skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Older cultures also didn't live to their 70s like we do now

This isn't exactly true. There has never been much of a shortage of 75 year olds, excepting certain grindingly poor societies.
I'd love to see the results of a similar study done at a school like MIT where self-segregation in living groups is not only allowed but encouraged. On the plus side, by letting students form living situations they're comfortable with, you remove a lot of domestic strife from their lives. At the same time you reduce the overall diversity in a living group.

As an alum, I really want to believe that the self-segregation is a net win, but this article suggests that that may not be the case...
Isn't this a racist statement? "...but those who roomed with Asian-Americans, the group that scored the highest on measures of prejudice, became more prejudiced themselves."
Interesting thoughts on Windows 7 design from a long-time Mac user
Ah, but that doesn't account for The Great Laser Conspiracy.

It's cover-ups all the way down.
Bad attempt. His link doesn't have anything to do with what he said.
print 'hell'
sleep 1500ms
print 'o'
for i=0->2
sleep 500ms
cursorleft = cursorleft-1
print o
sleep 700ms
print ' world'
Note: As of October 13th, 2005, some information in this paper may be out of date. Please visit http://eff.org/issues/printers for the most up-to-date information on this project

(in other words, be more careful with your titles relating to papers that are REALLY out of date)
Perhaps a good way to reduce prejudice is to always exchange resumes when meeting people for the first time -- even in non-work related contexts?
Well, they found places where it ran more than the purported subset:

> In the contest build, there were instruction sequences found that could jailbreak you from the sandbox.

From this link, which is fascinating & thoughtful on the topic:

http://www.matasano.com/log/1674/the-security-implications-o...
The same trend exists in the entire post war industrialized world, including Japan. Heart disease deaths declined as people got more affluent. Most likely because they could afford to eat better food and more meat and dairy.
It's factual. They phrased it as "scored the highest on measures of prejudice...", not "most racist..."

I wouldn't be surprised if it's true as well. For a minority group, Asian-Americans can be surprisingly racist.
I think an important caveat is that if you're stuck with bad roommates, tolerance of anything related to those roommates will decrease
Have you ever tried to convince someone of something which they were skeptical about, but had little knowledge about? It's hard. They're suspicious of everything they learn about it, because they're obviously aware that all the people who know about it claim the thing they're skeptical about. They're looking for the trick, where it all goes wrong, and if they don't see it, they often just decide that they missed it, rather than that everything is on the level.

There are probably things you have the same attitudes about: astrology, alchemy, global warming, macroeconomics, or whatever. You don't bother to study these things enough to refute them, but you might notice that the people who've invested years in such study all seem convinced (at least, most of the vocal ones, James Randi aside :]). Note that I'm not saying that those things are all equally valid or invalid. Just to be clear.

I know people who will refuse to agree with perfectly reasonable, obvious assertions because they're afraid that a series of such will "trick" them into changing their mind where we disagree.
starts at 8:30 AM
> I'm also not sure what you mean by "controlled".

Obviously not. You just offered the definition of uncontrolled.

> climate change is just blah

Well he makes a pretty good point that data dredging for correlations is bad science. But the real reason climate change is "blah" is that the world isn't actually warming. Clearly shown for over ten years now by satellite and ground station data. There was only warming after a long cooling trend that lasted into the 70s.

http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/06/how-the-us-temperat...
Try not thinking about something, and you'll find you can't do it.

People say this, but I find it's not true. Just think of something else. Works most of the time.
Wufoo do most things well, including the signup process.
I actively develop for Drupal (boost module). This 10 min demo should give you an idea on how fast sites can go up with it: http://acquia.com/what-is-drupal. I recommend Drupal.
I've used this for a while - it used to be free, I think it was hosted by some university. I would upload logos and stuff on there and then download the svg and scale them to my likings. It does work very very well.

Edit: it used to run only on a cluster of servers, the client-side program is new I think.
Not only that, but it should be perfectly clear now that if this technology is perfected and inexpensive in the future, then doing things now that you wouldn't want people to know about in the future is usually a bad idea as well. Act and think as though everything about your thoughts and actions will eventually be known to everyone who might be interested.

I guess how you think and act, then, will be a measure of whether you want to be thought of as moral or interesting. ;)
Thanks, we worked hard on that post.

The vulnerability you're talking about is a straightforward implementation flaw. Admittedly, it's a flaw NaCL's design begs you to make: forgetting about an aspect of x86 encoding is a problem you only have if you're going to let raw x86 instructions hit the processor. But the fix for it is no harder than the fix for, say, an implementation fault in the ELF loader code.
There was YEurope but it seems to have died. The German web start-up scene is hot; there's a lot going on. I wouldn't just call it copy-catting.

I think the only two places you'll find seed funding in Europe are London and Zurich. So although we're a Prague-based startup, our biz dev is in Zurich.
I would go even further and say that a lot of people prefer to just talk (and complain) about things rather than actually do anything.

Pisses me off.
HTML 5 Parsing
we are looking for a new backup storage and internal server setup for a video production company. If this is still available please write to tomer@millennialproductions.com
Interesting point. I think people who are gay should come out to as many people as possible for this reason :)
Even if the Secret Service can find the manufacturer and serial number info in a document, how can they match this information with the end user if he/she does not turn in a warranty card?

I can think of a couple of scenarios:

1) During the driver installation process, the serial number and the user info stored on the system is (edit: could be) sent to the manufacturer. This might be defeated by using an open OS and drivers. The user could also use the printer with a system that is never connected to the Net.

2) The Secret Service would be able to track the printer down to the store where it was purchased. The retailer would be able to supply credit/debit receipts, but what if the buyer pays for the printer with cash? The Secret Service would have to rely on the store's video surveillance system (who knows how long they keep these records?) or on eyewitness descriptions from the store clerks and cashiers (which may not be too reliable).
Oh nonsense. You can go hours in pars of london without actually seeing an englishman. That is definitely a development of the last thirty years.
As a former MIT applicant this is actually news to me considering I ended up going to a school where I mostly don't see any self-segregation. What exactly goes on there?

I have a problem with your argument though, how does encouraging segregation reduce domestic strife? You're assuming that simply being with another group would immediately cause hostilities. Even if it does remove strife, college is only 4 years! It hardly seems worth it to avoid some discomfort you will likely face more and more in the future.
Ever the skeptic, I uploaded one of the Windows sample images (Water lilies.jpg) and it spit out... a pretty damn amazing representation of the image. Hats off to the creators, if this project fails it most certainly isn't a quality issue.
Not directly startup related, but the Boston Ruby group is pretty active. http://bostonrb.org
Interesting form. I hit tab to go the the submit and it actually scrolled me over in a suboptimal way.
the autoplay feature sorta works like streaming radio.
Actually, I kind of like these threads. I don't think people are asking for advice to dumbly follow so much as looking to hear about others' similar experiences and/or connect with kindred spirits. I think it's rather fascinating that HN has evolved in this direction (edit: because it's done so entirely spontaneously). Keep in mind, too, that some people are introverts who might feel better able to communicate online, at a safe distance, than they do in person. For them, the alternative might be not communicating at all.
I saw on the Haskell (sub)reddit that they can run GHC on the iPhone, and they've made the source available for porting back into the GHC trunk.

http://projects.haskell.org/ghc-iphone/
It's about time we do another meetup... I have emails for a lot of the Pittsburgh people here, please send me an email if you're not on my list.
The irony of any statistics regarding race, etc. is that the very act of analysis is itself a form of unnecessary segregation.

For example, during the election I saw CNN blabbing about each candidate's popularity among white women voters or black voters or this or that, and I just turned it off. The whole problem is that people treat these as relevant and appropriate categories. The statistics should be completely uninteresting, in a color-blind world.
These aren't the $49 inkjets at best buy, these are large expensive leased units in government and large companies.
So when somebody leaks something embarrasing you have a better chance of finding who did it. If you are investigating a company for tax it helps to know who/when/where that document was really created.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that hiring someone who can't write a hello world app without using one of their "fail" methods is a really stupid idea?
Thanks for the links everyone! I'll stop by to check things out.
"Nope. The US merely needed to consolidate the Tet gains, which wiped out the VC. The NVA wasn't ready at the time."

That seems over-optimistic to me. Yes, the VC took a beating during the Tet Offensive, but Khe Sahn was close to ending up like Dien Bien Phu. There was combat inside the U.S. embassy in Saigon. The U.S. soldiers were demoralized and did not want to fight in Vietnam because they saw no point in doing so. The flow of NVA soldiers and supplies along the Ho Chi Mihn trail was never stopped though it was bombed to hell.

Sure, the U.S. military could have consolidated the Tet gains, but at what political cost?! Instead of fighting at a tactical level and failing, the U.S. military could have fought at a strategic level. One great idea would be to destroy the enemy's logistics. Though they bombed the railroad in the North, the U.S. only mined the Haiphong harbour in 1972, when the war was already lost. They should have focused on mining harbors in 1965 so that the Soviet SAM missiles, AK-47s, RPGs and land mines could never get to the VC and NVA forces.

Instead, the U.S. decided to fight at a tactical level. Burning villages and villagers. Spreading agent orange all over to kill vegetation, and condemning generations to come to cancer and other illnesses.

Last but not least, there's no comparison between WW2 and Vietnam. The U.S. fought the Nazis and the Japs to liberate occupied countries. In Vietnam there was no occupation by an external country. The U.S. messed up with a sovereign country's internal problems, and it lost the war it could have won. Sure, the Soviets were playing a role behind the curtains, but the U.S. did the same during 1954-1965.
Quite true, and some of the Songkickers I knew in London said that Ryanair and Easyjet (two low-cost airlines) contributed immensely to European integration.

That said, as a homo I found the Onion's article Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years all-too-disappointingly funny. http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28491
Good point, indeed I have heard arguments that there semi-secret stashes of gold which have been used to ward off earlier panic efforts to switch to gold.

Certainly, in our modern world, nothing is terribly certain and I wouldn't argue for gold an answer for those seeking a haven to store their value in.
Please note that this didn't work for Harvey Milk, for Alan Turing, for Matthew Shepard, and for many others.
The article makes it sounds so business like; so competitive, but what are these companies competing for? Who can add feature 'x' to twitter, when you know if feature 'x' shows profitability then twitter will copy it internally and the game is over... and if I was twitter I wouldn't buy that company out - I would just copy it.
I don't see this working -- there are dozens of sites doing this now, and Technorati's product has always been ridiculously shitty.

I have no idea how the hell they managed to establish themselves as the synonym for 'blog search' in the media for so many years, when they were so bad at it. Always full of spam, all of their attempts to fight it just delisted legitimate blogs, and terrible relevancy algorithms too. At no point in time were they even close to Google at their niche, even before Google was feeding from the ping/RSS firehose.
Except it's not the life mission of every gay person in the world to fix everyone's prejudices about gay people. It's exceptional and brave when someone does (not that it's exceptional and brave to come out of the closet, but it's exceptional and brave to go around fixing other people's bigotry).
I really hope this goes somewhere. I think there's a good chance they'll be able to make it difficult to attack this client to the point that other targets (Flash, Java, QuickTime, etc) will be easier to do damage with. And native code in the browser would rock, obviously.
I always felt that the <!DOCTYPE html> simplification, while nice, is still a little weird because it immediately precedes an <html> anyway. I recall a blog years ago suggesting that HTML 5 should simply have said <html version=5>, and I think it would have been nice to see something that sane. :)
What exactly do you mean by value added?

How do you think they should price their services?

At least with VC's (as opposed to index funds or others) the cost of investing rises with the amount investing. They can't double their position in their portfolio if their investors suddenly doubled. They would need to go out and invest in more companies.
The 'win' that said they'd write a genetic algorithm got me interested, but I'm not looking for a job, so here's what I came up with:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

our $POP_SIZE = 100;
our @GOAL = map { ord($_) - 32 } split //, 'hello world';
our $MUTATION_RATE = 0.05;
our $GENE_LENGTH = scalar @GOAL;

use constant GENE => 0;
use constant SCORE => 1;

my @population = make_initial_population( $POP_SIZE, $GENE_LENGTH );
my $generation = 1;

while (1) {
@population = rank(@population);

print as_string( $population[0][GENE] ) . "\n";

last if $population[0][SCORE] == 0;

@population = mutate( sex(@population) );

$generation++;
}

exit;

##################################################

sub as_string {
return join( '', map { chr( $_ + 32 ) } @{ $_[0] } );
}

##################################################

sub rank {
my @population = @_;

for ( my $i = 0 ; $i < @population ; $i++ ) {
$population[$i][SCORE] = score( $population[$i][GENE] );
}

@population =
sort { $a->[SCORE] <=> $b->[SCORE] || $a->[GENE] cmp $b->[GENE] }
@population;

return @population;
}

##################################################

sub score {
my ($gene) = @_;

my $value = 0;
my $num_diff = 0;

for ( my $i = 0 ; $i < @$gene ; $i++ ) {
my $diff = abs( $gene->[$i] - $GOAL[$i] );
$value += $diff;
$num_diff++ if $diff > 0;
}

return $value * $num_diff;
}

##################################################

sub sex {
my @population = @_;

my $end = $#population / 2;

for ( my $i = 0 ; $i < $end ; $i++ ) {
my @mother = @{ $population[$i][GENE] };
my @father = @{ $population[ $i + 1 ][GENE] };

my ( $sp1, $sp2 );
while (1) {
$sp1 = int( rand($GENE_LENGTH) );
$sp2 = int( rand($GENE_LENGTH) );
last
if $sp1 < $sp2
&& $sp1 > 0
&& $sp2 < $GENE_LENGTH - 1;
}

$population[ $end + $i ][GENE] = [
@mother[ 0 .. $sp1 - 1 ],
@father[ $sp1 .. $sp2 - 1 ],
@mother[ $sp2 .. $GENE_LENGTH - 1 ]
];
$population[ $end + $i + 1 ][GENE] = [
@father[ 0 .. $sp1 - 1 ],
@mother[ $sp1 .. $sp2 - 1 ],
@father[ $sp2 .. $GENE_LENGTH - 1 ]
];
}

return @population;
}

##################################################

sub mutate {
my @population = @_;

for ( my $i = 0 ; $i < $#population ; $i++ ) {
if ( rand() > $MUTATION_RATE ) {
my $gene = $population[$i][GENE];
my $chromosone_num = rand($GENE_LENGTH);
my $chromosone = $gene->[$chromosone_num];
$chromosone += int( rand(5) + 0.5 ) - 2; # -2, -1, 0, 1, 2
$chromosone %= ( 128 - 32 );

$population[$i][GENE][$chromosone_num] = $chromosone;
}
}

return @population;
}

##################################################

sub make_initial_population {
my ( $pop_size, $gene_length ) = @_;

my @population;

foreach ( 1 .. $pop_size ) {
my @gene = map { int( rand( 128 - 32 ) ) } ( 1 .. $gene_length );
push @population, [ \@gene, 0 ];
}

return @population;
}

##################################################
The Lame Ducks will be defending our title this year, after winning last year with MeetInBetween.Us. Bring it.
A nice thing about regular expressions is that you always know where you are in the expression (no backtracking, at least in theory).

Say your query is \d+(th|nd|rd), and your searchable text is "The 3rd planet from the sun is 20000000 miles away." Your tree search will hit 2, then fail on 20, then 3, then 3r, then 3rd, and then terminate successfully. So we followed 5 pointers, and tested another 20 or so for nullity.

This was independent of the length of the searchable text (but not the number of found matches). It would have performed equally well on "The 3rd planet from the sun is 20000000 miles away. Lorem ipsum (insert 10mb of random Latin here)".
Bummer - not working for me in Chromium (OSX) any more either. Which is odd since I did about half the development with it. I'll get that fixed soon...
I wouldn't claim the West lacks political repression but it seems obvious that any repressive states would love have such technology. Your argument seems to discount this.
Before you get too excited, keep in mind that this would also be true in a world in which racists are correct. That's still a world in which college graduates would generally have college graduate roommates, people who wanted to live in hip neighborhoods would have roommates who wanted the same, and people who liked to get wasted and listen to loud music would live with folks who had the same tastes.

It's easy to imagine this applying to age. If an 18-year-old and a 40-year-old share an apartment, it's probably because the 18-year-old is willing to be quiet after 10 PM, not smoke pot in the house, etc. Or because the 40-year-old is tolerant of late night noise and weed. However, the 18- or 40-year-old doesn't see it that way; to him, that 22-year age difference has surprisingly little impact on behavior.

However, the this-is-compatible-with-racism viewpoint can be disproven by either a) assigning people random roommates (no, not random roommates who all got roughly the same SAT scores, want to live in the same state, etc.), or b) seeing if there's a selection process that affects whether people pick roommates of one ethnicity based on how closely they stereotypically match the behaviors of another.
You could have said the same thing about search, but then, Summize did get acquired by Twitter.

And, you're assuming that the only value in building out these features is the potential to get acquired. It's possible that the feature itself has some value to BackType given their business.
It's one of those ideas that would be best tried out on one instance first. It's not obvious that the ASTs of programs in different languages would be "A" enough for a generalized querying system to be useful. Still, I don't mean to shoot the idea down - it would make for an interesting experiment.
Robot invented to crawl through veins
People do not usually share a bedroom with anyone they are not having sex with after college. Dorms are a rather unusual situation in that respect.

Even sharing an apartment with people you don't get on with can be a problem in terms of generating conflict. Roommate stress (especially for introverted conflict-avoidant people like me) is only a negative thing in the context of being a serious student. It's an essential thing to avoid.
Interesting observations.

The Windows branding one is kind of funny; this isn't new for Microsoft, they've just decided to replace "Microsoft" with "Windows". I remember being amazed at the stupidity, I think almost every version of Windows since 1.0 has used the name "Microsoft" 5 times on the splash screen alone ("Microsoft Windows 95" with "Microsoft Internet Explorer", "(c)1995 Microsoft Corporation", a stylized "Microsoft" logo in the corner, "Registered trademark of Microsoft", etc.). Someone in that organization is basically nuts. :)
The dorms at MIT all have a very strong cultural component (Do you like German culture? Do you like pyrotechnics? Do you want to avoid living with guys?) As an incoming freshman you're able to rank the dorms you'd like to live in, and you're placed into one of them by a lottery weighted by everyone's rankings. Once placed within a dorm, there's a further step of in-house rush which allows even further self-segregation, as within each dorm there're still more specific identities. The net effect is that most everyone lives with people like them (or at least people they like and vice versa).

Given the pretty heavy strain placed on you academically, it's in the school's best interest to reduce stress anywhere else in your life that they can.

Admissions takes great pains to make sure the school itself is diverse (50/50 guy-girl ratio at a tech school, for example), and so your interactions with other students are guaranteed to force you to work through any diversity-related issues you may have coming in.
love the video you guys put together. Im in SF so have little use for the app, but I really like the ingenuity and looks like you've done a really job of the pr side of things.
Mixed feelings on the updates, but Microsoft seems quick to patch security vulnerabilities lately. Same topic but unrelated, W7 will fetch and download drivers that it doesn't have installed.

I find OS X to be too monochromatic - I've made several modifications to get bolder icons, Dock, white text on black menubar. Granted, W7 does lack the same tightly controlled consistency as OS X, but I like the look.

I'm impressed with the Ribbon interface. The point about the large bezels - they make them stand out; it's a good design idea for Windows (note the distinction - it's good within their UI paradigm).

ed: clarity
The problem is, the statistics are very interesting just because we do live in a non-colorblind world. We're never going to live in any kind of idealized fantasy world where race and sex are irrelevant, so pretending that they are is ignorant of reality.
Of course not, nor should it be. It's just fascinating to think that there are so many bigoted people who care deeply about one or more closeted homosexuals -- whose world view would be shattered (and bigotry destroyed) if they found out.
"I’m slightly amused that there were 8 updates already."

There were up to 10 test updates for the RC:
http://blogs.technet.com/mu/archive/2009/05/08/upcoming-upda...
If you want a really unique look, try control+option+command+8 on a Mac. :)