skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What the author is hinting toward need not be centralized entity that stores all your data, the way I read it his aims were quite the opposite.

He is right that we should be able to have this centralized data source, but it would likely be one source for our contacts that we want on our phone, one other source for our online connections of a certain type, and a separate source for our photos, etc. What is necessary is one point where we can find out where the user stores his different data, an shared understanding of what the different data is and how it is represented.

I also applaud you for recognizing that the way things work is less than ideal, and for making a noise about it, because the lack of that noise is what deters people that might have the same thought pop into their head from continuing the train of thought and acting on it.

To those who continue to point out that the author didn't make a great proposal, he wasn't trying to make one, in fact he explicitly said that he's only trying to make a noise, and although he wrote as though he was looking for financial support in his idea, I think his confusion between proposal and making a noise about it was a decision to show that he believes in his idea enough to take the responsibility for it if no one else will, which is a necessary show of belief, because these problems have existed for ages, and then things like openID came along acting like they're about to solve them, and then completely miss the point, so I'm sure he, like myself, believes that people need to hear a louder message to counter their belief that these existing efforts are doing something about the problem, they aren't.
Yes, what you say is indeed a more ideal picture of the web, it will have it's downsides, so it probably won't feel the way you've see it in your dreams, but if your sole purpose was to make a noise about this issue, to point out that those responsible for the cutting edge of this area have been found wanting then you may rest assured that you have made your point.

I have also recognized this problem a long time ago and have been working for a little while in the area of social networking systems and this has indeed been part of my ideal picture as well, so hopefully it helps you sleep better at night knowing someone agrees with you and is working on it.

Cheers.
If you trust law enforcement officials to do this, then why not require far more detailed surveillance as a matter of course, in the name of preventing criminality?
I agree there's too much advice from people who haven't been there themselves.

My own article shows that advice from people who HAVE been there (like me) is still suspect, but at least it's MORE interesting than people who have ONLY failed.

Failing, learning, and then succeeding just feels like a better place than just failing, SAYING you learned, and then teaching.
Today's Networks Resemble Yesterday's Factories
Is anyone here using/considering MongoDB? I'm want to try it out on a new project I'm starting, a real-time web analytics app. Should be fun.
Self: The Power of Simplicity
One sided and a bit simplistic as the comments state, but also amusingly informative in a lighthearted way.
Yes! You're right I'm hardly the first people to talk about such things. The Black Swan is a classic although oddly enough right now on the front page of HN there's a critique of Black Swan that pokes holes in it. :-)

But yes it's true there's lots of good material on these subjects for those who want to explore further. Hopefully my piece whetted your appetite -- it's not the final word!
Yes, but I won't have time to start something before October, so I am not ready to share.
Men prefer websites designed by men
Lessons I Learned Earning $119,725.45 from Amazon Associates Program
you seem to think that pre-emptive "scarlet letters" are a good method of discouraging criminality..

Why not simply erect use data mining techniques to pinpoint households likely to commit criminal behavior (based on age, sex, employment status, national origin, etc.) and send out the vans before the crimes can be committed!
No, I guess not. Makes sense.

I've traded futures, but only for hedging.
Agreed with mediaman here.

Select both successes AND failures. Where they seem similar, those things may not teach us much. Where there is a pattern shown ONLY IN ONE SIDE (more or less) there might be a lesson.

I have a fear that there's isn't a lot you can do to guarantee success, but I admit this is just my feeling, not based on any facts or stats.
I'm thinking of doing something with adding optional typing to Smalltalk by just adding it to the compiler. Maybe add H-M type inference as well.

One could do the same for Lua.

Actually, I'm thinking of implementing a Smalltalk VM on top of LuaJIT and Javascript by JIT to the host language's source code.
Social Media Banned from College Stadiums
Taleb's strategy gets paraphrased as "buy out of the money puts" but I'm sure there's quite a bit more going on than that at his funds, even if that's broadly the strategy. For starters you have to figure out which puts to buy. It almost certainly isn't about buying puts on the main index, since that's almost a default no-thinking risk management approach which drives the price of the puts up.
That is a pretty poorly written article with some broad generalisations based on 'a five-minute tour of sites in my bookmarks list'.

The auther states 'You don’t really know what you should put in it'. Umm, I would think an 'About page' is pretty obvious: Contains meta-data relating to the site.

It is part of a bigger whole, so if the rest isn't that good, chances are the 'About Page' isn't that great either...
Not only do users have to learn and memorize what the device does, they have to learn how each application makes use of those functions!

Heaven forfend!
R vs. Matlab performance benchmarking
I forgot to mention, but I have used many variants of TiddlyWikis also to no avail.
My post was specifically about vectorization. In which case, I do claim that it matters.
Tesla's New HQ and Powertrain Facilities Will be in Palo Alto
If you think there's some degree of social homogeneity that will keep people from conceiving suspicions, hatreds, and jealousies, dream on.
Five Paradoxes of the Web
This kind of generalization is dumb.

So is reading hyperbole as logical fact. It's his thesis that needs to be accurate and unambiguous, not his blog entries.
Let's Call it a Draw(ing Surface)
Getting the puns and thinking they're funny are two different things.
A vision without a task is but a dream
Probably the best way I've seen of comparing languages is by what proportion of the program is problem solution versus how much is language/syntax cruft.
I strongly considered using MongoDB for an internal project at work. I eschewed it for my project though. I simply didn't have time to fully investigate it.

I looked at using John Nunemaker's MongoMapper library to integrate MongoDB into my application (see http://github.com/jnunemaker/mongomapper/tree/master). It looks great!
Call for A true Community-Driven Social Network
Not to contradict anything you said, but supposedly the iPhone is quite good if you're blind: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/making-the-iphone-...
I'm giving an example (vectorization) where experiments would be needed:

"Am I being pedantic? Does the time required to multiply integers on modern machine depend on the size of the integers? It certainly does if you are using vectorization. And vectorization is used in commercial databases!"

Sorry, I did not run the experiments this time around.
That's who decides in home-schooling, and it's not limited to "tracks".
Actual paper (maybe a moderator can point to it?) http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0908/0908.1801v1.pdf
Does this bring the potential for nuclear moon pies?
Me too. I was checking out SF a few weeks ago. Froze my ass off at night (50F!). People in SF are 10X nicer than NYC. Even the homeless. Food is not as good, though the high-end fancy places were ok. Housing appears to be half my insane rent in NYC. I'll inevitably move to SF when the economy improves.
The author covers the topic in considerable depth but fails to understand the key points.

Mandlebrot makes serious criticisms of the standard models of stock and other valuations - these boil down to saying that the "tails" of market changes are going to be larger than the current models.

The simplest example is CDO's. If you believe in short-tailed, uncorrelated stock market changes, you can argue that the stocks of five different tripple-A rated major corporations have a zero percent chance of simultaneously declining. And you similarly combine together even poor quality bonds to create a "synthetic" bond which also supposedly has a nearly 0% chance of failure.

If you believe in long-tailed, correlated stockmarket changes, you believe that the chances of such bonds failing is much higher.

Guess what actually happened?

I would criticize Taleb, however, for not bringing the issue of complex random processes to the fore. I think he wants to make his ideas very accessible but the problem is that he looses the key difference between short-tailed and long-tailed distributions, since short-tailed distributions DO exist in reality, especially physics and so we're not talking generic randomness when looking the problems of understanding markets and uncertainty.
Because "data mining techniques to pinpoint households likely to commit criminal behavior ..." and a van with scary cameras meant to help an innocent person live in peace are different things.

You should really stop seeing things as black and white. It's not one or the other. We're not all with the terrorists or with Bush. You're falling prey to a common logical fallacy: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope. You base all your arguments on hypothetical what ifs.
I can only assume that he means that he's not a Young-Earth Creationist who believes that God created the world and life as we see it today a mere 6000 years ago, and then subjected the globe to a catastrophic flood a short time thereafter.

Creationists (usually of the Abrahamic faiths) are pretty much the only ones who have a hard time reconciling God and science. They also make up the minority of religious people in developed nations.
Anecdotally, I was always annoyed when I was dumped into a class with the slow kids and had to help them catch up while I was bored out of my mind. The 'no child left behind' mentality has slowed a lot of kids down instead of letting them learn enough to keep them interested in the material.
Thanks for the appreciation.

#3 - Wow, that's advanced! Way down the road, but I'll keep it in mind for the pipeline.
#4 - As per your suggestion, target="_blank". Good idea. Thanks.
#5 - Right now the thumbs up becomes bolded, but if other people are also having the issue, I'll see if I can change it to something a little more obvious.

Thank you so much for your support!
That's an excellent idea. I'm going to add in this feature soon. It's just sort of tricky with respect to UI.. I'll figure something out. Let me know if you have any ideas?
Why would I want far more surveillance? I want what's enough to get those damn drug dealers out of my yard! Is that too much to ask without slipping off your slope!?!

First of all that truck was not meant as surveillance. You'll have read in the article that they used the cameras mainly as a deterrent. These cops are just trying to help. Why make it seem like they're trying to start the next totalitarian regime?

So I ask you, is there anything explicitly wrong about their limited use of cameras and a police van, without going into what it could lead to?
The client speaks one language (JavaScript), the server speaks another (usually not JavaScript). To cross the boundary between the client and the server, the code must be translated into a different language.

What does that even mean? Javascript is a programming language, not a data format. To communicate with the server, all the client-side Javascript needs to do is exchange information with the server in a data format (e.g. JSON, XML) that both the client and server can parse.

I can't imagine any architecture that would not require devices to communicate with each other using a common data format.
I'm going to do my best to avoid copyrighted tracks on the site.
Cookies! Nam nam nam.
Weinreb: Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing
This seems like a high-demand feature request. I'll put it high in the priority queue. Expect it some time this week. (Ugh. I hate that I'm committing myself..but I also love it ;)
Judging by the comments here, a lot of HN commentors would welcome surveillance, especially if targeted at poor, minority neighborhoods.

The kindest thing I can think to say is that when the cops get the address wrong, they only intimidate the Hell out of the people inside and maybe scare them into moving, as opposed to the usual practice of smashing down their doors, assaulting them, and sometimes shooting them.

Considering the ridiculously flimsy pretenses narcotics officers can use to get warrants to raid homes, the fact that police would resort to something like this when they can't justify arresting someone should be a waving, neon-red flag.
As others have said: they should (or, rather, it's perfectly reasonable if they do) try to provide jobs because they are funded by taxpayer money. As someone who pays taxes, I am very happy for some of that money to be used to provide jobs. (Of course, jobs doing something; if you have evidence that NASA is in fact paying people to do nothing, or to do useless things, then please feel free to provide it.)

I didn't take offence about anything. I mentioned that the slide was taken out of context because, er, it was, and that might be relevant -- e.g., because there is a considerable difference between "we decide whether a project is worth while by looking at whether it will provide jobs" and "we decide whether a project is worth while by looking at a dozen things, one of which is whether it will provide jobs".

For instance: Suppose one of the other slides says that a criterion they use is some measure of efficiency: useful stuff achieved per unit money or time spent. Then what seems to me to be the only reason for objecting to "more jobs => better" largely goes away. (Let's have an even more specific, albeit rather artificial, example: suppose two of their metrics are "jobs provided" and "likely stuff achieved per job provided", and suppose the way they combine them is to multiply together. Then that is exactly equivalent to the single metric "likely stuff achieved", which I hope you would not object to.)
You say the internet is broken because authentication is a pain? You say there should be just one social network?

I didn't say the Internet is broken because authentication is a pain. I said the Web has been created to deal (and access) hypertexts. Nowadays the WWW is used for much more. People use it to shop, keep contacts with friends living far away, some use it to share their "lives" and the current state of art is far from being functional to the scope. To my personal point of view, it is broken by design when it comes to these scopes. And far from me trying to say there should be just a social network.

The gateway I idealize is not a giant bucket (or a silo) you'd fill with your stuff, that's exactly what I want to avoid. The "gateway" would just be a place you use to authenticate and authorize apps to access subsets of your data. Some of it (anagraphical data for the most part) would be stored on the gateway, and other stuff would be in much more appropiate places. Flickr, Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, et cetera. The model I idealize would be a common layer to build thing on, nothing more and nothing less.
It's a really sad commentary on our society, and specifically the HN community, when a headline framed as a question (a no-no in Journalism 101) gets traction. Great response.
MythBusters: Just the Facts
It's Parkinson's Law in effect. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=731683
I am honored that HHG found its way into your precious bookmarks toolbar space :)

Right now it works with your preferences, and tries to match you with songs voted up by people with similar preferences.
Thank you very much. I'm not sure if there's any IP really; and while I would love to build CRG.com, it's so much energy to just work on HHG. . . though potential partners should surely contact me!
Following up on question 2 re switching gateways, I've been told by Braintree, TrustCommerce, and Plimus that they will export credit card data to another vendor for a fee. Of course you should confirm this with them yourself before relying on the info. Some others I contacted won't export, or can't because they don't retain the card data.
Awesome. That feature will be in the works, along with top 50 and such. Be sure to follow @hiphopgoblin on twitter for updates.
In the works, I'll shoot off a tweet on @hiphopgoblin when it's ready.
Thank you sir, thank you
Is there a big difference, from a legal perspective?
A thoughtless person might think there's a difference between being harmlessly stubborn with someone who owes you money and the cops parking a brightly marked armored vehicle in front of someone's house because of supposed offenses.
That's an excellent monetization idea. I'll try to keep a list of artists' websites in the database. Ahh... lots to do.
Please edit your entry to include an additional "[pdf]" type designator since the link is directly to a PDF document and not to a web page nor a Scribd embed.
Neat hack.

The word 'spectrum analyzer' is used fairly loosely though, fortunately the author is quite aware of it, and uses it tongue-in-cheek.

This thing sweeps a limited number of channels and displays signal strength in each.

That's a basic use of a spectrum analyzer, but calling this a spectrum analyzer is the same as calling your soundcard an oscilloscope.

What if you want to see what is happening between the bands ? That won't work because of the discrete steps between the channels, 5 MHz per step.

Those are pretty wide gaps, you could hide a whole bunch of FM-stereo radio stations between those channels and you'd never know about it.

On a real (sampling digital using fft or analog) spectrum analyzer those would stand out pretty clearly. The FM band is elsewhere (88-108 Mhz, not in the 2.4 GHz range), but an FM-stereo station usually has a swing of about 200 KHz, and on a 5 MHz channel separation 200 Khz is just a drop in the bucket.
Not in self-defense.
I'm glad it's workin' for ya.

Do you know which affiliate programs offer the best conversion rates, and which make it easiest to sign up?
Headlines are supposed to convey the thrust, not nuance. There's no false advertising.

Your basic complaint is that concise and sharp headlines do better than detailed, dull ones? Welcome to humanity.
Exactly. And I find it lazy to use such loaded terms to denigrate an argument one doesn't agree with instead of confronting its (lack of) merits. Obnoxious != wrong.

Actually, I find it strange that the initial commenter only suspects that "civil libertarians" might have a problem with the surveillance that s/he thinks is fine. The sentence seems to me a gratuitous pot shot at people who might think of themselves as "civil libertarians". Why?

HN deserves better rhetoric. Otherwise, there's always Slashdot.
It certainly is, from a legal standpoint.

From a moral standpoint, I think the fact that the story was written in 1975, 34 years ago, makes it really a borderline case whether Woody Allen should still have exclusivity over the story he published and profited from for 30+ years.

Even going by the 2x14 years principle, he's out. Imho, the world would be a better place if there was a deadline of about 30 years on the exclusivity of reprinting rights.
I accept the fact that not many people will read my thesis.

Scientists in the field will not read it because they are not interested in all of the details of the analysis. They are only interested in the result, which will be published in a four page paper that only broadly explains the methods of the analysis.

My mother will not read it because I won't be writing it for her. When she asks me what I did, I will explain it in a way that she can understand. If I'm lucky, some science journalist will write an article about it, and I can send her the link.
As I've just posted in the previous reply, I don't think it's a jackass line of thinking, because I think that after 34 years exclusive reprinting rights should have expired already.
"a period in history where the size of the federal government has gotten smaller in terms of total employees"

While I totally agree with your point, I see a problem with this specific statement. The population as a whole is usually growing, so a government has to grow in order to support it (at least somewhat).

But, yes, efficiency is the problem.
Sure, I can add in a replay feature. The thing is, I don't add in history for songs that you skip. So if you skip a song, and then you hit "replay", it won't be able to find that song. Is that okay? If it's not, I could always adjust the architecture. But let me know.

As for credit, yep, I keep track of everything and want to make sure the UI shines. But I'm working on an "advanced" version of the site, with more info.
Thank you! I'm actually using item-based collaborative-filtering:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slope_One
As I pointed out in a response elsewhere (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763613) I think a YC startup should supply the toolkit, a turnkey newspaper-in-a-box application.

Admittedly this is not something that journalists would or could use. Despite being (say) as easy as Wordpress, it just won't fit into today's journalist's worldview. But that's OK, journalists as we know them are a dying breed -- many just don't know it yet.

What could happen is (a) the rise of a new class of low-cost, low-profit "mini-publishers" using new turnkey applications to design content+layouts that appeal to their target audience. Then (b) what we think of today as "journalists", both newswriters and columnists, will disappear from the "news" industry. Columnists have already largely gone to blog but the newswriters have yet to change. My guess is that change will be forced upon them, and newswriters who want to continue in journalism will need to adapt. How? Possibly by becoming their own newswire. Instead of a few large wire services (AP and ilk) we will see thousands of individual "wire services", basically individuals covering local, family and/or specialty events. Few if any will be making a lot of money at this, but that's because of the economics of Internet news. The days of Clark Gable (and Clark Kent) journalism are over.

The key to all this is having a turnkey newspaper-in-a-box application that lets wannabe publishers design their own interfaces, choose their own content suppliers and publish on their own schedule. That's what YC should be funding. It's where the money (if any) will be made.

It also occurs to me that there is a business opportunity in helping folks start their own mini-wire-services. Structure the whole thing from scratch. Standardized processes for submission of news articles plus standardized usage and reimbursement terms (Michael Yon might be able to charge more than Jan Michael), but the process of choosing and using their output would be the same.

Maybe that's not the correct vision of the future, but I'm still sure the profession of "journalist" is going to change. Throw out today's molds and take a stab at what makes most sense to you. There's a fistful of dollars somewhere in there.
useful. even if you're not a blogger and your monetization strategy involves affiliate.

If anyone's company relies on affiliate fees, I'd like to know your story as well. (what works, what doesn't) We just signed up for the amazon associates program and we'll be launching in a month.