option. There're plenty of disgruntled Tumblr users right now looking for a way out.
You're making a bad assumption about my skill and preferences, and trying to use it as an argument. That's a logical fallacy. My argument doesn't depend on my personal experience: Algol-derived languages resemble English, and are therefore easier for new programmers to learn.

While I am sure that some high school courses may start with Scheme, it's certainly not a common beginner's language. I'm sure if I searched hard enough, I could find a high school class learning assembly -- but that doesn't make assembly a good beginner's language, either.
Converting Kindle Books
Iranians publish underground newsletter via Issuu
VoIP in a Cloud
Not if it provides a useful service that's worth the DRM. The Kindle's worth it, as is something like Steam. I proudly use both.
I'm confused about why people argue that it is not necessarily 2/3.

I assume that the sample space is: [(b,b),(b,g),(g,b),(g,g)] where the four possible birth sequences are [(younger child is boy, older child is boy), (younger child is boy, older child is girl), (younger child is girl, older child is boy), (younger child is girl, older child is girl)] and the sequences are all equally likely.

So now if you ask, what is the probability that the person has a girl and a boy given that at least one of them is a girl, you can discard (b,b) from your sample space because you know that there is at least one girl.

Now your sample space is [(b,g),(g,b),(g,g)] and the odds that the person has a girl and a boy are 2/3.
i had a similar idea for a web-rep system a while back. my idea included customizable avatars by which you could spend points on. a little extra incentive to participate positively on sites, and something you can show off.

an extended idea would involve games that you could play using your avatar on various sites. take your character and go play the new promotional game from cocacola along with your friends or whatever. take him out to the newly opened online theme part and walk around, ride some rides, play some skill games.

just thought it would be pretty cool to have the web itself be a landscape that you could adventure in with your "personal online character". might be a fun alternative to world of warcraft and all that senseless killing... :D
It's weird hearing people say not to focus on cleaning modules because they're a waste of precious resources. Down the road, the code is all you've got - you must keep it in as good a shape as you can. The more "technical debt" you acquire, the harder it's going to be 2 or 5 years from now to stay competitive. Hacks might sell version 1, they might even sell version 2 and 3, but come versions 4, 5 etc. it's going to be increasingly hard to add features and fix bugs without breaking the whole thing. I've been on two such projects in my short career and it wasn't fun. It's one thing to work with a complex codebase, and it's completely another to work with a badly mentained complex codebase - it sucks the pleasure of programming out of you.

As I've said - code is all you've got in the end, and if it's good, the shipped product will reflect that.
Second Life launches adult world "Zindra", all porn content to be moved
The San Francisco Chronicle made a similar announcement earlier this year, trying to turn it into a marketing hook with a new look too. Readers were unimpressed (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/comments/view?f=/c/a/2...) and as of last week they have been reverting to the old design for some sections. It doesn't help that the Chronicle has one of the worst websites I know, which makes it a chore to follow a story that was on the front page of the dead tree version.
The trick I learned in my freelance days came from a designer friend who'd picked this up the hard way and developed his own nuclear option for non-paying clients. Whether it works for a given contractor depends on what the contractor is doing, and so consulting with a lawyer (I am not one) is important. But in general it goes like this:

Step 1 is to ensure in advance that your standard agreement includes clauses indicating that creative work you do is not work for hire, that you will, at the start, retain copyright in that work, and will assign the copyright to the client on receipt of payment in full.

Step 2 is to go through the normal process; if they don't pay, you send invoices, attempt to negotiate, etc.; make a good-faith effort to resolve the problem.

Step 3, if the client still refuses to pay, is a DMCA takedown. You don't have to go to court, you don't have to get into legal wrangling about contract terms, you just get their site taken down until they pay up, which they often will.

Of course, they'll give you a bad reputation and you'll never get business from them again, but you'll have food on your table and they'll have learned an important lesson about trying to screw their contractors.
My user agent is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1pre) Gecko/20090622 Shiretoko/3.5pre. I'm using nightly builds. Got the search bar now from your other link, though, so thanks. :)
SF City College offers class naming rights
"About $13 trillion has disappeared/ been destroyed through mal-investment and the collapse of the credit bubble."

But how much of that money actually existed in the first place, and how much was just someone's imagination running away with them?
What's actually interesting is linking this result back to Deal or No Deal.

This implies that if you got down to two briefcases on the show, with both the $1,000,000 and $1 left, it's a 50/50 chance of picking the million dollar case whether you switch or not.
Do Programmers Optimize... Life?
Yeah, big-time. Guaranteed fixed-size encodings either take 4 bytes per codepoint, or give up some codepoints as unencodeable.
The Penn-Lehman Automated Trading Project (2005-06)
While that is more reasonable, you still have to wonder about the fact that the DRM is so complicated that the customer service people don't understand it.
The reason it's important is that the problem, as usually phrased, is a conditional probability problem. Say you picked door number 1. Given that Monty opened door number 3 and it's empty, what's the probability you'll win by switching?

Now suppose that Monty will always open the empty door as advertised, but he will also always prefer to open a door with the smaller number, if he has a choice of two empty doors to open. If that is how Monty always acts, then given that he's opened door number 3, your probability to win by switching is 100%, and not the usual 2/3. If he's opened door number 2, then your probability to win by switching is 1/2, not the usual 2/3.

If Monty will always choose which of the two empty door to open by random, then the probability to win by switching is indeed 2/3.

There is a way to phrase the problem differently, so that it becomes an unconditional probability problem, and then it doesn't matter how Monty chooses the empty door to open. One way to enforce this interpretation is to phrase it as follows: Suppose some player always chooses to switch. Over many attempts, what will be the approximate proportion of his wins? The answer will be 2/3. But that's not how the problem is usually phrased.
Federal Trade Commission to start monitoring blogs
"permanently disable it" - self destruct on a text message :)
Label's Response to Harvard Paper on P2P
IANAL, but here's my understanding of the DMCA's Safe Harbour provision, which is why scribd and other UGC sites (e.g. YouTube, isohunt, flickr) aren't held responsible for copyrighted material appearing on their sites. UGC websites can be protected by the Safe Harbour provision under the following conditions:

- The site provides a legal, legitimate service (i.e. fair use)

- The amount of UGC on the site is too much to reasonably police

- They have an employee registered with the US govt as the agent for handling all copyright claims. Simply providing an email address, contact form, or even a mailing address doesn't count.

- When they receive legitimate removal requests from the copyright holders they remove the content in a timely manner.

As long as these conditions are met they can't be held liable for copyright violations which occur through the use of their product.

HN is a different case, because the amount of content copied from the source site (the headline, and only in some cases) is a small portion of the original work. Furthermore, HN is adding value to the content through ranking and community, which makes it a distinct piece of intellectual property. Similarly, you can legally make a collage which contains copyrighted material because the collage itself is a distinct entity (more than the sum of its parts).

How much of the page content can scraped and presented, or how large the pieces of a collage can be, is vividly debated. For me personally, its a bit of a Potter Stewart situation, and this feed is absolutely copyright infringement.
I've played one of these online before. I'm gonna download yours to see if it suffers from the same issues the other did (namely lack of intuitive animation).
Noweb, a simple, extensible tool for Literate Programming
'Synthetic tree' claims to catch carbon in the air
Parallel and Distributed Computation: Numerical Methods
when other people are signing her paycheck, she either does it their way or finds a new job

If the people who hired her were thinking straight, they hired her for more than just her ability to write code to a strict specification under strict supervision. A number of developers are valuable far beyond their ability to make a computer do their bidding, and the employer who does not care does so at their own peril.

She may come off as a little overbearing, but I don't get the sense that she is unreasonably set in her ways. I get the sense that she's passionate about doing things right, and will take up issue when something doesn't make sense and push back until things do make sense. If you think these are the same, I'm afraid your model of developer behavior is flawed. Strong beliefs can be weakly held.

And it is possible that refactoring code that works is worth $XXX/hr. Consider the savings that might be accrued later on due to shorter bug-fix cycles, quicker feature releases, and less overall malaise of the development staff. Not everyone can be motivated by having their paycheck treated as a carrot on a stick. So the money might be very well spent.
Harvard Paper on Empirical Costs of File Sharing
People looking for co-founders
I came across a website recently where people post their ideas and are looking for co-founders. Does anyone know which website it is?
This is what happened to me when I first signed up for Facebook. Even never having had an account with them in my life, 3 pages in to the signup it popped up a photo of my face and asked me if I wanted to set that as my profile photo. I left immediately and have never returned. I know that whatever I do online is a matter of public record, but it still creeped me out to the extreme.
I wrote a z-machine interpreter for the Newton a million years ago:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030811081833/scrawlsoft.com/pro...

The single UI feature of which I am most proud was suggested by a user: tap on a word and have it appear on the input line.

I've searched and searched for his name to give credit, but haven't had any luck.

He also, I think, came up with the best name: TAP

Text Adventure Player

It is excellent to have users smarter that you are.
"Google: we brute-force stuff."
I understand Posterous is a YC company, and we're supposed to be all ga-ga eyed about them... but in all honesty the only thing to resurrect your dead blog is you. Not software. Just sit down and write.
Reply to brandnewlow: Currently, the link to the site being reviewed is below the screenshot-I'll see about getting it moved. Thanks for the suggestion!
Can university subjects reveal terrorists in the making?
Overworked and underpaid. The cops, especially in a place like Chicago, don't have the time (or the inclination) to search for a few hundred dollar piece of consumer electronics.

Plus, I don't imagine a blue circle on a Google map would convince a judge to issue a warrant.
No, those keyboards are pikers in both quality and unbelieveable silky-smooth touch compared to the Microswitch-built Hall-effect keyswitch-based custom keyboards used at Stanford and MIT, aka The Knight Keyboard.

http://world.std.com/~jdostale/kbd/Knight.html

Even the later versions that Symbolics and Sun used were inferior in quality and feel to these old TK keyboards.

Sigh.
Origin Story - TAM looks at origins of institutions
Seeing vs hearing is a red herring.

What really matters is whether information about one child being a girl fixes a particular child. It doesn't matter how the child is fixed (a popular variation is "I have two chilren and the older one is a girl"), but it does matter that out of the two children, it is now known about a specific one of them that it is a girl. In that case, out of 4 possibilities, 2 are ruled out, and the answer is 1/2.

If all that is known is that one of the children is a girl, only one possibility out of 4 is ruled out, and the answer is 2/3.
"Really?"

Yes, really. And it's necessary to have a more thorough understanding of the current issues in copyright law and recognize that it's based on statutes and case law before speculating about what may or may not violate fair use. Words also already have definitions (eg, http://www.answers.com/publication and http://www.answers.com/publish) and, in a legal setting, those are the definitions you'll need to work with whether or not you have your own. I realize that this sounds somewhat ungracious (sorry! I mean no harm), but it's a legal issue, not a purely speculative philosophical issue.
I'm sorry. I definitely didn't mean to offend anyone-I'll start labeling reviews as such in the titles when I post them on HN.
"To save legal fees, we just copied the SpaceX articles of incorporation"

What?! Such fees must be, at most, a few thousand dollars; it seems really weird that someone worth what Musk is would do this just to save (what is for him) pocket change.
Doesn't seem that efficient, actually. If blocks were numbered in some straightforward sequence and house numbers were, say, given as clockwise from the north-west corner instead of age of construction, that'd be reasonably efficient.

Look at the map in the linked article - if you go down from block 29, you hit 39. Go further, you hit 40 - or the un-numbered block between 29 and 41.

Given arbitrary block numbers and arbitrary street names, finding a street and moving along it to the desired address seems to be an easier task than locating a block and then trying all the buildings in it.
Story That Takes 1,000 Years to Read
Tesla has taken a $350 million loan from the U.S. government -- that's more than a million bucks from Uncle Sam for every car they have ever sold. The taxpayer gets absolutely no upside on the deal, except the hope that we get our money back, but the millionaire equity owners and the foreign automaker Daimler get unlimited upside. It is another "heads we win, tails you lose" deal from Congress and their cronies.
Introducing the Virtual Keyboard API