skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm with you Sho. _why's writings are in large part what initially attracted me to Ruby. I have nothing but admiration for his work. If one releases open source code, I don't expect them to support it for free or at all, everyone's time is their own. But at least leave the existing code up there or at the very least, give some notice that it will be removed.

This of course assumes that he did do this intentionally and that he was not the victim of some kind of foul play.
Assuming infinite time and resources, it's absolutely a false dichotomy.

However, especially from the standpoint of a graduating high school senior, it is very real.

I think there's an implied "first" (or "next" after secondary school) in all of this.
I rolled my own chat widget for my website in a day. It was super easy using just javascript.
Computers are not that slow these days :)

It reduces complexity and a global, which is far more important.

And that blink loop is probably not that big - just how many blink tags do you have?

I don't use it for blink loops anyway, I use it for toggle on/off, where keeping state for each element individually is pretty important.
The Camping page is alive still, too. http://camping.rubyforge.org/files/README.html
There is little problem in supplying power to a grid like this. It's related to the classic Given an infinite grid of 1 ohm risistors, what is the resistance across a single diagonal? Well known answer: 2/pi ohms. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=92564

Basically, as the size of the grid increases so do the number of paths to an edge element. The practical limit relates to how much current you can drive through a single, element, but you can always use more than one power connector.

Edit: USB connection it can support a 3 x 3 grid (500 milliamps * 5 volts / 9) ~= 0.3 watts. So 130 of them should equal a low power CPU.
> HighlightCam, which we covered last month, is a service that can look through hours of video footage and identify when something happens. The company’s first product involves security cameras — it can take many hours of security footage and then identify the few moments when things out of the ordinary are happening, cutting down the footage to only a few minutes of important content. Soon the company will be releasing its API, which will allow developers to tap into the software to shorten a variety of different kinds of content (including things like wedding videos). The software can produce 20-30 second trailers automatically for any kind of video.

This is actually an interesting one, I think: one of the knocks against [lifelogging](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelog) is that it will be too hard to search all the hours of video, but condensed videos would be much easier to search.
CompuNetsi.Net is the best community..
Go is significantly more strategic and it is possible to do well at the amateur level with middling tactical skills but a good strategic sense (the best, of course, are excellent at both). One of the most important lessons that I have the hardest time getting through to my students with is you must ask the question every time you put a stone down "what does this gain me? Is it more important for me to play here, or to play somewhere else?".

You can crush someone with good tactical play who wastes moves locally in this fashion. The difference one stone can make is astounding.
> Unlike most of us here, _why never profited directly on his online celebrity status.

Most of us are online celebrities?
In his prime, Fischer was the archetypal chess player. Just because he was an insane genius does not mean that all the things he said were wrong.

Because he was so good, he could say things about the game that were controversial, but deep down a lot of patzers knew that what he was saying was right.

Sure, one's source of enjoyment from chess varies between players, but what both Scott McCloud and Fischer were pointing out is that winning a game of chess makes you feel wonderful, and losing one makes you feel bad.

I think virtually every chess player would be familiar with those feelings, and would concede that "crushing the other guy's ego" (or its corollary "not having my ego crushed") has a little bit to do with it.

Whether you are playing Spassky for the World Championship or a game of blitz with a friend, the emotions are the same.
No, strong Go players calculate everything out, exactly, quite far.
Does anyone know how this number (11/24 companies not yet launched by demo day) compares to past years? I was surprised to see that it was so high.
> 6) and your favorite mainstream swear word

That's one of my favourite "how to get to a human on the phone" myths. It's the same as no.7 really, or just being silent: unrecognised answer == human needed. Even a reliable recognition of digits/numbers is hard enough - noone sane will waste time to put some swearword profiles on the system... If they did, they'd probably make sure you get back to the menus instead - call center people are either allowed to disconnect you if you're being agressive, or they're so used to that, they don't care anymore ;)

Even though Mitel seems to have a patent for such system http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6411687/description.html I could never find a product which implements that option. It wouldn't be cheap either. I don't think it exists... if anyone can prove me wrong, please do :)
I would agree that most chess players probably feel good when they win and bad when they lose.

However, there's a big difference between that and agreeing with Fischer's goal of "crushing the other guy's ego" or your earlier assertion that chess is about "beating someone up with your mind". I don't think that's true at all, or at least no more true of chess than any other game.

Also, I would strongly disagree with Fischer being "the archetypical chessplayer". From what I've read about chess players through the ages and from my personal experience, the overwhelming majority of chess players are nothing like Fischer.

Sure, you will occasionally find an obnoxious, childish, mentally ill genius, but that's the exception. Even non-genius chess players are generally no more childish or obnoxious than people in the general population.

And I see no evidence that the average chess player's motivation is anything like Fischer's motivation, except wanting to win and hating to lose. But that's the same for players of any competitive game.
Another Benefit - reading an article like this leaves you with a feeling of acknowledgment and pride.

As opposed to my current feeling of guiltily agreeing with all of these points and knowing I won't do anything about it.
What causes the reluctance? Just curious =)
Browser autocompletion, with Google for the tricky ones. I visit the same 6 sites all the time anyway.

I figure that if I can't remember a useful keyword off the page, it must not've been a site worth remembering.
Interesting to see google talk about it, but not a lot of news here. If someone clicks on an ad in the first or in the last position, you wouldn't think it would effect their likelihood of buying something on the destination site.
The companies being bailed out are very large. Your example does not work because it presumes that bonuses are, or should be, tied to profitability or performance of the entire company.

Many companies wisely do not do this; rather they tie bonuses to the performance of business processes they are responsible for.

Suppose you work at a plumbing and carpentry business. You work for the plumbing division; an incompetent coworker works in the carpentry division. The coworker buys loads of wood for a client, but then lets it sit in the rain for too long and it rots. You have an employment contract that rewards you with a bonus for the performance in the plumbing business, which performs well. However, the loss of material causes the firm's overall profitability to turn to a loss, even though your division has reversed some of the damage of the carpentry division.

Should your bonus be reneged because of the carpenter?

Suppose you have a job offer at a competing plumbing business, and you decide that you will leave for that job if your current employer eliminates your bonus despite the contribution in profits you have made to the firm. Is the firm best served by eliminating your bonus?

Questions of bonuses for the CEO, presuming it was the CEO who presided over the disaster, are another matter: it's not clear why they should be rewarded by the board, given that they are ultimately responsible for all divisions.
Twitter - It's all about you
Seems at first glance a lot like chatterous' widget.
The article is OK, but in my opinion, it gets a few things wrong. And I should know: after struggling with getting up my whole life, I became an early riser (pre-5am). Rather than rehash it, here's a previous comment on the subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=525334
When I canceled my Vonage account (several years ago, I used it for my business phone line back when I had a business that needed a phone), I kept having to repeat myself, and ask the guy on the other end to repeat himself. The quality was horrible. At the end of the cancellation conversation, the guy asked, "May we ask why you're canceling?" And I replied, "You know how you and I have had to keep repeating ourselves, and saying, 'What?' every ten seconds?" And he responded, "Oh."

Anyway, I thought Vonage had gone bankrupt a few years back, or something. I don't understand why anyone would use it for anything. Cell phones are pervasive, dirt cheap, and they work reliably. Skype is mostly free, has video and other cool features, and works reliably. Vonage has none of these things going for it.
I think the killer question is, "Is Hacker News in your blocked sites list?"
command-B
WAIT just a minute... the dude took down a bunch of domains and accounts TODAY. Isn't this a tad premature for a eulogy? Maybe we ought to wait until we find out what happened, and what _why intends to do before going into "mourning."
I'm really sad for purely selfish reasons. My 11 year old really enjoyed hackety-hack up to the point that it worked. Likely it won't be finished now, which is a shame because it was a really great tool for introducing kids...
where are you getting the idea chess isn't incredibly strategic, or that not every move in chess counts and has to be considered carefully for what it gains?

amateur chess players are mostly terrible at tactics, by the way. non-masters hang a piece every game, pretty much. (but usually their opponent doesn't notice)
Ditto -- and its something I do pay for. ($25 a month, which I quite literally could justify with any one day's improvement in my funnel numbers.)
I'd really love to find this too.
Who writes Linux?  Big Business
Even if it is the same as #7, it is just so much more satisfying :-)
Nice to see at least one other person thinks so.
A masterful bit of deception. Who would have guessed that a botmaster would be so trusting?
The SMS payment option is twice as expensive as the paypal or credit card option. Interested in seeing conversion rates on the various payment options.
Contex: http://www.advogato.org/person/whytheluckystiff/diary/50.htm...
Ethics Question
Scenario: DNS researcher sells research data and consulting services to domain name speculators. The data is otherwise public and collectible by anyone, however relatively "few" are likely to have the same level of interest in DNS and to have done the same research.

Ethical or not?

I hope DNS is not too controversial a topic. It receives some strange media coverage and is not well understood by many people in my experience.

My view is this: I see DNS, remote translation of names to numbers, as "unnecessary" for most end users of internets (cf. intranets). I believe the Hosts or /etc/hosts file or a cached DNS server are 1. enough to meet such users' needs (i.e. to list all unique sites a user will visit in a lifetime), 2. small enough to be manageable with today's technology (e.g. the entire .com namespace could be addressed in a file under 150mb) and 3. simple enough for users to understand (e.g. analogous to an address book; cf. the concept of a distributed database). Moreover, I believe users are quite capable of remembering 10-digit numbers, as they routinely do with telephone numbers, usually by maintaining a personal address book. But I think users are never given the chance to evaluate these options, because 1. they are unaware of them, and 2. the usual sorts of "FUD campaigns", for lack of a better term.
Scott McCloud also has an interesting TED talk in which he explores making non-sequential comics:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/scott_mccloud_on_comics.h...

He also mentions his father's blindness. Although it probably wasn't true, Scott's father believed it was caused by looking at a solar eclipse.
Practicing yoga is the only requirement to be a yogi. Hacking is much the same way. We all share similar goals but our practices are always intensely personal. If you're practiced enough you know that what you consider important and what you consider progress continuously changes. Thus we don't judge someone else or their practice but appreciate the opportunity to practice with them. Without question both Zed Shaw and _why have hacked. I think it's important to appreciate many qualities of both without needing to apply labels to either.

Namaste
But regarding Tabarrok's point, I think it's this. It's important for the markets to move much faster than the physical goods they convey information about. I.e., house prices should move much faster than house construction.

Maybe a better analogy is this: there is pirate treasure at GPS coordinates (X,Y). It's good for society if one guy sends a boat to retrieve that treasure. It's less good for society if 5 people get into a race for the treasure. Maybe we get the treasure in 5 days rather than 7, but we also sent 5 boat trips out rather than 1.

Similarly, picking up alpha in 12 seconds rather than 15 is probably not useful to the rest of the world, although picking up alpha is better than leaving it on the table.

I do agree with you that most of the carping about HFT is stupid, however.
I use InstaPaper for stuff that I want to "read later" as is its intended purpose, or stuff that think I might want to return to occasionally. I like that I can get to it from anywhere, doesn't matter if I'm using my local machine.

For pages I use all the time... I have a local HTML file as my home page. It's just a simple set of links organized into a few broad categories. Faster than navigating the browser's bookmarks, for me, though slightly more work to update.
http://whoiswhytheluckystiff.wordpress.com/
Is there a video of demo day online? I'd love to watch it--previous ones too if possible.
There's more to Zed's response than that. Consider the following:

http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/3414550229

"Actually, I didn't see a lot of sympathy from _why when I was going through similar tough times. In fact, the inverse."

And: http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/3414567310

"Totally jealous, I wish I could leave the ghetto as completely. :-)"

What comes off as gruffness, I think, overlies a complex substratum of hurt and ambivalence.
Wealth that you generate yourself isn't a benefit that comes from society, so social justice doesn't demand it be redistributed. There plainly are benefits that society gives us that give us a chance at generating that wealth, though, as can be seen by, for instance, the lack of Botswanan Web 2.0 startups.

Even if you were correct that social justice is radically redistributive of all wealth, however, that would not imply that the $1/day idea is supposed to serve as a positive example. Rather, it shows how unpleasant it is to do so. If they wanted to show equality of income wasn't such a bad idea, they might have done the live-on-$22-per-day project.
There are benefits to rising late as well. Some of them are similar to the ones listed in the article. If you are in your room by yourself, 1AM to 2AM tends to be a quiet and peaceful time. A lot of social activity also happens around midnight, and if you are an early riser you may find yourself burnt out and unable to participate by the time midnight rolls around. If you are forced to stay up late a few days in a row and you naturally wake up early as well, you may start accumulating a sleep deficit. A sleep deficit will eventually catch up to you and you'll stop appreciating those morning benefits.

There was also an article posted a while back of a study done that showed people who tend to wake up late performed better on some cognitive tests at certain times of the day, while there was no similar advantage for people who naturally woke up early at any other times.

I do think this article does point out some of the practical advantages that the experiment in that other article wasn't interested in; like how a sunrise makes you feel, the value of beating commute traffic, the value of getting a head start on daily activities, etc. (I like rising early and have tended to for the past 5-6 years. In my case, natural light and no drugs[1] is all it takes)

[1] Alcohol, caffeine, as well as ibuprofen and other painkillers can all help me sleep through a sunrise.
I understand your point, but you just compared some guy removing his freely-released code from the Internet to a gang of people who went around lynching black people.
I would love to see _why come back as _whynot
Props on your flexibility, and particularly on having the vision to service the other side of the digital divide. If it's not confidential, I wonder what proportion of your business is urban v rural?

While I was looking at your site I was thinking it was sad that people would upload photos for automated delivery to Grandma rather than (say) print them out at home or Walgreens and add a handwritten note...then it struck me that I take digital convenience for granted, living in SF.
Do you normally delete all your stuff before going on vacation?
That's what cocaine costs in Brazil and Argentina. $2 a line.

I've read that in Australia there are heroine addicts on whom everyone has given up hope of rehab who have normal, janitorial jobs to pay for their habits. They get the horse from government sanctioned farmacies at low cost.
zotero for saving pages that I'll want to see again or want to be able to search locally
underwhelming? By whose standards...yours? Sounds to me like professional envy. Why can't you accept the fact that it takes ALL kinds to make a world? In Vivek Kundra's case, he demonstrated that a UMUC graduate is very capable of rising to the top of his professional game. How 'bout you?

As for lying...? The only phonies in this story are people that gloss over Vivek Kundra's exceptional real-world work experience. Excuse me...but Kundra WAS the CIO in the DC Government and Virgina. Therefore, he has way more experience than anyone here attempting to "judge" his qualifications. You couldn't even come close to having that type of experience...degree or no degree.

Again...you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself.
Of course. Zed's a complex human being like all of us. He and _why have a history. I recall _why delivered a pretty twisted put-down to Zed once, the sort where you were more confused than hurt. And they both had a unique position in the RoR community.

Doesn't change the fact that Zed's cursing out _why and acting like a jerk. He's not just being a jerk, but he is being a jerk.
Lessons for Web Start-Ups
Terrible! Skilled paid programmers are writing mission-critical code to improve Linux!
Oh yeah. In fact, coca leaves used to be distributed by the Catholic church.

Now, I totally agree with the part about the chemicals. I mean, you can do the same thing with coffee: taking caffeine pills is dangerous and can lead to a fatal OD.
Thirded. I was going to show my brother this at the end of the summer, and I'd hate to find it gone.
While I'm sure many readers at the NY Times may find the idea of a conservative advocating for same-sex marriage novel, it fits pretty squarely into the libertarian view of freedom. "Conservative" in the USA really doesn't mean what it used to any more.
Gotta Love this :)
Ink found in Jurassic-era squid
The Women’s Crusade
How To Become an Early Riser (2005)
http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=roford&init=quick#/pro...

Ken Roford has an account on facebook, but no details revealed to the outside world.
I wouldn't say that most chess players are like Fischer personally, it's that chess has a tendency to consume players to some degree, the way it consumed him almost completely. That's what I meant by archetype.

Personally, I found the rush from winning a game of chess to have a different character to winning at some other competitive game, and I think ego has something to do with it.

Maybe I suffer from some of the same flaws Fischer did (without the same gifts).
Ask HN:How do you guys filter adult content in your kids PC?
I am thinking of buying a PC where my kids (5 & 7) can play web and desktop games.

How do you guys filter adult content from your kids pc.
thnks for the tip
As with most Zenhabits posts, it's just filled with feel-good hokey (come on, the Dalai Lama? How is he an expert on good working hours? I'd rather get sex tips from the Pope). No actual evidence. And if you've got flexible hours (which a lot of programmers have), most of it is moot anyway. Late risers can have their breakfast and prepare for the day at 12 o'clock if they want to...
"Perhaps the lesson presented by both Abbas and Saima is the same: In many poor countries, the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy. With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty."

Indeed. More people with better education working to take care of themselves is the proven path to poverty reduction all over the world.
His GitHub account is back! http://github.com/why
Yes, I would agree that chess is a game that people tend to obsess over to a degree not found in most other games. Scott McCloud's story is evidence of this, and there are many others like it.

But even there, Fischer is in a class with few peers. There's obsession and then there's all-consuming passion, which is more of where Fischer fit in (at least until his resignation from the World Championship).
Just about all IVR's are coded with a counter for the number of "no inputs" (silences) or "no matches" (whatever you said did not match any of the expected inputs above a configured confidence threshold). So as pointed out above, 6 and 7 are identical, as is plain silence.

Accent detection would actually be pretty hard and beyond the scope of the speech engines used in most of these applications.
The group is very substantial this time around. Developing things like a database optimized for solid-state drives involves non-trivial technology. I'm impressed.

I wonder what kind of background these guys had to convince YCombinator that they could pull it off? Many of them aimed quite a bit higher than yet another web app.
You could probably get a good discussion going on CircleID about this topic. I think it's evil, but other people (like registrars) are probably selling similar data to the bottom-feeders already, so what's one more?

Replacing DNS with host files would introduce a lot of friction into the Internet and you have given no reasons why host files are better.
Surprisingly high. It is much easier than the rest of the methods.

Also the conversion between dollars -> Heyzap coins probably removes the mental coupling of the difference in margins.
Ask HN: Why did you kill this thread?