skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, and I'm pretty sure after all that complaining he still went ahead, removed the keyword and submitted the app. I'd say if you're going to bow down to Apple then you have no right complaining.
Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows
So do successful gamblers, lottery winners etc. What do the failed entrepreneurs believe?
Collective neighborhood online purchasing for Green Shipments
While buying things online from Amazon, Zappos, Buy.com, etc - is the carbon footprint of the shipments a consideration:

http://www.fgx.com/tools/carbon-calculator/

I had submitted a collective neighborhood purchasing idea to Amazon four months ago, but never heard back from them. The idea was to encourage green shipments and maybe even give some form of carbon credits to people who take the extra effort to group their purchases with others in the neighborhood. This might also encourage a kind of social networking on Amazon which is currently not available.

This is the link to it: http://www.scribd.com/doc/19420681/Amazon-Neighborhoods?secret_password=24cz10i0xg7pxtzrbhur

Would such an idea be useful and/or feasible? If it is, then what should be the next steps?
He was obviously prepared to risk that the demand would be very low or zero

That wouldn't be risky. Let's say he lists 5 Wiis. If no one rents a Wii, you simply don't buy it. If one person rents a Wii, you buy 1 Wii. If 5 people rent Wiis and 50 more express interest, you increase the number of Wiis you list and meanwhile demonstrate to people that there is a market for Wii rental.

Or what if he offered too many of the common items and effectively ended up competing with his own potential users who have something to rent?

You could, essentially, do one-sided-collusion with your users. For example, suppose the site offers 10 Wiis at $100. Later, one person offers a Wii for rent at less than or equal to $100. You simply stop offering one of your Wiis, and either hold it in inventory or sell it used to recoup most of your purchase price. The supply of Wiis stays constant but the portion of economic activity happening between customers increases.

The big two risks: listing more items than he could fulfill (either for lack of capital or lack of sufficient supply among the merchants he used -- you can't rent 30 Wiis if they'll only sell you 5, and your failure to deliver on the contract would only be discoverable after you've taken money for it, which spells "serious egg on face") and theft. If you're renting for 5% of the purchase price per week with a 50% of retail deposit, and the Wiis are not coming back, even if you're getting your Wiis below retail you could start bleeding money very quickly.
Great way to lose an hour.  Or three.
http://www.lawrence.com/
Other than being kind of small, tracking only 3 things, and costing $10 month what do these have over munin, cacti, or other RDD graphers?
yes.

While I program in a proportional font - given that code is what I spend most of my time staring at, it being readable makes a big difference - I still have my terminal sessions in fixed space fonts. Far too many things assume that it is being displayed this way.
There are still a couple of issues Brian brought up you haven't addressed.

The main one being the hubris of the copy on your security page. Declaring users data to be uncompromisable then justifying this by listing mostly physical restrictions to the datacenter seems to ignore rather the larger security issues for web-based applications. A firewall and latest security patches do not make one immune.

His other peeve seems to be the perceived bullshit of your support team saying they replied to his initial complaint when it appears (at least to him) that they had not, then putting the blame for this on his spamfilters.
Quotes from early reviews of the game. Here's a few:

"A tremendous achievement. . . Mechner has crafted the smoothest animation ever seen in a game of this type."

"PRINCE OF PERSIA is the STAR WARS of its field."

They aren't accessible inside the game, you have to be reading through the executable to find them. I discovered this by chance back in the early 90s.
50 Press Release Writing Tips to Increase Your News Exposure
Writing press releases is simple, especially if you have utilized a super checklist such as this one. The list contains 50 of the top press release writing guidelines to help increase the odds that your news release brings free publicity to your business.
This is the greatest book ever written.
Ruby has a taint mode for String too. I think it's used in Rails, or maybe they rolled their own, but the concept is definitely there.

Problem is, at some point you have to be able to display user-entered data. You indeed mark it as tainted, or equivalent, then escape it as best you can. The issue here was a bug in the escaper. Tainting was working as planned.
I remember the feeling of awe when I read it for the first time. My excitement was palpable.

Hofstadter has said that it's an often mis-described book, that to sum it up it is about how complexity and even self-awareness can naturally spring from simplicity.

If you are smart in an analytical way and haven't read this book, read it.
Here's a hint: throw resources at supporting web standards in internet explorer. Seriously that is the main reason I hate Microsoft and around here I'd wager I'm far from alone.

IE's fuckedness is inexcusable. If you actually fixed it, 90% of the reasons I hate Microsoft would just melt away that instant.

And until you fix IE, it's just "DOS Ain't Done til Lotus Won't Run", Web Edition, as far as I'm concerned.
Just WOW !.
> Systems biologists can't, nor can climate scientists, oceanographers, ecologists, geophysicists or astronomers.

Notably, all fields where you can't do controlled experiments.
Floor loading (and rack size) is a problem with their 'very big box of disks'.

That, and the fact that the company seems to be struggling to get sales.
Indeed. It would be nice to see some comparisons to the architectures (and, as everyone seems to care so much, prices) in the various 'VTLs' sold by the likes of Falconstor, HP, EMC, and StorageTek/Sun!
It's an apples to oranges comparison.

Maybe for the low-level tech, but certainly not what it's used for. There are lots of online backup services out there. Some of them publicly make it known they use Amazon S3 for storage. I'm sure there are some other companies, who own their hardware, like Backblaze, but didn't optimise their cost structure using custom builds.
Hedge funds, proprietary trading desks in i-banks, etc. have been using automated trading strategies for decades. But on the the agency equity trading side (the guys who move institutional investors in/out of larger long-term stock positions --- and the guys who are the driving force behind all the dark pools), it's still at least somewhat new.

Institutional clients were reluctant let a computer trade their big order. They wanted a human to be deciding how much to quote, when to trade a little fast/slow in response to market conditions, etc. And up to the early 2000s, agency "trading strategies" were still shockingly primitive. Marketing literature claimed they "intelligently managed market impact risk vs. volatility risk". Fancy way to describe a glorified time slicer. Human traders (not to mention prop algo strategies) earned easy money gaming these dumb things.

Eventually, the "human advantage" faded away because the humans in question were being expected to handle more and more volume (to earn more and more commissions) --- they just didn't have enough time to pay lots of attention to each client order and the prices being quoted all over the place on all the new alternative venues. And so the banks finally had an incentive to pour money into making their algorithmic trading systems less primitive.
How will Google be disregarding the copyright claims? The Books Rights Registry [...] would oversee payments for authors arising from Google's use of the works [...]

And why would you "go with Amazon"? They're shitting bricks that the the rightsholders (and publishers, as the case may be) might be able to screw Amazon out of their pricing power.

Of course Amazon would want copyright changes via the US Congress - their lobbying would be more effective there. Amended copyright law in response to technological developments? DMCA, tyvm.

And surely Amazon is large enough to be one of the "commercial or private entities" that could license the library rights from the Registry.

Naaah, we'd just rather our current way of doing business is not threatened, now or ever..
I see a lot of interesting claims but unfortunately no references in sight.

E.g:

"Some scientists trained a bunch of flatworms to react in a special way to light. They noted how long it took the worms to learn, then they cut the worms up and fed the pieces to another batch of untrained worms. After their meal, the new worms were taught the same lesson. The second batch learned much faster. Wondering if this were a fluke (no, they were plenaria), some other scientists tried similar experimentation with mice. A batch of mice were trained to run a maze. Then their brains were removed, an extract was made from these brains and fed to another, untrained batch of mice. Once again, the new mice learned the maze much more quickly, up to twice as fast."

"German researchers trained honey bees to expect food at a certain time every day. Then they cut off the bees' heads and transplanted a part of their brains into the brains of other bees. The bees with the brain transplants then expected the food at the same time of day."

Does anyone know if this is for real?
Business Guy in a Startup
I resent that! slanket + iphone = warm hn surfing thank you very much.
Of the top ten entries eight used C++ and two used Java. I used Python.
I noticed that too! A great Aussie success story brings us all out! :)
Better link: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0921/revolutionaries-stock...

Choice titbits from the article where algo-trading will "help the little guy":

- [...]high-frequency trading has morphed into a technology arms race.

- Making it in high-frequency trading these days requires the latest technology. Lots of it.

- [..]a big chunk of high-frequency profits derive from jumping into markets before small investors can.

Good luck, retail investor.
Bing Lee also passed away.
"what if demand had exceeded his physical ability to supply the items he'd promised"

Otherwise known as "a good problem to have" ...
Microsoft wins right to sell Word
Hi. I'm formerly of both startups and Artwork Automation tech. Your idea sounds great & good luck with finding a co-founder.

@YC W10 I have a few comments

1. CutBots :: Installed base of cutting machines

Can you offer a service to post the results to your customers who don't have a cutter? Frequent or On Demand customers may still want a discreet device but experimenters may be prepared to wait for the post.

--

2. Established Competition

Shapeways.com and others. Their big trade is vanity bracelets.

--

3. Suggested Reading

Crossing the Chasm - Moore. Specifically this book details the difficulty of going from the Hackers who search for your "Hack CriCut" to the Early Majority who do scrap-books. The Early Majority will need specialist tactics and Moore's Whole Product solution.

--

4. Business to Business

My Artwork Automation tech was B2B rather than your B2C focus. I would say that you should consider refocussing away from customer facing to White Label provision.

Consider that anyone can now have Nike shoes made with your own name on them[1], and lots of people have heard of Nike versus whoever did their implementation for them.

Try to imagine selling your tech to say a Crafts Magazine where the magazine can promote their cutter tool and you provide the technology & delivery and take a cut of any transactions.

-----------

[1] http://missgeeky.com/2008/04/03/nike-id-design-your-own-shoe...
Joez, Good point about the social nature of the product. It is referenced obliquely on the Joolme slide, but also stands true for the other two. I'll work on that.

I would certainly consider someone with Supply chain experience. I have some knowledge by virtue of my job, but it would be a welcome addition.

Kickstarter is a great idea! It would be cool to "Syndicate" that and a YC round:)
Most of this is BS.
Health and Beauty Tips
A proposal for R7RS
Beading is another HUGE hobby worth billions of dollars per year. Go to a Michael's craft store and you will see hundreds of square feet devoted to it. Part of the thought with the jewelry was that you could order the whole thing complete OR get components and assemble it yourself.
My girlfriend messaged me on OKCupid because of something funny in my profile.
Indeed. I had a recent situation where I was building a trie for prefix search, and found that object overhead / pointer cost was so expensive (a whole 8 bytes per instance in 32 bit - really adds up and worse in x64) I dropped down to using parallel integer arrays to store all data, and even then, I was able to squeeze out more space by going to a custom bit-packed array class.
Hndir.com doubles to 500 college-enrolled hackers
It's a wonderful problem to have. But only if you can solve it. Just because you can describe something as a good problem to have doesn't mean it's not actually a problem.
My favourite was in Trolls, which I have seen it myself somewhere 1992-1993, later it was put in mobygames:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/trolls

"This game was written on a very slow schneider 10mhz 286 with lots of wait states. If for some reason on your very fast xxxx 25mh 486 this game seems to be fast or unplayable, do no blame us for it was a penny pinching boss who would not buy us reasonable pc's to work on. signed THE PROGRAMMERS OF FLAIR SOFTWARE"
This one may merit a summary, since there are a few subtleties. So, here goes.

Background: Ever since Goedel, we know that in any given system for doing mathematics some statements are neither provable nor refutable. So, if after much effort mathematicians fail to find either a proof or a disproof for some conjecture, it's natural to wonder whether perhaps that's because neither exists.

In some cases, an undecidability result of this kind would be pretty much equivalent to an actual decision. For instance: Goldbach's conjecture says "every even number >= 4 is the sum of two prime numbers". If this is undecidable then, in particular, I can't write down an explicit counterexample, so it might as well be true.

OK, so what about P=NP? Well, what David and Halevi have done is to show something a bit like the following: "If 'P=NP' is not decidable using the axioms of Peano arithmetic, then any family of decision problems that's in NP is 'almost in P'". But there are some fiddly details that might matter.

Detail #1: it's not actually "is not decidable", it's "is provably not decidable". The distinction between these two is important to anyone who's interested in this stuff in the first place.

Detail #2: it's not even "is provably not decidable", it's "is provably not decidable, where the undecidability proof is of a particular kind". They claim that "any known technique for proving independence from sufficiently strong theories of statements that are neither self-referential nor inherently proof-theoretic" is of this kind. Since the whole field of independence proofs got started when Goedel worked out how to make things "self-referential" that on the face of it look like completely the wrong kind of thing to sustain self-reference, I can't help but be a bit unimpressed by this.

Detail #3: What they mean by "almost in P" is this: there are arbitrarily long intervals of arbitrarily large numbers such that any problem whose size lies in one of these intervals can be solved in almost-polynomial time -- i.e., O(n^f(n)) where f grows very, very slowly, in particular more slowly than log log ... log n with any number of "log"s.
World’s Biggest BOOBS ??
Norma Stitz holds the record for biggest boobs and biggest pair of bra.
That's referring to this very paper.
Pwnce ? Not anymore though...
I just checked one literally at random, the one about the conductor stabbing himself through the hand with his baton during a performance. It has been confirmed by Wikipedia and two other sources, although I can't vouch for Wikipedia's accuracy, nor for the independence of the sources.

One sample does not a proof make, and the pural of "anecdote" is not "data." However, some of the items do check out as true.

I personally think it's a good starting point for talking to kids and asking whether you can believe everything you read on the internet. I also find it amusing.

YMMV.
It must be some kind of z-modem hackery.

(my earliest self explanation for the phenomenon that I too, noticed from a few years messing about on BBS') :)
You're right - we somehow wound up with three copies at our house - one hardcover two soft.

Good call.
Hndir rejects my .ac.uk email address. You'll probably want to fix that if you want it to work for schools in the UK.
My mom was Welsh and could actually pronounce that.

The last bit sounds like you're barfing up breakfast....
Relations of Language and Thought: The View from Sign Language and Deaf Children
Even security is a trade off. Try to estimate the costs of the average security breach on a blog and compare it with the added hassle.
"One out of every four women fail in business. Four out of every five men fail in business."

I'd really like a source and more info on this.

Edit: looked around more. Even if most of it is true, it's too dubious and incomplete to be of any use, even if it's wasting time.
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...for me at least. GMail and Google Reader are still working though.
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you linked to a static error page
Right. This also biases the test toward certain kinds of algorithm. The implicit requirement that the thing being learned should be something you can see (and check) by looking at pictures like these pretty much guarantees that simple "proximity-based" approaches will do well. So it's no surprise that we see nearest-neighbours and radial basis functions looking good in these tests.
The flatworm one is something I first heard decades ago.

The bee one is described here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/t778p74668537708/
What about Lawrence Journal world site because it was with site that Django was born
I could tell you that without a "research study". And any of my grandparents were also aware of it.

These kind of studies leave me a bad taste. It's as if they ran out of funds and want to produce something entertaining that sells stories and that looks like real research.

It also promotes sexism. I mean, what would be the natural conclusion coming out of such a study? Stay away from beautiful women? Don't hire them because you'll go nuts?
I once had this kind of response from a lawyer when I told him what I did. I said to him that if you needed a criminal lawyer you wouldn't ask a intellectual property lawyer you met at a party to help out. I could see him thinking about fees.
I suppose I see using a "one size fits all" scheduler as inherently full of tradeoffs between desktop, realtime, server, and 4096-core-compute-system requirements. IMO distributions and kernel hackers should be able to choose a scheduler that is optimal for their target audience. RHEL would probably stick with CFS, but Ubuntu Studio could use something more latency-oriented, like BFS.

Maybe if CK keeps bringing up the issue, eventually someone will figure out an optimal way of measuring perceived latency that will prove or disprove the anecdotes given by CK's "followers."
Free Chat Rooms Cool Alternative for Bars
These days people are using free chat rooms as an alternative for bars. With the effects of recession hitting us hard, we look for ways and means of reducing our personal expenses. So people find free chat rooms as a cheaper alternative for bars. Why do people go to bars? It is mainly to spend their free time, catch up with their friends and have a few drinks.
Is it just me, or is this backwards?
Seth's Blog: The problem with positive thinking
Why? It was fun to read, but doesn't it go on VERY long about something that could have been said in three pages or so? I see it more as an example for marketing these days (Goedel's proof - not sexy, stories about turtles - sexy).
Quantum computer slips onto chips
Hacking goes squishy
Am I the only one who completely discounts a .in domain as being spam from India? I certainly would not have ever clicked this link outside of an "Ask HN" style post b/c I would have expected it to be as such.
Good point. Also, if the browser is able to recover from malformed markup, why can't you have a module on the server to do the same thing, and rewrite the malformed markup to well-formed before serving it?
- It's not the amount of memory, it's how much memory you can transfer without disrupting program execution due to bus contentions. It makes a huge difference whether your 16 GB of memory are in two, four or eight sockets (different sockets can (or at least could) be accessed simultaneously) or if it's attached to a single processor or pooled system-wide.

- AMD64 is a little better than vanilla 32-bit x86, but it still has few registers compared to POWER or SPARC architectures. This increases the risk of memory access, which is bad. I suppose there is a point when it's pointless to add registers and x86s do some convoluted stuff with shadow registers, so the picture is not really clear. Optimizing compilers should alleviate this too, but, like car builders say, there is no substitute for the cubic-inch.

- Still about processors, the least a multi-threaded CPU can do for you is to keep an execution context in-chip and prevent a context swap from memory. That saves a lot of memory bus time that cannot be used by other parts of the system. AMD64s (and their Intel counterparts, AFAIK) max out at 2 threads/core. POWER and SPARC max out at 4 and 8 tpc respectively (again, a number off the top of my head).

- On PCs (defined here as "a computer that can run Windows"), there is little distributed intelligence. I never saw a PC where CPU, disk controller and network interfaces could do the chat I described. Contrast it with the typical vintage mainframe design, where there are as many things going in parallel as designers can think of. As as example, there is an IBM disk-drive in the Computer Museum where you can see two sets of heads/arms on opposing sides of the disk, effectively being able to read/write different cylinders simultaneously. While I don't believe such machines are in current use, this serves to illustrate how far a server designer is willing to go in order to beat a throughput record.
Definitely. This is one of the things that attracted me to factor
Of course, thanks. The failure of spell checkers to evaluate context. Some day though!
> He says it might be due to the fact that he is totally non-plussed by beautiful women (since he has no sexual interest in them)

I was somewhat nonplussed by this statement until I read this:

http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/nonplussed?view=uk
ljworld.com, lawrence.com - very nice but I thing this are not Django killer apps. Do we still wait for one?
here's the link to the abstract:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
When optimizing - don't forget the Java Virtual Machine (JVM)
reproductive organ is a redundancy.