skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe one is not enlightened enough to fully understand its brilliance?

"Ours started out 20 years ago, at NeXT. You could say it goes back to 1977, with the BSD guys. Heck, you could even say it goes back to 1969 with Dennis Thompson and Lionel Ritchie."
Travis, yeah my impression is similar -- a reverse proxy cache (e.g., Squid or Varnish) plus a light weight layer 7 load balancer (which is how I tend to use nginx)
Improvements in hardware are a necessary condition for AI. They are not sufficient. The other necessary conditions are algorithms (correct and efficient). The latter is much much more difficult. That is the biggest bottleneck in AI not hardware.
I liked Fake Steve Jobs when it first came out, some of it was really harsh but funny. But I was always slightly perturbed by the "freetard" stuff which seemed out of place for a Steve Jobs parody, and whenever they came up a strangely pro-micrsoft stance appeared too. When I found out that those bits where the opinions of the real author (Dan Lyons) leaking through I found that ruined it somewhat for me.
they held the extension system back possibly because it could have been a bottleneck or because they just didn't want
to give you the possibility to use an extension that blocks their ads. however, they are working on the extension system (http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensio...) and you can already start creating your own extensions (http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensio... or http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensio...).
the whole point of masking is so that you don't give away your password when you are using a projector(giving presentations etc)...this is no different than not masking the thing at all
No, not really. I doubt there will be ads in Docs & Spreadsheets. But there ARE and WILL BE ads in Gmail* and Google search results. The main idea is to keep you in Google's ecosystem and to make advertising on the web more valuable.

Selling advertisings isn't about creating new places to put ads--it's about making advertising space more valuable. And that isn't as straightforward as you seem to think. :)

* And adsense ads in apps that others create.
Su.pr Stumbles Out Of Beta, Officially Enters URL Shortening Wars
And I said that before noticing the super-annoying left-right format that requires scrolling but is incompatible to the left-right touchpad scrolling feature of my web browser.

I think I'll just read some more small blogs from people who will make the disruptive innovations of 2012. I wonder why I still visit news.ycombinator.com
You should probably switch browsers if you're still getting pop-ups ;)
Kinda cool, but the second one (with the concentric circles) is obviously a bad graph. The radii of the circles are proportional, so the ratios of the areas (apparent size) are off by a factor of pi.
Scientists Reprogram Clearly Defined Adult Cells Into Pluripotent Stem Cells
What does that have to do with adsense at all?
This is very well written (which is defined as not quitting after the first 3 paragraphs) and the first FSJ post I've read.
This is funny because a friend and I were having the exact same conversation recently. He started playing poker after a long hiatus, and was impressed with how much Poker Tracker had improved, and mentioned that it was so sophisticated now it came with an installation of PostgreSQL. I balked at this immediately, thinking there must be a better way than loading an entire PostgreSQL instance onto an end user's machine. I assumed that standalone applications that required RDBMS functionality would use an embeddable database system like Derby or SQLite. I'm most interested to hear from the developer what requirements led him to choose PostgreSQL over those alternatives. Anyone here have any thoughts?
I've seen police men and parking inspectors on them, quite recently - both in the Netherlands and in Switzerland. So I thought they were finally catching on.

Also, it gave me (and some friends) a good laugh by yelling the A-team tune at them while they were passing by :)
But Micand didn't go gaga over this Google announcement.
Sounds like iDrive spammed every contact on his iPhone, and because of the fact/coincidence that he has gmail set to save every person you ever send an email to as a contact, AND because of the way he is using gmail on his iPhone, this became "iDrive spammed my gmail address book".

If a company is selling a service (iDrive) which is basically "store your contact data on our services, trust us with this data", it's pretty shitty for that company to then turn around and market to the contacts in that data. It's probably in their TOS or something, but it still feels like an abuse of trust.
This reminds me of the Fortress programming language:

http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/Publications/fortress....

(Image from the part of the above PDF that I was thinking of: http://skitch.com/joelf/bs99c/sun-research-fortress)
Well, that's certainly part of the point, but it's also to prevent casual shoulder surfing/people walking by/etc...

I guess I'd prefer to see something like how the iPhone handles it, where each char is shown for split second before being masked. It lets you see that you haven't typo'ed, and yet ensures that your whole password is never sitting on the screen.
Transcendent memory (subscribers only)
I guess you didn't try it out. Spoiler: the first test requires you to disobey an order to pass.
That's precisely why I said "Data export facilities are your friends." They exist.

I am aware I can pull my data off Google's servers anytime I want, but, if such interfaces or facilities become unavailable, I will be stuck.

Recently, I received a lot of e-mails about my Yahoo 360 account. I have no data there, but, still, someday soon (if not already) all data in those servers will be gone. From first warning to total obliteration, a mere couple months have passed. I had vacations longer than that.

That's why I keep all my important data nicely backed up someplace I control.
It's true. An all black screen with no apparent content will indeed be hard to replicate without resorting to the awesomeness that is Flash.
If they are real it would be an easy way to get out of $billions by claiming they're fake
One important thing is missing from your website: I was looking for a section called something like "Here's what you can do if you want to help"
According to JWZ, Netscape's injuries were partly self-inflicted: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

To its credit, Google has amassed some impressive brainpower, much better than Netscape ever did in its heyday. It will be interesting to see how their OS works out.
I'll just assume the whole SF thing applies to you too on that one. Just like most people don't give a shit about what OS they use, most people don't really care about browsers either.

I have never had issues with Firefox, I don't care one bit about Javascript speed and honestly Chrome is underfeatured to the point where I think I'm using NCSA Mosaic. I gave it a shot. I was back to Firefox before lunch.

I see there is a hype there, but I just don't get it. The post is clearly hyperbole and overly sarcastic, but to me and stuff which matters to me, Chrome actually is shit. I'm not buying it, even though it's free. I might even go for MSIE before Chrome.

For the same reason, a OS where Chrome is the only browser* would be 100% DOA on my hardware.

* Rumour has it that Google wants to ditch X. If that is the case, no other GUIed *nix software will run without a rewrite.
Codingthewheel actually did a pretty intensive and in-depth series of blog posts about building a poker bot, you might want to check it out if you haven't already. IIRC covered things like communicating with the other processes, using Win32 APIs to scrape the text and controls of the poker client, how poker clients attempt to detect bots, etc.
What MBA Schools Won't Teach You
The demo actually works better than you would think: Easy to read for the writer, hard to read for a shoulder surfer.
J took one of APL's chief positives, the only thing that made it possible to look at absurdly dense APL code and make sense of it, and destroyed it. APL has a "one character == one primitive" relation, except for user symbols which all have to be letters. So no matter what jumble of crap you had, you could tokenize it easily starting from anywhere. J has variable length characters.
Looks like they forgot to show it to a geek before publishing. Not only did they claim a TB is 1024 GB, but they did so just after saying a TB is 1000 GB.

Also: interesting to note that the graph of dollars per GB has continued to decrease rapidly. Consumer-level drives are currently at about $0.08 per GB.
Does Being Free Cheapen Google’s Brand?
I'm just saying, that I use and like social networking. I only moved to Facebook because of the 'social pressure" of people leaving MySpace. Exactly like I left Friendster for Myspace.

That said, I look at with a combination of nostalgia and pity. I miss aspects of it, and I pity their loss of self as they attempt to become MySpacebook.

MySpace wants to be Facebook, Facebook wants to be Twitter and what I want is a foggily undefined thing that is none of the above.

I see the end of Facebook, veteran that I am of three generations of social networking.

Just saying.
I don't see that anywhere except for the part where they talk about the hard drive holding 1000GB. That's the standard way of measuring hard drive space for most drive manufacturers.
Take comfort from the fact that you are graduating into one of the nastiest job markets in the history of the United States and still don't have to face the kind of competition that you would in any of these countries:

Liberia (80%)

Zimbabwe (70%)

East Timor (50%)

Bosnia (40%)

http://www.aneki.com/unemployment.html

Graduates in any of those countries would gladly swap places with you.
I still like my idea: * * * * els

Where you mask every character up to the last N specified characters. I started writing this up in JQuery, but... then I stopped ;)
"goes google one better" on Google = 966
"does google one better" on Google = 12,500

So yes!
Sure, I'll bite at this, my submission

include<stdio.h>
int main() {
for(unsigned long n = 154566997192872; n; n=n>>5) {
printf("%c",'`'+(n&31));
}
}
that and salmon fishing.
"nobody uses Chrome"
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-daily-20090708-2009070...
losing to safari by .05? I understand its a joke... I just didn't laugh. They also say they are planing on starting with netbooks, not only targeting netbooks. I do think its a good niche market to target first though since there isn't as much of a dominance and since netbooks target low prices, removing the windows cost might make it a better seller.

All and all I think google and apple use different marketing strategies, so perhaps Jobs wouldn't understand googles strategies. Is interesting that although google makes 60% the total revenue (2008) their gross profit is very close.
I think it's one hell of an experiment, but in all honesty I don't wish you luck. When it comes to many things having to do with politics - and the clusterfuck that is California in the wake of their ballot initiative system is the prime example - people are dumb.

The clusterfuck in California proves that the Government is dumb. People did the right thing voting down on more taxes. California is already among the most highly taxed states. More taxes would damage the economy even more and would only extend the agony of the government.

The government has to shrink and cut expenses instead of wasting and taxing all the way to hell. People voted on letting the government go broke instead of going broke with government.
Wonder how this will compare to Nginx speed-wise...
Javascript can do it all:

function entropy(x){ return sum(p(x)*log(p(x))); }
My bottom line is that, as a publicly, tax funded organisation this is a total waste of time (and money). Other, open source frameworks are, at the very least, good enough.

Hiding some individuals ego trip behind the stated good of "inclusivity" is weak and unconvincing. The glow framework bespeaks egos run rampant and an IT department with a budget beyond its remit.

I worked for a consultancy that produced video on demand to rival iPlayer for a 10th of the budget in a quarter of the time. I've worked at government funded orgs too, and even though the consultancy was greedy, grasping, rapacious, dishonest and generally incompetent at least they had to contend with genuine market forces.

The BBC reeks of cronyism, old boyism and general too cool for schoolism. I'm glad they open sourced it but what use is it to anyone?

I feel not unlike a Red Top reader caught in some issue related rant but that bottom line is rearing up at me like a moon from the smug wasters at the beebs IT dept. In the words of "Annoyed" of Froom, "Why oh why oh why, BBC, did you waste the licence fee on this half-baked, ill conceived, masturbatory effort when you could of used JQuery and knocked out your code in 1/10th of the time? (And then made a nice episode of Caedfell)?"

(You may have to have be a UK citizen, raised on main stream TV in the last 30 years to understand the Points Of View reference)
They got part of it right. Google is making an operating system, but from my understanding, it is no longer solely a browser.
How to manage a customer crisis
As is k. (http://kx.com/)
nice idea and nice realization, too! it works pretty good! if you can't read the password after you've typed it in, try to mark it with SHIFT + LEFT-/RIGHT-ARROW or SHIFT + HOME/END :)

by the way: the guys from arc90.com cook up pretty cool things in their labs, like the greatly useful Readability bookmarklet http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
My idea is the best: reveal on mouseover
I am looking forward for Fortress 1), which takes these ideas to the extreme (basically, the whole language is unicoded and the syntax is mathematical). Fortress also features some very innovative features such as implicit parallelism for a imperative language and transactions. One of the creators of Fortress is Guy Steele (one of the guys behind Scheme, Lisp and Java).

1) http://projectfortress.sun.com/Projects/Community
Er, "We are all in this together?"
They Saved Michael Jackson's Brain
Yeah, I think you have a great point there :)
This story is particularly juicy because in the Metafilter thread in question (you can read it at http://www.metafilter.com/83061/Ruins-of-the-Second-Gilded-A...) the commenters pointed out a lot more work by this same photographer (Edgar Martins) which is apparently doctored in the same fashion. The funny thing is that Martins makes a public point of claiming that he doesn't do any "digital manipulation" on his pictures, which appears to be a total joke.

Here are some more of his images which he claimed to have shot naturally that appear photoshopped to be symmetrical:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/06/30/magazine/05gi...

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/06/30/magazine/05gi... (orange fence in front)

http://www.jmakes.com/spfo/dimpresent1.gif

http://www.artnet.com/Artists/LotDetailPage.aspx?lot_id=0E9A... (plants are mirrored)

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/images/thumbnail1.php/d4d7a...
Sorry for being grumpy, but how does it help to say that "1 petabyte = 20 million four-drawer filling cabinets filled with text"? Changing one huge number (1pb) with another (20M) doesn't add much to the overall understandability. The other examples are similar in nature. They're either comparisons with other giant magnitudes (10B facebook photos) or comparisons with things we have no fucking clue of how big they really are (HD manufactured in 1995, google's processed data).

"1 petabyte is a lot of data". Oh rly?
I don't think the readability of implementations is all that important. Java is widely regarded as having poor syntax, but any client of this type of a method (assuming it is in a static utility class) will do something like double myEntropy = InformationTheory.entropy(myseries); The details of a method like that just aren't all that interesting, it's 10 lines or 200 (likely the latter as there seems to be an optimized version for doing anything). I like to abstract away mathematically complex(ish) things like this and leave syntax like I stated above in my code, so that my code tells a story that is easy to read about how data is being manipulated and really focus on the high level semantics of what is going on. Maybe I am influenced from having done clerical work in HS and typing fast enough that a few lines doesn't matter, but sometimes I prefer longer code, with more interfaces and more abstraction and more standardization to concise and elegant but more obscure approaches.
Hey guys, I'm the author of HalfMask - please let me know if you have any feedback, or you can check out the source on google code: http://code.google.com/p/halfmask/

Forking to try new things is heartily encouraged - I'd like to see new approaches to password masking.
This is not an article. It's just some guy talking. There is not a single sentence in this post that would not be improved by asking the question "Why?"

Today saw the announcement of ... something I’ve wanted for quite some time; an ... OS with the web and Google’s services as its backbone.

Why do you want this? Is there something wrong with your current method of accessing Google's apps? What is it? What do you expect this new OS to improve?

The move by Google is sure to leave Apple and Microsoft shaking in their boots

Why?

I’m certain this is the beginning of the end for Ubuntu.

Why?

Since the increasing development and improvement of Google Apps, the increased speed of Chrome, the release of Android and now, the Google OS. I’m left torn.

Why? What do these technologies have to do with one another? Do they interoperate? What do they offer you that you didn't have before?

My current commitment to Google Apps has left me ... entertaining ideas of what it would be like to truly incorporate all my primary web services into an operating system

What would that be like? What benefit would it offer? Why do you want this?

I’m left wondering what Apple can bring to the table between now and Google’s OS release

What should they bring? What does the new Google OS offer that you think Apple should incorporate in OS X? Why would that improve it?

The point is this. As long as Google and web applications continue to improve at the rate they are, [Apple is] going to have to start thinking far more Google-like.

For love of all that's good, why?! What does it mean to think more google-like? What is wrong with how Apple is thinking now? What improvements is google making? How are those superior the improvements Apple's making (if, indeed, they are not completely orthogonal).

this is the beginning of an era of Google dominance, the likes of which we’ve never seen before

Why?

The company is slowly but surely taking over every aspect of our lives ... for some its scary, for me... I’m excited.

Why?

And for now at least, the one company I want to see step up to Google’s surge in dominance is Apple

W-H-Y?

and I predict they will, but its not going to be easy.

Predictably: why?

I propose a new rule. If you're considering posting something to HN, think how a fifth grade teacher would mark it up. If there would be more red than black on the page by the end, maybe give it a miss?
Same as the iPhone.
I'm honored you read my post and replied to it.

> I'd also argue that code size is a more meaningful measure of readability than familiarity ... but since whatever notation you put in a language will eventually become familiar to its users, you should factor out familiarity when making design decisions

An exaggerated, uncharitable interpretation of what you said would be "users will figure out the notation, regardless of how hard it is, so make them jump through hoops so you can get a shorter notation". How do you distinguish between shorter notation that is a net win, and shorter notation that looks like perl?

My goal in using the macro was to reduce noise. Without the macro, the equivalent clojure would look like

(defn entropy [x]
(- (Σ #(* (p %) (log (p %)) x))

To me, the original version is easier to read because it lacks the #, % characters. Given that every call to sum would likely use an anonymous function (and therefore use #, %), it seemed worthwhile. Maybe that's an argument against clojure, but the arc version is almost as noisy, IMO.
How to ID covert cop cars
Nevertheless they seek techno-drones.
read the parent(s)...
If you own the whole internet, as they would, surely there should be a way or another to make some money?
C#:

Func<List<double>, double> entropy = (X) =>
{
double e = 0;
X.ForEach((p) => e += p * Math.Log(p));
return -e;
};

Compiler gets negative points for not being willing to infer the type-definition of the function-variable though. I guess that is stuff you have to live with in statically typed languages ;)

Edit: Just checked. C# allows unicode characters like Σ for functions and variables, although I would never use it myself.
keyboards

http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/adcolkey.html
In theory, yes. And in the great-great-grandparent of this comment, I'm essentially saying that I feel that the days are numbered for the 2% per year management fee.

But equilibrium often takes some time to re-establish itself. After a situation changes, customs take time to catch up with the new reality. At the moment, it looks like the common practice of VC fees is lagging behind where it will wind up.

Also, I think part of the problem is that the people making the decisions (the "consumers" of VC value-added, i.e. large endowments, pension funds, banks, etc.) generally also have no skin in the game. This means they have much less incentive to press for the absolute best deal they can get, common practice be damned, than they would were they investing their own money into these VC funds. This means that the change in common practice will take longer than it would were the consumers generally investing their own money.
If you can write something as a function, that's always a better option than making it a macro. It's clear to any clojure programmer what your entropy function does, just like it's clear to any Perl programmer what all that "line noise" is. (Arguably, there isn't much line noise in Perl, only in regular expressions, which every other language has stolen Perl's implementation of. If you want real line noise regexps, try Emacs Lisp without "rx".)
This also works fine in Perl, Common Lisp, and Haskell... and probably every other programming language that was designed after 1970.
When we create new software that benefits from lots of networked users, we will be forced to make that software compatible with the people who do not have their own private servers. So users can run their own servers, but there will be those who cannot afford to do so or do not have the expertise. If there are enough of those kinds of users we will then have to bend to the needs of those users who in turn bend to the rules of the companies hosting their software.
Apparently Swedish is no longer a required skill in the Swedish military...
Yes, my programming language can do that.
jumble of crap you had, you could tokenize it

I don't grok this argument, when would one like to have that?

For me personally J is all about tacit functional programming. Any APL have this?
15 points? This is currently the top comment on a medical breakthrough restoring sight? This is why I left Slashdot.
About halfway through they state 1 TB = 1000 GB, which is correct.

Further down, they have comparisons of relative size from MB to PB, where they incorrectly use binary units.
BBC (yes, BBC) releases open source Javascript framework