skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. Evolution is basically a filtering process that records and compresses memories of past changes to the environment, along with mechanisms for communicating those memories as widely as possible and incorporating the communications of other agents. The better agents are at this, the more resources can be marshaled for recording, compressing, and communicating memories. For this reason larger and more tightly coupled agents are favored, but the complexity of maintaining homeostasis increases with agent size, and increasing size also serves to move agents into new selection environments. In other words, an agent's own actions may cause their fitness function to change in ways that are difficult to predict from past experience of the environment alone, and this may become a bigger problem as agents increase in size. At some scale, agents who do not add models of themselves to the fitness search space may be at a disadvantage. If they are social agents in a society of agents similar to themselves, and if they already model other agents, creating self-models may not be much of a leap.

Or at least that's my half-assed theory. Guess I should probably read up on Robert Axelrod's stuff now. Thanks for the pointer.
Ask HN: SEO today, what's it all about? 
What are the best practices. Is it worth it, whats okay whats not?
I'm curious - could you for instance walk the streets of Shanghai in a t-shirt openly critical of the government? 'Cos people in London do it all the time...
How to make Chrome bearable in Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/research/Dissemination.pd...
Another version, a little more risque, as he described it:

http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/pocket-books/180-1.jpg
It's a cultural thing. If you use an obscure feature of Perl (or Ruby, for that matter) to do a common task in a novel way the community will call you a "wizard", high praise. Do the same in Python and someone will patiently explain that the rest of the community has reached a consensus that this thing is done this way, for these reasons.

Most of Perl's bad reputation (e.g. that it's a "write only" language) is simply because the community around the language reinforces that style of coding.
Solar Motion Ferris Wheel
http://kuler.adobe.com/ is a really good resource for this. You can name a general description of a color you want ("dirt" or "angry" or "light blue" or "cloudy"), and you'll get a ton of color combos, with a ton of complimentary colors thrown in for free.
the initial infusion of celebrity

Leo wasn't famous on the day he was born, was he?

The only reason he seems to have had an "initial infusion" of celebrity is that you're telling his story starting in the middle.
Of course the problem is that 99% of non-conformists are wrong, but all of them believe that they are right, some of them are really dangerous, and some of them are work very hard to be persuasive. Society is a balancing act of incorporating as much diversity as possible without losing structural integrity. Most people disagree with each other about whether we need more diversity or more conformity, to what extent we are unbalanced, and pretty much everything else at any given point in time.
Prepping Fedora for amateur robotics with python
Particularly since one of said ways is done to to save fuel when the plane's not fully loaded.
Zero-tolerance, in schools anyway, is zero-thought for the administration and principles, having to deal with the grey cases, setting exceptions when they're education administrators not lawyers.
I doubt a student who did a similar action (stealing and returning a library book) would perceive themselves as morally wrong even with a zero-tolerance policy in place on 'stealing'.
Slava Pestov's Favorite Programming Language Feature
Watch Wake Up Sid, wake up sid download free, download wake up sid song
Download Wake Up Sid Songs an Bollywood Movie who is ready to sloppy your day. Wake Up Sid is a movie made by Karan johar and the starcast are strong by Bangoli hot and bold Konkona Sen and handsome hunk the bollywood hot dashing new and most of all Deepika Padukone's Present Boyfriend
A poor workman blames his tools.

Not a great defense. Perl is a great language for bioinformatics, and is also a great language used the right way. It's not persuasive to assume anyone who is critical of something cannot use it. Many good workmen criticism tools only to make better tools.
Individual members of populations of every species alter their environments. Humans may do it more deliberately, but as either civilizations or as a species as a whole it's not clear to me that we're all that much better at anticipating and avoiding environmental disasters than other species; we just do everything at a larger scale (more massive individuals, across the whole planet) than any other single species. Not necessarily longer time scales though - that remains to be seen.
I wonder what the world would be like if people made their own choices, not influenced by what's "popular" this week.
20+ hour outage due to EC2/EBS on BitBucket
Jeebus... I always sort of figured TWiT was more investment for the future and wasn't making money yet - I had no idea they were doing so well. Awesome to hear it, though.
Coding as art not prostitution
Ask HN: UK Colleges - Oxford or Cambridge?
I'm a recent US high school graduate currently on gap year working at a software startup, in no small part thanks to the advice I got on HN in April. I'm reapplying to numerous universities, one of which will be either Oxford or Cambridge (for engineering; applying to both is not possible), and I need to decide which soon.

I've been leaning towards Oxford, because it's in a larger town and offers a combined Engineering/Economics course, and I've heard that the difference in the sci/eng programs' quality in the two universities is insignificant. However, I just read about "Silicon Fen", which is evidently the UK's tech-company concentration spot, located around Cambridge. Its existence pointed me to the thought that Cambridge has a better concentration of hackers than Oxford.

So, can any HNers with experience with the two universities help with some input regarding the comparative strengths of the engineering (and science) programs, and the student bodies of the two universities? As well as a macro look at the universities, any advice on which colleges within the universities offer the best atmosphere for a budding hacker (preferably without being too bookish) would also be very helpful.

Thanks for the advice.
I 'lift' them from paintings :)
I read the first 20% of this article. Think I got the gist.
False dichotomy. There is a difference between "totalitarian dictatorship" and "society with relatively low levels of political freedom". The former requires the latter, but not every instance of the latter is an instance of the former.
Very good point.

As of late, I think Perl has gone more in the Python direction, and Ruby has gone more in the "old Perl" direction. (It is mildly amusing to watch the Ruby community make all the mistakes that Perl made 10 years ago, especially with its advocates' constant hatred for Perl.)
Selling an mp3 file is different from selling a bundled application that contains a slew of different features and functions. Apple has a whole bunch of things they don't want appearing on applications, because they want to control the coding environment. A song requires no control. An app requires a lot. So no, this isn't something that's been around for 7 years—though I recall iTunes store having its own problems when it launched.

I do know dozens of (well respected) developers who have had issues with the app store.

Dozens out of thousands of developers. 99.9% might have been a stretch, I don't know the exact numbers. 99% wouldn't have been.

So, I think some criticism is deserved here.

There's a difference between criticizing Apple and hijacking a conversation about something entirely different to rant about the App Store. There are critical essays about the latter every day or two. We can complain about Apple there.
A trick I learnt from infomercial makers: Look for 2 out of 3:

* Star

* Story

* Solution

3 out of 3 is best. But 2 out of 3 also makes a good recipe for added fame.
I must be uninformed about something but why is Pirate Bay getting all the flack from the DMCA; having their servers raided, going to court, this. Aren't there a dozen other torrent indexers to persecute?
Are we seriously going to have this argument? This is Hacker News, where most of us don't play the Ford/Chevy game with programming languages. Most of us have used multiple languages and know exactly when to employ the right tool for the job.

Perhaps we should have a new rule: if you haven't built a full-scale web app in a specific language, we'd prefer you not comment on it.
The CPU Clock principle of software releases
Then people would spend a lot more time electing better choices when they could have spent time working on solving their problem.
Coming of Age in the Era of Cloud Computing
How Microsoft will lift us out of the IT-spending dumps
These days you can be arrested if you have a home chemistry lab. Imagine what the government would do to you if you started teaching people how to peek on supposedly secretive military bases.
Using pygame with Arduino part 1
It’s Time To Hide The Noise
of course it's worth it...if you're interested in proactive SEO, you need to focus on building relevant, targeted one way links to your site for the keywords you're looking to rank for. Start with long tail keywords (like 2004 nissan altima 5 speed vs. nissan altima) so there is less competition to worry about. As you build authority on those long tail words, it will become easier and easier to get ranked for the harder keywords. Use your target keywords in the anchor text of the links you build (so instead of "Click here" do "2004 nissan altima 5 speed" as the anchor text)

The best link sources are:
web 2.0 site profiles that allow links
web 2.0 blog sites that allow articles with links
social bookmarking
article marketing
blog commenting
wiki links
directory links (though not too much)

Don't go crazy on the number of links you build. There's no set number of links that are too much per day, but what's most important is consistently building links. That way the search engines see you as a long term authority site for your niche.

Also, while on site SEO is a good thing, it really only amounts to about 10% of your rankings. It basically makes it easier for the search engines to crawl your site and determine its topic once they find you.

It's all about links...
Gmail, Now With Favicons
http://zabadab.eu/colorwhore/
http://www.knorrpage.de/colormatch.html
I wish decrying popular things as fads was just a fad
HN is not your personal blog.
(a) Content (and attach a blog)

(b) Be the community.

Answer questions on forum(s) related to your niche. Help people solve those problems via Twitter and other social sites. Write in turn about those experiences. Rinse & Repeat.

It's cheaper to cause awesomeness than to buy it.

(c) Adhere to basics, good titles, viral marketing, link building, make it easier for people and spiders to find you site.
I studied at Cambridge, only visiting Oxford to visit friends and to speak (seminars and public events).

I think there is little to choose between them. You will find people of like mind almost whereever you go, provided you seek them out.

It's true the Cambridge has the science Park, and I know of several spin-offs and high-tech companies in the area, but there are also many high-tech companies in the area of Oxford.

I believe Cambridge and surrounds has the reputation for the smaller companies, and that's probably what you're looking for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_corridor

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

However, I believe the much more important thing is the university and department. For that, I would suggest Cambridge has the edge, but I've not got enough data to be definite.

You might do well to see what the PhD students are doing in your area, because that will show the strengths of the staff.
I've used http://www.colourlovers.com/ for years. Great site.
The key part being "the same actions". This is missing subtlety and judgment. Is "stealing" the action, or is "stealing a book from the library with the intent to return it" the action?

Would you agree that stealing the same book out of someone's bag with the intent to return it is different? If so, then why are you arguing for zero tolerance?

If not, why haven't you turned yourself into the authorities for the laws you've broken?
Big difference, the US was planning to remove the visa-waver program because of the British Pakistani community.

I doubt this. One crackpot unelected official does not "the US was planning" make. If we kill our visa-waiver program, everyone else in the world will remove the US from theirs. That is simply not going to happen.

Also, if you feel that the US is discriminating against you because of your ethnicity, you have full access to the courts. The Constitution protects all "people", not just citizens.
I would like to know what percentage of Facebook apps can be considered a business?
That's a tough call. It's hard to tell if I can understand the concepts from that along after already read and studied DIP. You may want to pick up the 2.ed of DIP if your concern is price. I learned from 2.ed of DIP, and not sure if 3.ed is worth $60+ more.
Prove it.

(Every week I hear about some new asynchronous web server written in Python. Do people really want to spend time working on their own problems, or do they just want to type as much code into the computer as possible?)
It's quite interesting to think about how much I've learned about nature socially, vs. directly. It seems clear that I learn almost everything socially, and everything I learn directly is probably available socially, probably at a lower cost. In other words, nothing I learn directly is really new, and what is new could very easily be predicted from models - it's hardly even information in the Shannon sense. I'm a university student, but it's not clear to me that I've ever even met anyone who learned anything new themselves either (about the environment). Almost the entire information processing capacity of the species seems to be devoted to internal processing of information and the modeling of internal behavior. It seems like there's no other way it could be, given the sheer number of people, but it does make you wonder how far that can go.

Listening to people like Gwynne Dyer talk about global warming makes it sound like the problem is not so much that we don't have enough people tracking the environment, or even that we don't propagate the information fast enough, but that the sheer inertia of the system makes it so that changes can't be made fast enough to avoid major shakeups.
But having web users bring their own database is not the problem that AWS is trying to solve.
There is a draft of Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications by Richard Szeliski available for free online http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/szeliski/Book/. It's good overall, but some sections are still incomplete (missing diagrams, for example).
Big Brother is watching you shop
Good points, I got into programming at about the same time and was discussing the same question the other day with some colleagues. Conclusion, the best web languages at the moment are the ones YOU know well. Unfortunately for me this means PHP until my Python skills are a bit better :)
"How much theory for recognizing objects in images?": Some pattern recognition, lots of image processing.

For the most part, it doesn't matter what classifier you use: k nearest neighbor,support vector machine, random forest, neural nets. They'll all give about the same performance. You should have a general idea what they do, but I don't think it's worth the effort to become a "neural net expert". You should know enough pattern recognition so you don't fool yourself (by over-training, for example), and have an idea for how to choose the right features.

Where should you put your effort? Into finding useful features for the object you want to classify. And the more image processing you know the more useful features you'll be able to try. How much do you need to know? Depends on the problem. If you're finding cars in the desert then not so much. Your feature set might be "has long straight lines and is not sand colored". If you're trying to tell American made cars from Japanese then it's harder (unless they are moving, in which case it can't be American).
All I'm saying that evaluating every research language out there and seeing how well it suits your problem would just take too much time. Getting acquainted with a few well-known languages and a few DSLs or cult-followed languages should be sufficient.
At some point, Palm starts looking even less rational, because the cost of the strategy they're pursuing exceeds the cost of just building their own sync system.
When I hear the word 'totalitarian' or 'dictatorship' I think of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. If contemporary China is a dictatorship, then apparently life under a dictatorship isn't as bad as I was raised to believe and I need to review my evaluations of those regimes. I used to live in San Francisco and now live in Beijing - my ability to live my life as I see fit has been relatively unchanged.
This article didn't seem to have anything to do with actually switching to Git; it was just a list of SVN commands without the Git equivilant. It did mention one difference thats worth mentioning:

Since git doesn't keep empty directories, you can add a .gitkeep file to empty directories that you don't want to go away.

However, I thought one of Git's selling points was that it didn't add a file to directories?

And the site adding a link back to the blog when I went to copy and paste that quote? Eugh.
HTML5 Examples and References
http://colorschemedesigner.com/ is also nice, it also include emulator for different eye diseases
I look for nice colors that aren't blue. Too many things use blue.

I also use the previously mentioned colourlovers and colorschemedesigner.
What a vile and invidious piece. Equating mathematicians and nerds with thieves, and touting his inability to understand another area as a positive virtue.

Sadly, it's those who are trained and experienced in writing who help to shape the minds and attitudes of others. The influence of the public is in the hands of those who comment, rather than those who help to create the world that enables their existence.
Every time DRM comes up the BBC embaresses themselves with their shifty and/or nonsensical stances. It is genuinely appalling so I'm glad to see them taken to task.

Their stance is completely weird because it's clearly thrust upon them - This one is the weirdest one for obvious reasons as seen in the diagram: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2009/04/welcome_to_so...

Admittedly a few of the things Corey said didn't make sense (HD-to-SD converter boxes) and the likes but it's mostly true and he's a good person to have spearheading this issue.

For more information see the debate on the bbc backstage mailing lists:

http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Why a web app? I write a lot of software which has nothing to do with the web, and I use Perl very happily for some of it.
"On the other hand, there are still scenarios in which managed code simply cannot be used today (such as building the CLR itself or the debugger)."

I thought the Mono CLR is written in C#, as is the C# compiler which compiles itself. Did I misunderstand something?
No, I couldn't say that. What I'm saying is that the focus on "good" Perl came after Perl lost some serious hearts and minds to languages like Python and Ruby.

If you want to keep using Perl and enjoy the new stuff, that's great. For those who jumped ship and got up to speed on a new platform (as I did after 8 years of Perl), I don't see much reason to come back. Even Ruby's lacklustre performance is almost on a par with Perl now - http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al... - and Python is developing at a great pace.
SU - Option pools and founder % on Flickr
I think he's missing a </jest> tag.

Or maybe not. British humor ("humour?") is totally inscrutable to me.
I think his point is that Leo was famous from traditional media before he started an online podcast.
Handcrafted CSS book
Opera Web Standards Curriculum
Considering thousands and thousands are made per day and most are not necessarily, probably a very low percentage.

A more interesting question, IMO, is the "market size" of Facebook apps, irrespective of your chance of success. I've built a few apps that generate $800k-$1MM in revenue per year.

It's just much easier to get massive scale on Facebook than outside on the web, and the monetization methods are constantly improving.

Of course, it's hard to say if you can just build a viable ten year business out of it, or if the Platform will be dead in two years. But you take what you can get now, factor in the risk of long-term failure, and branch out it ways that protect you against that.

There's certainly enough money to sustain a decent business in a short-to-medium-term.
After the faction-change and Sino-Soviet split, the US actually sold weapons to PRC. It lasted until 1989 where the Tiananmen Square protest ended it all with a PR disaster.

Ironically PRC has more Black Hawk helicopters than Taiwan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UH-60_Black_Hawk#Military_opera...

Also not sure if anyone noticed some of the choppers during the parade were Eurocopter Dauphins.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocopter_Dauphin
I use Color Scheme Designer, it's so easy to find complementary colors and its a beautiful UI.

http://colorschemedesigner.com/
A terrible tragedy: Dan Haubert of Ticketstumbler (fallentimes) has passed away
He thinks the side he's on is the artists. Actually it's the old.
If you were an ethnic German, life in Germany in the 1930s was pretty good too. Bierkellers, girls in dirndl dresses, finally after the setbacks of WW1 the German people were back on their feet, etc etc.

If you're an ethnic Han, or a Westerner, life in China could be pretty good too.
In the words of Jeremy Mims -- Dan really was the heart of our YC Summer 08 batch. He was always quick to smile, share a good laugh, and share sharp insights into all things startup.

We will miss him always.
I pick a nice photo of nature and use a
"color palette generator" (search for this, etc.)
Just a caveat to anyone who DOES want to start an "easy business"...

In Founders at Work (another great book from Apress), Paul Graham talks about starting Viaweb (which Yahoo bought to power Yahoo Stores):

Graham: "We had this angry phone conversation where he [co-founder Robert Morris] said something like, 'We’ve been working on this thing for a whole month, and it’s still not finished.' It’s funny in retrospect, because we were still working on it 3 years later. At the time, I was just thinking about how to get him to keep working on it for another month..."

In the same book, Max Levchin talks about starting Paypal:

Levchin: "It was pretty funny because we met with all these people in the banking and credit card processing industry, and they said, 'Fraud is going to eat you for lunch.' We said, 'What fraud?'"

Levchin ended up spending almost all of his time writing software to tackle fraud, which turned out to be Paypal's core competence. He now calls PayPal "a security company pretending to be a financial services company."

So, again, keep that caveat in mind when you're looking for an "easy" business. Letting people email money? What could be easier? Muahahahahahaha...
That isn't possible with DDR1/2/3 RAM because the signal quality degrades with each slot; with more than 3 or 4 DIMM slots the signal would be garbage.
He does touch on that a bit towards the end. For the most part, he seemed to view that sort of success as an artifact of the transition between traditional mass media and internet media. In particular, his view seemed to be that the mechanisms for filtering out good content weren't/aren't fully developed, giving people in his position a head start.