skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At least this seems like a suit that makes a lot more sense than some of the crazy ones like getting Google to shut down your email when there is no evidence that you've done anything (let alone anything wrong) let alone even read the email from some random third party.

I usually read these filings with a grain of salt - after all, a good lawyer just throws everything at the wall and waits to see what sticks. In this case, it seems like a simple case of defamation/libel - where these kids should be liable - if they indeed did it. I think it's usually the latter that's a lot more difficult to prove if facebook isn't cooperative with releasing IPs for disclosure.

I wonder though... I wonder if I would be less sympathetic if it wasn't some other kid but say a corporation or a celebrity? (but I guess celebrities are generally more fair game given that they're in the public eye and more things can be interpreted as satire)
Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying!
I'm a bit confused. This author makes the future sound bleak, with impossible choices. He makes it sound like wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro will never be enough.

But then, you read a quote like this from another source and the solution sounds almost easy:

"Less than 1% of the world's deserts, if covered with concentrating solar power plants, could produce as much electricity as the world now uses."

http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/images/CSP_map_squares2.jpg

What am I missing?
Agreed 100%.

Give it at least 2 weeks before reacting. This is a change with potentially large consequences, and you definitely can't see all of them within the first day or two.
The point of this thread is that you have to do something to magnify your viewpoint!

Bad comments get grayed out. Maybe great comments should get shiny.
It appears you are using the subject line as more of a meta-data type tool to organize your events. Wouldn't it be better to have the ability to organize and message events rather than manage all this through the messaging services?
Hypothesis: Your country's likelihood of fielding a world-class soccer team is roughly proportional to the number of person-days of access that the average kid has to an unfrozen soccer field.

Isn't this like asking why US colleges north of, say, Virginia have so much trouble recruiting top-class college baseball players, such that the College World Series always seems to be "some team from Florida vs some team from Arizona"? Aspiring players of professional baseball prefer to play for teams whose home field thaws out before April.

Of course, the opposite is also true. Great hockey players are more likely to be hail from Russia, Canada, New York, or Massachusetts than from Brazil, Italy, London, or California.
Well, he can't follow the shortcut by voting up someone he thought had insightful opinions... :-)
You can no longer tell if a reply has more "support" than a parent post (unless one has a negative score).

Other than that, order of comments works pretty well for determining quality.
Pubsubhub and RSS cloud are "competing" approaches to real time notifications.
You may not be aware of it, but the view command on (most?) Unix systems is basically a read-only way to execute vi. It has the same keybindings in general, of course, because it's actually the same program with the -R option, more useful than more or less. It's especially more useful because one can "break out" of the read-only limitations if necessary (and if one has the requisite permissions for the file in question), but one has to actively override those limitations.

Since the Web is, a lot of the time, basically a read-only medium with occasional need for limited editing -- and, when done well, it's a primarily textual medium -- the vi interface philosophy turns out to be quite appropriate. If you dislike having to switch interface contexts between keyboard and mouse because you're a touch-typist who has learned the efficiency and power of a keyboard driven interface for text editing, a browser that does the same thing is a very attractive idea.

Unfortunately, most people's experience of text user interface browsers is limited to the shite that has been available for more than a decade, such as the ubiquitous Lynx. While it's entirely keyboard driven, it's not a good TUI. It is, in fact, a crap TUI. Vimperator, however, has managed to improve on the failures of all other TUI Web browsers I've ever seen by importing vi idioms to the context of Web browsing -- improve on it so much that it blows away both TUI and GUI browsers, at least for me.

I also use a window manager with a keyboard driven interface, and I probably do more typing online than the vast majority of Web browser users. With all that in mind, keeping one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse would be broken up a lot by having to get my hands back to home row on the keyboard so I could do things like type in the browser, switch workspaces and do work there, and so on. At least 98% of the time, Vimperator obviates the need to keep one hand on the mouse the way you do it, which means there isn't any interface context switching going on in my brain at least 98% of the time for me, whereas without Vimperator I'd spend more like 60% of the time I'm using the Web browser also using a mouse and would have to switch back to home row every time I need to copy text to or from Vim in a terminal emulator (for instance).

Now, the only times I need a mouse in the browser is when I want to do something like click the upvote arrow here at HN or do something in a Flash object (such as start the Flash player, since I use Flashblock).

I used to believe that for the best browsing experience, a mouse was necessary for the majority of uses, because the Web is an inherently graphical medium. Even essentially pure-text pages seemed that way to me, because things like hyperlinks are location-specific. Vimperator has allowed me to learn the error of my reasoning in that regard.
Yahoo upgrades their search engine to Microsoft's Bing
SOAP is dead for good reason. Its an overcomplicated POS. I will pretty much refuse (unless there is no other alternative) to use a web service that only supports SOAP.

My conspiracy theory regarding SOAP is that major tool vendors support it because you need a complicated and expensive tool to design a SOAP service.
...the only purpose is to magnify your viewpoint.

And to put an easily-visible number next to it -- because article scores are still visible.

So perhaps another effect of the hidden-scores: more comments will be promoted to submissions in pursuit of one-click public support.
Yes, I agree with you. I was reacting to the common attitude illustrated by the parent post that goes "Why does any group of people excel at something? It's necessarily because of culture and social support and you're stupid for considering anything else."

Postulating variations in the human brain is socially off the table, and perhaps this is the best way for it to be. The evidence people are willing accept as absolute proof that human brains are basically equal is weaker by several orders of magnitude than that which would convince them that there is any statistical difference in the brains of any populations.

One indication of this is that people who think that there is no significant statical pattern in variations of human brains never take that thought further toward interesting scientific questions. (For example, why have all groups of humans had the exact same evolutionary pressures on all kinds of intelligence, or why is intelligence seemingly unable to evolve in different directions, given that however you measure it it seems highly, highly heritable as shown by twin studies and other evidence?)

So basically, I'm just a mood to explore really politically incorrect and dangerous ideas, many of which may also be wrong. However, people who explore these ideas are not stupid, and reactions like "duh, it's the society" aren't really warranted. It may be socially irresponsible to think about ideas like this, and I'm agnostic about whether that's so. It quite possibly could be indicative of a very poor political sensibility too (see James Watson, Larry Summers.)
Yeah -- more (keys) is always better!

Oh, wait . . .
Sl: linux command to help you remember to type 'ls'
Press on. Make him proud
Nuclear can prolong us for a long time, uranium would basically be a stop gap to full on conversion to thorium reactors, as it's 3 times more abundant than uranium, but 550 times more abundant than U-235.

Basically nuclear would only be a stopgap to Fusion. Once fusion becomes available, you can begin replacing fission with fusion. Existing nuclear power plants have so much land reserved around them as a buffer zone that entire fusion plants can be built on them without the requirement of any new land as the old nuclear plants are decommissioned.

The ITER project currently puts the first commercial fusion plant in 2050, however that's based on current funding and research. As fusion increasingly becomes our only alternative I have a feeling the funding will begin going through the roof. I still wouldn't bet on anything closer than 2035 though.
Regulation costs small businesses nearly $500 billion in CA [pdf]
Search.fastestp2p.com
R.I.P.

http://calacanis.com/2009/07/29/yahoo-committed-seppuku-toda...
Another book of his on a different topic but with same great clarity of explanation is "Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms". The PDF is on his site at http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html.
Voted no and note if you call a mule a horse it will not make it so.
..because you need a complicated and expensive tool to design a SOAP service...

huh? Don't think so. Can you please give some more info about your opinion? My SOAP services was always easier to implement than others like XML-RPC for example. Never found anything complicated about SOAP.
Besides if you do need something like SOAP but without the unnecessary overcomplications you always have XML-RPC (http://www.xmlrpc.com/) which I use a lot.
Why Pay for RPG Games when you can get excellent ones for free
Thanks. For some reason I was thinking of old-fashioned wooden wheels rather than modern car wheels. I guess someone figured out the physics at some point and there was no looking back.
I'm not sure adding more structure is always useful. When I'm throwing a party for 30 people at a set date and time, I use event organization software, like Facebook events. If I want to get a feeling for my friends' thoughts on the local concert schedule this fall, I want to have a conversation with them. And the subject, as in email, is meta-data about a conversation, not (necessarily) the content of the conversation.
I generally pick one or two most interesting topics from the front page, and read most of the comments on them. It seems better to read a few things in depth than reading sound bites on everything.

This also frees me of any need to complain about offtopic stuff, as long as a few on-topic posts remain.
This is a VERY poorly researched and written article.

The loans provided to Fisker are not for development of the Karma, but for development of a lower priced entry model which would allow the company to develop low cost electric vehicles (I believe in the sub-$30k range).

The loan to Tesla was not for the 'british built' tesla roadster, but was to build manufacturing capacity in the US (as far as I recall).

Both Tesla and Fisker received loans in the 200+million range.

It is entirely feasible that the DOE looks at the smaller requests of sub 100 million and think that the smaller loans won't have as much impact or that the group isn't thinking big enough.

Fisker has been a 'coach builder' of 'custom sports cars' since 2005, and partnered with Quantum Technologies to build Fisker Automotive and the Karma.

Also, why write twice that Vinod Khosla is a backer of EcoMotors and is a campaign contributor?
When computer scientists protest...
In my experience, anyone of average intelligence becomes quite good at chess, if they take it seriously.
"Only," but that's ten times what a professional chessplayer outside of the top 10 in the world makes.
Sure, but then the only advantage over email is if you don't know someone's email address but have them as a friend on fb.

So I can really see the value of status updates, wall->wall posts etc, but messages? meh
> The controversial product would heat food packets containing muscle c e l l s , oxygen and nutrients. "This will create 100% pure meat without the need for animals to be killed and with no risk of contamination," said Cocoon creator Rickard Hederstierna, a 27 year-old Swedish design student. "It will change everything."

I am just scratching my head here. Could somebody, please explain to me how muscle cells will be produced and placed in the food packets?
"it's not dependent on experimentation..."

therefore it should not be called science? Software development involves experimentation, testing, trial and error, measurement, standards, and it's much more rigorous than any science.
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We fully intend on offering a worldwide service. There are many factors involved of course with providing that type of coverage (some technical, some legal). But know that we are keeping our international users in mind as we negotiate contracts and develop our products.

I'll be happy to toss up a shirt up North (my e-mail is in my profile). We get them made by American Apparel and they are quite comfy. I've been wearing mine all week and I think my co-workers are starting to demand a change.
Dramatic play, he said, was the training ground where children learned to regulate themselves, to conquer their own unruly minds.

This makes intuitive sense. Dramatic acting is almost by definition doing what you think you should do, instead of what you want to do. Except for method acting, which instead tries to make it so what you want to do is what you should be doing.

I'd be interested to know if actors have better or worse self-control than non-actors, and if method actors have better or worse self-control than other types of actors.
What am I missing?

1) His general point is that no single energy source will be sufficient. We're going to need a combination of many different sources of power, combined with as much improvement in efficiency as we can muster. He concludes that it is very difficult, but not impossible, and that tradeoffs will be necessary.

2) Covering the electrical needs of the world is an easier task than covering the total energy needs, and even covering the current energy needs will not account for increasing demand by the developing world. Still, this is an approach worth exploring. It's covered in considerable detail in Chapter 25: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c25/page_17...
Google Voice doesn't compete with AT&T any more than a VOIP provider that you use via your DSL or cable internet competes with your ISP. They provide different services, and the one you are arguing competes with the telephone carrier or ISP actually relies on the customer paying a telephone carrier or ISP.

I don't think we should ask: "Why can't Google's mere 'bidirectional phone call forwarding' include the disputed rural endpoints?", but rather "Why should a call forwarding service be held to the same network neutrality constraints issues as an actual phone provider?". When you make a call with Google Voice, Google doesn't transmit your voice over the internet or over telephone wires or via microwaves. Your phone provider does that. Regardless of whether it would be better for GV to allow you to call those rural areas(which of course, it would be), we should not expand the jurisdiction of the FCC to include services that are not actual communication networks of any kind.
It doesn't. They mistake the word "design" for "dream".
Imagine if someone emailed confidential data to various of the folks involved in the court case, and then demanding its return under the same terms as this decision. This decision would then become a whole new form of denial of service.
I liked this article, especially for the last known picture of RMS when he was shaved, and (more seriously) Stallman's quote at the end. This sums it all up quite well in my opinion.
What is the point of a design competition where the winners are for things that cannot be produced even in the laboratory or defy the laws of physics? The winner is just a stylish steamer that copied a staple of Star Trek. A cup of Earl Grey, please.
If you desire a "simpler and cleaner [interface] than the later windows versions and is easy to use for things of peripheral interest to me, like browsing", may I suggest DSL[1] or Puppy[2]? Both are simple and clean interfaces with modern linux drivers. Puppy has a slightly nicer interface.

However, it sounds to me like you don't like Linux due to it's lack of soft modem drivers. If that's the case, I don't think you're judging this software fairly, as a hardware modem is available for less than the price of a windows license.

[1]http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

[2]http://www.puppylinux.org/
Always go earlier in the year than you think you should; right now is perfect. :)
Sometimes I want to retain my freedom not to have freedom in certain cases.
I just open it in another window to take a quick look at then close that window when done.
You don't have to be part of the community to sign up for an account and start voting stuff up.
Thanks! Visit anytime. We're right next to the Hippodrome on the 2nd floor above Dragonfly. If you walk out on the ledge until you hear Skyler pounding on his 1980's style IBM keyboard, you've found Grooveshark.
The last word on Lily Allen and her anti-filesharing campaign
I'm not sure what your opinion of iTunes is, but,

Apple's Airtunes works really well. Plug in speakers/receiver/whatever (either analog or SPDIF) into each Airport Express. In iTunes, check each Airport you want to play through, and away you go. The audio sync is good. The Remote app for iPhone/touch works nicely with this kind of setup.

Another option, which I think is more expensive and difficult, is Sonos.
I may be missing a crucial point here, but this sounds like all it is is running a modular malware scanner off of a server, and checking each computer on the network.

This seems to fall under a classic problem (well, maybe not classic, but I see it a lot): people see something in nature and assume it will work on a computer. Taking a look at the metaphors used in the article, it looks like these researchers may have fallen into the same trap.

Worms in the digital sense are nothing like worms in the natural sense. Digital worms propagate by attacking a computer, taking it over, and then using that computer to launch out its own attacks at as many other computers as it can. The only way it resembles a natural worm, is because both of them leave a clear, followable trail, as long as you know where to look. While the natural worm's trail is in the dirt, the digital worm's trail is through infected computers. They're hard to trace back to their source, but it may be possible.

Assuming I understand the concept of security "ants" correctly, it will only work until viruses catch on, at which point it will be even more susceptible to attacks than current generation virus scanning. What so many people fail to understand is that once a computer is infected with malware, you cannot trust anything it tells you. I can't stress that enough, an infected computer can very easily lie to you. So, what it looks like from the article, is (for instance) we have 3000 "ants" running off a server, which each check every computer for a specific symptom of running a virus. If the computer has that symptom, more and more ants are sent to that computer to find and disable it.

To give this another metaphor: lets say we have 3000 police officers, who patrol a neighborhood with several homes in it. We know from experience that there are criminals who break into homes, and use it for all sorts of nefarious purposes. In a particular home, someone has broken in and set up a Meth Lab. A police officer comes up, knocks on the door, and one of the criminals comes to the door. The following dialogue ensues:

Officer: Hi, I'm checking for illegal assault rifles today. Any chance you guys have any assault riffles in there?
Criminal: No.
Officer: Ok, Have a nice day.

The problem of running a virus scan off the network is similar to the problem an officers faces without a warrant. The network scanner cannot directly check the hard drive and processes running on a computer. It has to ask the computer to check those things, and then report back to the scanner, or, alternately ask the computer to make those resources available to it and check them itself. All the malware has to do is make the computer it has infected lie to the scanner, and its free. This is difficult, but possible when the scanner is on the local machine. When its on the network though, it doesn't stand a chance.
I love this idea, but it should really be initially implemented as a kind of A/B test.

Simply choose half of the UIDs at random and always show them the comment score, and don't show it to the other half. Track which comments are upvoted most when their score is visible versus when not (there are many other metrics to use as well). It should be pretty easy to determine how much groupthink plays into voting.

I suspect that most people only read (and therefore only vote on) already popular comments, so I suspect groupthink is fairly high here.
In what POSSIBLE WAY does this "benefit" everyone? There are too few big competitors in search already. Now there's even less. I don't give a damn if Yahoo's current CEO says "we're not a search company" because they damn well were.

I actually don't understand why this post was written, why it was submitted to HN, nor how it gets to the top of the front page with 2 votes.
i'd say that's a pretty good advantage when you have a few hundred friends from throughout the years and don't have their email, or they don't have yours, or perhaps you don't want to disclose yours
Hey, we're all huge fans of HN. Great community.

Thanks for your suggestion about Autoplay. This will be fixed in our upcoming product launch. If you want a sneak peak, check out preview.grooveshark.com.
Perhaps a simpler (less than 49 pages) explanation is that our ability to make nuanced decisions is clouded by our survival instinct to make quick decisions in the face of danger, hunting, or competition.
I see nothing awkward about it. It just makes you upvote and reply to the most thought provoking and insightful posts rather than the ones with the highest counts.
Nifty device. Sort of a BeagleBoard + LCD and physical IO devices. It has IP over 802.15.4 for a more power efficient wireless internet connection than 802.11, but you can always plug in a USB WiFi if you need speed.

I wonder if there is a way to acquire one other than enrolling at Oregon State University or building your own from the open source design?
The case against the Founder's Visa
We do have quite a bit of obscure music. For sharing songs, you might want to check out our URL shortener, TinySong.com (we have other sharing features on the songs themselves in the Info pane). You can also utilize our API if you'd like to do cool stuff with our library.