skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is entirely different. Apple is using CSS3 to generate compliant HTML files for their application interface (see the link to Will Norris' post, which includes a link to a HTML file you can view in any browser).

I think this is interesting not simply because Apple moved the iTunes Music Store interface from proprietary XML to HTML, but because this might allow for (unauthorized) third party iTMS interfaces, similar to pymusique/SharpMusique: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharpMusique
Goal setting
A different perspective.
Ask HN: mySQL as a Service
I couldn't find any offer for a SQL based database as a service. Register, get access to your (virtual) DB server and plug-in your web-application. Plus DoS protection, auto-scaling, ... Why doesn't exist such a service?
I'm quite sure it's not linear by weight supported.

The field exists in the entire area, each water molecule gets supported individually by the field. So the field needs to be strong enough to lift a single water molecule against earths gravity. (Plus some extra since water is also lifting misc other stuff in the body.)

You don't need a stronger field, you need one that covers the entire area, at the original strength. To do that you do need it somewhat stronger due to the dropoff by distance from the magnet.

But you don't need it stronger to support the weight.
Taylor swift tickets
This is a site that sells tickets for taylor swift and other popular theater, sports and concert events.
Residential Inspection
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It's good to know that there are alternative ways to embed PDFs, but I'm a little confused by the reaction in the comments. Is this a big improvement over simply using the object tag?

http://blog.flashcolony.com/?p=244
In the database world, developers are sometimes tempted to bypass the RDBMS, for example by storing everything in one big table with two columns labeled key and value.

Ironic, if you look at the Wikipedia schema. (At least last time I looked, which I admit was a few years ago.)
Another intentionally crippled API in Android wouldn't exactly be surprising. I run into them all the time as a developer.

The initial SDKs had an awesome XMPP implementation that made communicating with programs on other phones incredibly easy. A program could even be started remotely to add a status bar notification that someone is challenging you in a multiplayer game you both have installed, for example. Now there's no public XMPP API at all and you have to include a less integrated Smack API JAR provided by the community. This uses up a lot of the very small amount of data storage space for installing applications and requires you to query the user for user and password information the phone already has anyway. Needless to say the issue thread for this is full of developers complaining and detailing how badly it impacts them and Google doesn't care.

Similarly, earlier versions of Android exposed some great APIs for searching for nearby businesses. For example, you could find all pizza places near the user and do something cool with that information in your application. The classes that allowed this were com.google.googlenav.Search and com.google.android.location.GmmGeocoder, but are now inaccesibe. The public GeoCoder class is useless for this. Developers are forced to call the Maps web service, handle all the potential problems and resource issues of opening HTTP connections, and parse XML results when this functionality is already completely written, just no longer exposed. The built in Maps application does this, so Google probably wants to prevent developers from being able to do the same easily.

I suppose it is a lot like how Apple rejects apps that "duplicate functionality". Google is trying to cripple third party developers in the same manner, they just do it at the API level.
http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/sites
Take a look at Ecoute[1], a minimalistic player which uses your iTunes library as a source. It's a lightweight iTunes replacement for me.

[1] http://www.ecouteapp.com/
Diamagnetism only repels, it doesn't attract. All materials are diamagnetic.

Ferromagnetism does both, attracts and repels, but only certain materials are ferromagnetic.

It's not gravity BTW, it's magnetism.
For what I've read salt is a commonly used term in cryptology, and refers to certain schemes for key derivation for hashing/encrypting. Salt can either be public (to make brute-force attacks infeasible) or private (for better security).

Almost always when pickling we're only interested in one aspect of security that is integrity: what we put in is what we get out. Encryption isn't needed and signing doesn't really offer much more with regard to this case. Instead, cross-checking against a message digest to make it hard to modify pickles (or any runtime data offloaded to disk) seems to be almost idiomatic. YMMV.

Not that I wouldn't want to write a fancy GPG based persistent storage but generally it would be an overkill. And overkills, in my experience, are good at blinding the developers from other threats. YMMV.

There are many good, proven message digest algorithms that are useful for implementing a simple salted hashing scheme. In practice, an application developer must eventually take algorithms for granted. We consider MD5 demonstrably weak but SHA, especially variations with longer digests, we consider strong enough for most purposes. So given the assumption that we can trust SHA, I'm sure you're familiar with something like the following:

- take the pickle output from pickle.dumps()

- create some random data and use it as salt

- run the pickle output + salt through hashlib.sha512() or whichever you prefer to obtain the message digest

- store the pickle output somewhere, even in public

- store the message digest somewhere, even in public

- store the salt some place safe

- recompute and verify before calling pickle.loads()

You still have to have trust in some storage that you consider safe. Computing the salt dynamically from a set of fixed and/or runtime values could be done by anyone, and is merely security by obscurity. However, exactly the same applies to GPG: you would have to store the private and public keys somewhere safe, and go from there.

And finally, as for me, I'd probably create more security holes in implementing the GPG integration than just sticking with the standard Python hashlib.
You can always replace it with an <object> tag.
One reason I wish JS had goto
Facebook Developer Garage Singapore Powered by Intel
Imagine your replicate is put in a world without oxygen. It would very fast feel rather different from you despite being identical. You assume consciousness is an inside state which can be copied. But it could as well be a process in constant need of an external influence which might refuse to connect to your replica. Like the difference between standing and flowing water - watched only in one instant they might seem identical. And while the solution would certainly be to copy the world as well, as long as we can't define consciousness we can't really say for sure how much we would have to replicate.
And isn't that convenient? Google's main kind of link-selling is unaffected by their rules, but other kinds of link-selling is disadvantaged. ("Use a standard we invented to make our job easier, or risk being frozen out of 70%+ of all search traffic.")

And similarly: "We crawl your stuff; but our search results are off-limits." Of course, anyone can block Google, but given the asymmetry in business models and market power that's not much of an equalizing factor.

I like Google and think they mean well. Individually each of these policies has a reasonable basis. But Google is now so dominant -- and the positive financial rewards they get from self-serving policies so large -- that their actions deserve close scrutiny.

(The Freud-inspired quote I led with was originally about the state; Google's influence on the net is so large that they are a lot like the net's government.)
Thank you lutorm and andrewf for the great replies.

lutorm, I appreciate your example of the brightness of galaxies needing to be altered, pretty much just compressing the dynamic range (borrowed from audio, sorry). I will never picture galaxies in my mind the same way.

Thanks to andrewf I got this from the website:

The image is a composite of separate exposures made by the WFC3 instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. Six filters were used to sample narrow wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic image. In this case, the assigned colors are:

I hope this has some scientific value but I'm suspicious that it has much more of a public relations value. This strikes me as completely dishonest. Pretty up Hubble images so the public will throw as much money as possible at it.

Compressing the brightness of objects like galaxies seems reasonable, and I know I've seen accurate images of planets, but combining filtered images, each with a different "pretty" color, is just whoring up deep space.
Compiling mplayer with multi-core decoding support in ubuntu linux
Me too, although I never really used iTunes along the way. I tried to live with Cog, and Play, but both sucked.

Songbird still needs ReplayGain support, and global hotkeys. Then it will be a tolerable alternative for foobar2000.
Machines will always be as dumb as a box of rocks and will need to be told what to do.

Oh, right, as opposed to most people.
> Google doesn't care.

Is it that, or that there are political reasons behind their choice? Anything that can push to phones is an SMS killer, for instance.

I don't think they're actually so concerned about crippling developers as trying to get people to ship real phones, and they won't do that if the phones make it really easy to get around high margin stuff like SMS's, unfortunately.
The source code is all there, so he ought to look at it and see. That doesn't mean it's necessarily very easy to access, especially via the public API, but if he wants to know what it's actually doing, it should be visible at some level.

Edit: for example:

http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/hardware/ril.git;a...
It's an Australian article about an Australian incident (unfortunately), so can we use Australian grammar?

"Australian Federal Police have dropped the ball on 'Anonymous' hack attacks"
I agree with you in that consciousness does really see ill defined. But I don't think that would stop a computer program from achieving consciousness.

Even with consciousness being so ill defined I'd say that there are a few points that we can agree on. For one, even if peoples definitions and expectations of consciousness differ, we can all find examples of life that we agree are conscious.

The boundary may be really fuzzy. We might disagree whether animals are conscious or brain-dead/comatose are conscious. But we could probably find a case that we agreed on.

And once we assume that I would ask you whether a computer program would ever be able to pass the Turing test and convince us that it was conscious. If a computer program would be able to pass I'd argue that it was conscious, since consciousness seems to me to be totally subjectively defined.

If you say that a program would not be able to pass, I might agree with you intuitively, but I would question it intellectually. Because I've always believed that there are cases that are definitely perceived as conscious by other people. I would be shocked if someone truly believed that the person next to me is somehow not conscious. So the next question I would ask is whether consciousness resides and arises from something that can be explained scientifically. Or to put it simply: Can we describe,now or in the future, the workings of the brain? If so, I really don't think we would need a scientific explanation for any epiphenomenon
such as consciousness, all we would need to is recreate those initial conditions and we should be able to mimic consciousness.

If you say that we won't be able to mimic the workings of the human brain I'd simply say that you are making the statement that there is physical phenomena that can never ever be explained by science.

If you say that even if we recreate a human brain, we will never mimic consciousness, then I'd reply that you are saying that my personal definition of consciousness not affected and defined by other peoples definition of consciousness.

I think that might be why you see an inconsistency between attributing a special meaning to consciousness and and religion. We instinctively act like the human race can find common ground on the definition of consciousness. We don't instinctively act like we can find common ground on religious beliefs.
Growl could get there.
I believe that qualia arises out of specific, physical, quantifiable conditions. And so I think that would imply that machines can experience qualia as long as the initial conditions are there.
Ah, Bluetooth was just an example I picked from previous comment. iPod Touch actually has Bluetooth nowadays, it seems.

My point was that device manufacturers drop features from cheaper models because of costs. "This won't make a difference how many units we sell, drop it and we save $50 million!". Nokia does this all the time with their phones. From outside, it can appear as an artificial segmentation, but it rarely is.

Now, cameraless iPod Touch? That's definitely deliberate segmentation.
you'll end up with the inverse problem when you go back to infix notation though - be warned! when I see func(arg) I feel like I am on the inside of a star fruit.
Two alternatives in 15 seconds.

Problem-oriented: Severe weather kills people and breaks things. Our customers entrust their lives and property to Stormpulse. Its us and humanity versus death and destruction. Join our side.

Solution-oriented: We made a really cool AJAX/Flash mashup which combines a bunch of publicly available weather data sources. We'd like more money to develop a bunch of awesome features we have in the pipeline. How about it?

They're equally true. They're by no means equally effective.
View and manipulate data of CDMA phones in ubuntu
No, but it is driven by external pressures, which we could apply to artificial consciousness by hacking it :) Ok, artificial selection - but no reason we couldn't game it to be genetic.
There's this, but it sucks:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10737

You click a link and it first does some communicatin with Google Docs to get some kind of security token, so it takes 2-3 seconds for the new tab to come up.

EDIT:

A kickass version, just uploaded it to the Firefox Addons site:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/14226/
It's... a list of Google results for 'hackernews'. So?
My peeps, it is not necessary to give negative karma for someone expressing an honest and inoffensive opinion you don't agree with.
First you have to think for a braking system for the hoverboards.
Switch to Mini-Player? (Cmd+Shift+M)
Nice read. These may be of interest to people as well: http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/overcoming-procrastinat... http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/03/conscious-procrasti...
At most you could say the known universe

Known to who? I don't like this very self-referencing way of thinking. Very similar to the discovery of America... people were already in America way before Columbus came and "discovered" it. (although apparently he didn't even realize he hadn't arrived to India)
I think that addon is worse than you describe: doesn't it add the files to your logged-in Google Docs account, and do so by uploading said files from localhost?
Is running your mySQL at AWS good enough?

have a look at here: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...

you get all what you have asked for and even more ;-)
We've used CacheFly and have been really happy. The price is right and at our low number of transfers it always maxes out the customers downstream pipe. The only issue we've had is some of our customer's internal firewalls have blocked one of our files that 5GB+ but I guess that would happen not matter which CDN we used.
It seems like this hoverboard, though, would work best over water.
Check your regexes. The webkit-only tags used are

-webkit-appearance
-webkit-appearence [sic]
-webkit-background-clip
-webkit-border-image
-webkit-border-radius
-webkit-box-reflect
-webkit-box-shadow
-webkit-box-sizing
-webkit-gradient
-webkit-mask-box-image
-webkit-resizer
-webkit-scrollbar
-webkit-tap-highlight-color
-webkit-track-piece
-webkit-transform
-webkit-transition
-webkit-user-select

Many of them will be in the final CSS3 spec, e.g. box-shadow and border-radius.

Great work pushing HTML5 and CSS3.
Here's a levitating frog:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1vyB-O5i6E

1997, as Confusion mentions.
Hardware is holding back progress in AI. Well, I can only speak for game AI, but given that game AI even has to work with simpler worlds and can fake many things I suppose it's not much different in other AI areas. And game AI programming is a lot about programming against the limited available resources. You mention for example the ability to rewrite own code, but what you think about might be more about unsupervised learning in general. I occasionally did experiments in that area - and so far always stopped them after a while due to lack of processing power. I don't say that there isn't also a need to improve the software side, but missing processing power was at least so far the thing that was always blocking me more.

Just to give you one example. Think of bots in shooters. Humans have no problem browsing the whole screen in realtime and evaluating the data. But try even just doing the simplest image processing in realtime with a typical resolution and you will already find out how hard that is. So bots can't do that. Instead they cheat and shoot a few single visibility lines and even those are already targeted because bots can know where opponents are and so they only do for example linechecks to certain areas like head, body, arm, legs and try to find out if that line is blocked. And even that might already be too slow with many opponents so you have reduce it further and shoot only a certain number of lines each frame. And there is no processing yet - this is only about getting the simple information of - is there something or not. This is how slow computers still are. You could certainly do a little more with giving a single bot the whole processing power of your computer, but with the increasing complexity of game worlds the needed processing power grows rather fast (current addition of simple solid-body physics in games makes AI programming already way harder). For AI tasks computers are still very slow.
typedef struct State
{
int state;
int num;
} State;

int f(State* state, int n)
{
if (state->state == 0) {

// initial call

state->num = 0;

if (state->num <= n) {
state->state = 1;
return state->num;
}
}

if (state->num < n) {
state->num++;
return state->num;
}

return -1;
}

And technically you're using 'state' as though it is initialized to '0' anyway, so you might as well do the same for 'num' that changes the code to:

int f(State* state, int n)
{
if (state->num < n) {
return state->num++;
}
return -1;
}

Or am I missing something ?

edit: that's what you get for coding before morning tea ;)
edit2: shortened first code a bit further
edit3:

In javascript this is the closest that I can get to your python example:

<script languge='JavaScript'>

function f(s,limit) {
if (typeof s.num == 'undefined') {
s.num = 0;
}
if (s.num < limit || (s.num == 0 && limit ==0)) {
return s.num++;
}
return -1;
}

g = {};

while ((t=f(g,10)) != -1) {
document.writeln(t + "\n");
}

</script>

So that's one line extra to declare the variable holding the state for the generator. The 'undefined' trick is pretty gory, but it does do away with the 'location' variable or a need to initialize it.

I take it that this does not generalize to your use case though, it is just a 'special case' solution for the python sample you gave, do you have a more complicated sample for a generator that would fail using this simplistic scheme ?

Interesting thing you have on the go there, if you succeed in making a fully compatible in the browser version of python I think a lot of folks will be really happy, it would be the ideal learning tool, especially if it would have access to a canvas to draw on.

That would be a really nice environment for kids to learn how to program.
The difficult marriage of cloud and data-intensive apps
I am not sure what it speaks about "new" real life, that using social networks is considered a necessity these days.

I check the few social networks that I am on about 4 times a year(and would much rather not check them at all).

IMHO, totally different username for each site would be very normal for someone trying to vanish.

Personally, I am curious how they discovered the IP addresses, if he was using TOR.
Yes, for a wide variety of reasons:

* Before version 8, Adobe's plugin was an epic piece of shit on all platforms
- old versions are on hundreds of millions of computers!
- it's still really crashy on Linux (especially in nspluginwrapper)
- The only OS X browser they support is Safari, in which it is unnecessary
* Google re-hosts the file for you
* It is ridiculously snappy with no main-thread-blocking initialization
* It will never crash your browser
* Your users don't have an ingrained hatred towards it
- Rebranding the free Acrobat as "Adobe Reader" was the stupidest thing
they've ever done (ever hear a user say 'my Adobe is broken'?)
scrolling/zooming even works! die flash, just die.
Thanks again from Matt and I for the feedback. You've made your point loudly and clearly, and we will most definitely tweak accordingly.
Goalstage Report: 10 Greatest Football Players of All Times
These are the best-of-breed players whose names have become synonymous with football. These are the legends whose fame is not bound by time and space. Heres our tribute to the greatest football stars who have redefined the game with their unique style and unquestioned sportsmanship.
Space Doesn't Really Look Like That
Try the BBC documentary 'The Century Of the Self' by Adam Curtis. You'll have to torrent it because no US TV station has dared show it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

It documents (with gripping style) the activities of Edward Bernays and others in their efforts to manipulate people's subconscious - to make them buy stuff.
How to Recover Lost or Forgotten MS Excel passwords.
using CSS3 to generate compliant HTML files

A significant chunk of the CSS is vendor-specific. Similarly, the HTML contains Apple-only attributes and segments designed to only be interpreted by iTunes. Neither the HTML nor CSS is "compliant" (ie. validating).

to a HTML file you can view in any browser

Except it's completely broken in anything but WebKit-based browsers, and isn't functional outside of iTunes.

They've moved from proprietary XML to proprietary HTML. This doesn't open up any new doors for third-parties; it's just a convenience for the people at Apple to design new content for the store.
Hey guys, we (Wingify) have exposed an API for determining sentiment and context from any URL or piece of text. I'll be glad if you could review it.

ContextSense was made to demonstrate our contextual targeting capabilities -- and sentiment aspect was added to avoid traditional blunders of displaying ads on pages/news on catastrophies. Best to try with text heavy URLs. Also try it with news items (both positive and negative).

I will be happy to provide API access in case any of you is interested in trying it out.
Why Twitter Is (Probably) Not the Right Place for Games Today
You're right, I just checked my Google Docs and it added the files. The hacked version just opens the URL and passes in the PDF url as a HTTP param.