skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you need to separate "the idea" from the obviously technically unfeasible implementation he gave as an example.

His idea is to make your content free to people who use it casually but to charge people who use it extensively. I think there's some merit to that. The more you use something the more valuable it becomes to you and hence the more likely you are to pay for it.

There are definitely some technical hurdles to it but on the surface it's an idea worth consideratoin.
Vista Speech Recognition - Equation Editor in Word
Of course, Dos Equis was created by a German.
I'm sure Skynet only has our best interests in mind.
Your claim that somehow marriage is against "men's evolutionary nature" is a pretty strong one. Certainly, widespread attempts at reproduction (screwing everything that moves) is one strategy, but it's not at all clear to me that such a strategy is favored by our human instincts honed by evolution.

Frankly, your use of the word evolution seems to be to justify preconceived notions of male and female roles in society.
You missed his point. A big part of his point was making your content accessible for free so you don't lose out on all the search engine and casual user traffic that is generated by having your content out there for free. Micropayments doesn't solve that problem (which is a large part of why they aren't being used by many even after the ideas been around forever)
Hmm...good point. I take it back. Bad collection of links!
i'm interested in your business. how can i contact you?
Because the two graphics are not exactly the same. The one linked in this post was made by a redditor: http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/94gv2/this_is_how_...

I cannot attest to whether the linked graphic is correct or not. However, the NYT article has a 30ms advantage whereas this one talks about a 500ms one.
How to Cure Cancer by using some Common Sense
I wonder if anyone ever told him that trolls aren't called trolls because they are like the mythical ugly green humanoids...

That said, I generally enjoy NSFW for its entertainment value.

"For every comment I see complaining about the length of this column, I will add an extra 100 words to the following week’s installment."

God I hope no one clues in the /b/tards to this challenge.
That probably has much more to do with a specialized part of the bran that provides an intensive face processing and retrieval mechanism than it does with some fully generalized predisposition.
Human Genome Sciences’ Value Skyrockets with Data from Lupus Trial.
Constraints usually aren't that hard to implement. For example, "computer worms and viruses that defy extermination" is and always will be a computer security problem, not a philosophical AI problem.
"How have we gotten here? What has shifted in African American customs, in our community, in our consciousness, that has made marriage seem unnecessary or unattainable?"

Well, for one thing: Welfare. Welfare was created at a time when most poor, single moms were "the deserving poor" -- ie widowed -- and having a child out of wedlock was a big taboo and hardly done. Welfare, while well-meaning, was (unfortunately) designed in a manner that rewards women for becoming poor, single moms -- and thus actively grew the population that fits this profile by changing the social contract. Although (iirc) most people on welfare are white, the small amount of money involved in getting food stamps and welfare is more alluring to people who are very poor and live in neighborhoods where the mentality is one of hopelessness, with no expectation that one can get ahead honestly. Add in the fact that blacks are "last hired, first fired" and the tendency for young black males to be the biggest victim of that reality, and you have a situation ripe for developing a culture where a woman has a baby by one man, gets on welfare, breaks up with him and then finds a different boyfriend -- in part because a father is expected to provide for his kids (and gets booted out the door when he cannot) but mom's new boyfriend is seen as generous for doing anything for the kids, even if he doesn't actually provide for them. "Gifts" are enough.

There are some books, articles and studies about such things. I've read a fair amount of stuff like that over the years.

On the upside, I've seen some stuff that indicates that black women tend to have more say in how the money is spent when they are part of a couple than white women do. The paychecks of black women are more needed for a black couple to make it at all. The paycheck of a married white woman who has kids is more likely to be seen as "fun money" -- something the family can spend on vacations and other extras but not really needed for basic necessities -- and this tends to carry with it less "voting" power when financial decisions are made.
We should be so lucky to have machines outsmart us.

This article fails to communicate the unfathomable chain of events such technology would set in motion. Without hyperbole, all previous events in human history would pale in comparison.
I have my own little aggregator running, it's still very much under development though. I'm trying to get away from the 'there goes the neighbourhood' feeling that almost every social network seems to suffer from sooner or later.

I think that there is much more 'value' in an upvote or a downvote of an article / comment than just the 'karma' the way HN,/., digg and so on use it.

Easier said than done though :)

Also, I absolutely suck at design...
For instance, has this been answered?
http://jim.com/chomsdis.htm

Here is a cute list:
http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/200chomskylies.pdf

I read those a while ago, but don't really know (or care) enough to build a certain opinion. If I would respect Chomsky as an intellectual, I'd first want to see serious answers to those.
This seems to be working way better than any of the speech to text recognition software I have used. And the fact that you can not only convert speech to text, but control the software is just crazy..
The American legal system has lots of things that are very hard to explain to foreigners. The sheer amount of case law and the jury system make for lots of income for lawyers and very little justice.

Child support should be limited to what it actually costs to rear a child, not some arbitrary multiple of that.
I worked at the Mellon Foundation for a while, and one of my jobs was to visit Chandler and find out what they were doing with our money (my boss had foolishly funneled them a lot of funding for a version 2, "Westwood", suitable for university use). It was a complete vanity project - Kapor had brought in his art collection, the offices were spacious and lovely, every developer had state of the art workstations with an acre of screen space - but the software never worked. Pointing this out just created tension and bitterness. The project floated along on Kapor's reputation and ate his money, and had no opportunity to make contact with reality. I think of it more as a cautionary lesson about lack of outside constraints than software complexity. It was a Spruce Goose, except nowhere near as pretty.
> I'm pretty good at JS - I swear.

Sorry, didn't mean to be a dick. :) This particular wart apparently got my nerd rage going.

> In general, most don't use the same String value for a key/index to store different values

Agreed, it'd generally be pretty sketchy. My current puttering around project is a "Python-in-JS" in the vein of http://objective-j.org/ which is where the desire for a "map" rather than an "object" comes from.
Goldman's Billions (High Frequency Trading)
That's definitely not uniquely American, racism is unfortunately alive and well all over the world.

Skin colour is the single item you can tell about a person at 100 meters distance, even before you can tell their gender. That makes it a prime candidate for differentiation and differentiation is a first step towards racism.

If everybody would be born exactly the same shade of medium brown as of tomorrow I'm sure we'd focus on hair colour next. And anybody with red hair knows how true that is.
The earliest version of HN I can find; 166 LOC
We used to have a market for private ownership of individuals; thanks to Wilberforce et al., we don't any more (at least, publicly, in OECD countries). Is there some reason to believe that public ownership of individuals would be less evil?

Debt by individuals is still allowed, though. Generally you can do anything with debt financing you can do with equity financing, no? Student loans are an example of this, as applied to personal development.

Some "intellectual property" laws are another gray area. If someone becomes an expert in a patented process, the owner of the patent gets to decide, essentially, how much that person is allowed to earn with that expertise — and how much they have to pay in rent back to the owner of the industrial property. Utility patents and trade secrets have this property; copyrights and mask-work rights less so; and trademarks and design patents least of all.
I've met people who have used DragonSoft's software for several years and gotten it so well trained that it really does work like we would expect it to at dictation.

Echoing KM's comment below, training is important. I had a Newton some years ago and I noticed that if I really drew the serif part on, say a 'C', the newton had a much easier time recognizing my handwriting.
Fail for me at least. ;-)
We should translate that into as many languages as possible and use it as a benchmark for a real world application to compare the efficiency of the various languages.
Adobe bug recognised over seven months ago 
Adobe confirmed that the software pioneers were well informed of “potential vulnerabilities” influencing Adobe Reader, Acrobat 9.1.2 and Adobe Flash Player 9 as well as 10. Thus, advising users to make sure their systems are completely secure since hackers are still lurking in the midst.
You'd have to translate it into Arc at this point. It would not run in present-day Arc.
They are certainly sunny states, but they also account for ~25% of the nation's population. California, Texas, and Florida have the 1st, 2nd, and 4th largest state populations respectively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_populati...
But that really isn't the point. Let's not go all beer snobbery on an advertising thread.

Alcoholic drinks are primarily sold through superior advertising, not a superior product.
tcc isn't a toy, but it's optimized for a very different scenario than GCC, one where compilation speed and small compiler size are paramount, winning out over things like error reporting and output code quality.

IIRC lcc was a production-quality, if simple, C compiler when it came out in 1995.
The way I know the context: after WWII, it was clear for policy makers in the USA, that internationalization and (seeing the success of) science (as mentioned above) were key to global dominance relying on technology. There was a slight hope for the automatic translation of documents [i.e. scientific papers] from one language to another, and funding was abundant with the '56 landmark paper. The original goal then was not reached, but as with all good research, the by-products were of great value. Speaking of statistical techniques, not unlike GOOG's case today, with the UN documents used to train translate.google.com -- somewhat achieving the "original" dream, having gone full circle. I would therefore discount the later UNESCO report from Backus as independent work, it is rather the incarnation of the results of the zeitgeist [1].

About the influence of Pāṇini it is true. Thanks for drawing my attention to it: I've learnt something[1]. But I am inclined to think, that the pieces of today's compilers fell to place as a byproduct of his work at MIT (right time, right place).

[1] "Speaking of linguistic law in general is like trying to pin down a ghost" -- Ferdinand de Saussure

[2] http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1825/18250150.htm

When asked what suggestions he would give to individuals who are trying to raise questions and challenge conventional doctrines, Chomsky said: "It's the same advice you'd give to a young scientist. Be honest, be thoughtful, be creative."
Even if, theoretically, it might benefit someone to sell their freedom, its too dangerous to allow such a transaction to be considered legitimate.

That is simply untrue. We sell our freedoms all the time. I sell big chunks of mine in two-week increments when I work; I sell my freedom for other times when I go home to an apartment where there are certain limits on my behavior.
Are you kidding? Look, you can argue there are varying opinions. I have no problem with that. But the majoirty opinion among people who study male nature is that our instinct is to "spread our seed" as widely as possible because or evolutionary purpose is to further our own lineage.

You see this in pretty much all primates. Silverback Gorilla's have whole tribes that are made up of the women they have sex with and their children. Because even in modern primates the males nature is to breed with as many women as possible.

Also, I said nothing about male and female roles in society. My entire argument is based around male and female instincts and I've said there are exceptions (again look above where I say feminism exists because there are exceptions and it's a good thing)
I've never heard of this occuring at a primitive level (which was what I was referring to). I know there are primates where females are considered the "leaders" such as Gibbons and monogamy has been observed in them but I've never seen a male dominated society of primates where monogamy was naturally occuring.

Again, I'm not disputing the fact that men can want to be monogomous or realize it's the best way to breed. I'll even concede it occurs in non-primates such as birds. But I don't see any examples where a primate male's nature is to be monogamous without female influence.

Edit: You know, I'm thinking on this and it doesn't even make sense. Lets say its true and we have dual evolutionary natures one of which is to seek out means to create a paticular type of offspring. How is that contradictory to polygamy? Couldn't you hunt down every female in your area with those desired traits? More to the point wouldn't it be smart to do just that in order to increase your chances of generating that preferred off spring (assuming primates didn't have in depth knowledge of genetics and passive traits)?
I agree, I find them pretty offensive on several levels and they're all over Montreal right now.

The province of Quebec is packed with micro-breweries and has an enormous selection of excellent artisanal beers. People here like their beer: I've never seen anyone order a Bud here. They're going for the lowest possible denominator in a really tough market.

In fact, it's almost like they're targeting adolescents, certainly 18 year old college kids. A summer camp staffed by cheerleaders? The more you think about it the more appalling it seems.
Alimony is such a perverse fail. If women really want to be seen and treated as equals, they'll come out full-stop in favor of abolishing it.
Against group think and political correctness
Vista Speech recognition works exceptionally well for me personally, and another person i know i recommended it to, it worked great for her as well.

This person has either not done the speech "training" or the computer cannot "hear" him clearly.
Of course it can be beneficial to slaves. If they're an asset, and the appreciation in that asset's value accrues mostly to the owner, that owner has every incentive to maximize their value.

As Mencius Moldbug (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-car...) points out, one modern version of this is the Japanese lifetime employment system. If a company pays 2% on money it borrows, and gets to keep employees for twenty years or more, it can afford to spend years training them without getting any revenue from their work.
I'm not American, but Americans get a bad rap on race relations. Go to other westernized countries and racism is far more systemic. I mean for crying out loud, you have the gypsies all across Europe who are marginalized, Spanish fans taunting a black F1 driver with the "N" word, Japan is a completely xenophobic mess, etc. All otherwise comparable countries in terms of standard of living. Except the United States is in a state where most races live side-by-side and tolerate each other. No, things aren't perfect and people aren't fully accepting of each other. It's 2009, but interracial marriage is still bothersome to some folks. But honestly, the United States gets a really unfair reputation for having poor race relations. Say what you will, but at least Americans don't sweep their race relation problems under a rug like some other countries.
"meaning it's 4 days old." -> 4 years :-)
The New - HTC Hero Unlocked
HTC Hero becomes multiple phones in one. Create and switch between Scenes that reflect different moments in your life. You can find a person by dialing their phone number or simply by dialing the first few letters of their name.
What I do: browser bookmarks + regular calendar reminders "should I visit network xyz?". (No email notifications or anything.)

If I could design a service...
It would pick the _type_ of new stuff of each network of my choosing and aggregate like a Feedreader. With type I mean for example: new entries on my wall in a given Ning community, but no personal messages and aggregate those together with friend requests on Facebook.
I use friendbinder (http://friendbinder.com invite code HN) which is my start up
I used 'neighbors' very loosely, speaking more about Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc. But you are right.

Oil Produced: (Wolfram Alpha)
Israel | 5 966 bbl/day (barrels per day)
Syria | 381 600 bbl/day (barrels per day)
Egypt | 664 000 bbl/day (barrels per day)
Saudi Arabia | 9 200 000 bbl/day (barrels per day)

Israel for the political reasons can not afford for its economy to rely on exported oil from Arab states. I'm not even sure if Iran, Saudi Arabia, or the UAE would be willing to export oil to Israel. It's expensive to import it from farther so Israel spends 73.43B/year on oil imports[1]. The opportunity cost of not developing alternatives has been high so solar panels are already a part of the infrastructure (ie: to heat the water in almost every single home).

[1] http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=oil+import+israel
No, 4 days. The write date of the file is September 6, the comment below says he started writing it on September 2.
I've never been a big fan of these sort of hacks.
Conditional comments work fine and I don't mind the extra request on the part of the users who choose to use an inferior browser. I'd rather have my IE users load more data than have everyone load more data.
New Web-Enabled "Avatar" Toys Will Offer Augmented Reality
The HN-worthiness of this article aside, I continue to be amazed just how quickly and how far anyone who posits the question is down voted.

It's surprising how all the diverse interests here share such an extreme intolerance for this meta discussion. It's a fascinating dynamic.
Ah yes, a world with networked sentient software controlling the next-next generation of automated labs for making biotech bacteria.

How could that go wrong?

I am a big tech optimist, but sentient software could arguably be classed as WMDs.
Matasano hacked. A humbling lesson, even the pros are vulnerable.
There's a pretty good story to be told here, combined with the Death of Popular Music and the RIAA.

In both cases, it looks like people stopped taking any risks. The music industry (at least the Popular Music Industry) started putting out more and more formulaic garbage, b/c it was low risk. The AP stopped doing journalism and moved to a press-release transcription agency. Eventually both started dying. They started looking around for external causes, and found The Internet.

Now they're trying to undo the effects of internet in hopes that they'll return to where they were before. Of course, what they have to do is realize that where they were before was due to their risk-taking predecessors' legacies, and where they are now are the results of their own cowardly actions.

What they should do is fire themselves and admit that they're cowardly losers.
The problem is that using the criteria of "well within the lifetime of people alive" is arbitrary. Nazis killed six million Jews -- an evil much worse than slavery -- well within the lifetime of people alive. All sorts of people having been doing all sorts of mean things to other people well within the lifetime of people alive.

I'm in my 40s, which means that I never knew a society that wouldn't allow blacks to vote. I certainly had nothing to do with slavery. I used to find this identity politics justified, then amusing (as I thought through it some more), and now it's just feeble.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those that start each day looking for opportunities and those that start each day looking to the past. I'd rather be the second kind of person. So I don't discriminate based on color, won't put up with others who do, and am finished with considering race an interesting or important issue.

As an aside, there's a serious issue with segregating population based on skin color (as opposed to any other random collection of genes)for purposes of commentary -- it actually reinforces the idea that somehow people of one color are different than another. Of course we all know that patterns appear in the genetic pool, but using skin color as a predominant discriminating factor is, as best, misguided. At worst, it can cause the exact types of behavior we all agree is so bad.
Repeats that are more than a year old are absolutely fine. Less than that may be ok, but I wouldn't push it.
Bill Gates quits Facebook over 'too many friends'
At the risk of stepping on a landmine, what if the issue isn't so much black people aren't marrying as (a large portion of) black men are unmarriagable? (Unemployed or underemployed, have drug problems, involved with the criminal justice system, etc. Pick any socioeconomic system you want to look at, young single black males do not come out looking great in aggregate.)

Combine that with a cultural norm in (a large portion of) the black community to not get married outside of one's race, and you'd expect to see this.

You could construct other situations where marriagable women outnumber marriagable men and see what that does to the marriage rates, too. Example: college practically anywhere in the United States in the 2000s, compared to college in past generations. When the population is about fifty-fifty male/female, the equilibrium favors a lot of pairings. When it is 60/40 F/M, at least 1/3 of women are structurally incapable of being in a traditional monogamous relationship. (Then add in the cultural change that happens once some portion of men realize this and act on it -- the "hookup culture".)
I am actually more interested in the small amount of information about Cyan. That's a spectacular flameout of epic proportions that I've never seen written about in any detail.
ShowMeDo: Video Tutorials for Programming
What happens when your gas station needs fewer employees because everything involved in pumping and payment is automated (as many are in California). What happens when checkouts are all automated (Starting to Happen in Home Depot, Walmart, others..)

Have you ever been to Japan?

But, and here is the catch, as technology improves, the low-water mark may, in fact, start to rise above where people are capable of competing with technological solutions - then what happens?

Ancient Greece - lots of slaves, ancient Rome - a whole lot of slave, in fact their economy collapsed when they ran out of slaves.

The future we can look forward to is this order:

1. An economy much like modern day Japan.

2. An economy similar to ancient Greece where people busy themselves with pursuits of the mind.

3. An economy similar to ancient Rome where a whole lot of people have nothing to do and we have a vital need for bread and circuses, luckily easily taken care of by robots.

4. Machines as smart or smarter then man - Singularity!