skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would be scary if it caught those flashing moments of doing something extreme all of us experience and acted on it (ie, walking by a ledge and thinking of throwing your new laptop off it).
On the other hand, it's much cheaper than Mathematica!
I think this is a great idea. Iceland needs a new industry and this just makes sense. Data centers are to the tech age as factories were to the industrial revolution.

The government can ensure/facilitate high speed fiber links to the continent and then let the rest take care of itself. As long as there is enough network capacity this should be a no-brainer.
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Sorry, posting as I was going out the door. The Sidekick disaster is a problem, but the first party phone referred to by jsz0 is probably a bigger issue. Think "Plays for Sure" vs. Zune.
They need a lot of work, of course. That's OK; given some startup capital (I suppose this would be metastartup capital) I could easily do a reasonable job of making them livable, then comfortable, then nice. It wouldn't even cost all that much - even if I hire people to do the work. The Amish are only charging $9 an hour right now; there's just not enough construction work to go around.
People whose faith on free markets have been challenged by the recent "troubles" have a potential crisis, and they can generally do either of two things: accept that market regulation is a necessary evil; or think that the real problem is that the markets weren't actually free, owing to governments propping up banks and preventing panic.

I believe this second approach is misguided, unrealistic, and frankly juvenile, a position that only those young enough (or cloistered enough) to favour ideology over pragmatics can hold.

It doesn't take much panic for a bank to collapse, owing to how their multipliers work, and when you have three or four banks collapsing around you, it's only reasonable to assume that all banks are dodgy. Getting into that kind of a situation for the sake of an ideological approach to free markets is dangerous, IMHO.

IMO, banks should be small enough that they can fail, and there ought to be a procedure that lets them fail in a relatively clean way. Joe Q. Public should have his savings and deposits protected (up to a limit), and perhaps even small business similarly, but the rest of debt should be converted to equity, and previous shareholders wiped out. But regulations are required, both to limit bank size, and to standardize the procedure so that it's a known quantity (and explicitly removes the bailout moral hazard) and shareholders can apply sufficient pressure to management to avoid self-destruction.
I went ahead and posted this comment on the blog post. It'd be great to be able to at least have a sandbox to build a library for communicating with the API to test out libraries and clients under development. Without something like that, I really don't see open, robust client libraries being built, and driving adoption in applications and around the web.

---

I'm surprised that no one has said this yet, so I'll step up.

This is massively expensive.

Releasing an API without offering developers any way to build client libraries for Ruby, Python, and other languages short of ponying up $60 to test their client (or even offering a sandbox for sample data) is a bit much.

I'd be interested in putting together a Ruby library for interfacing with Alpha that would abstract the work of creating a request and parsing the response, making integration a snap for other developers and enabling deeper integration with Alpha around the web. I've thought a bit about how that might look, too:

query = WolframAlpha::Query.new(:query => '7.5 parsecs in light years')
response = query.execute

response.pods.keys.map(&:title)
=> ['Input Interpretation', 'Result', 'Additional Conversions', 'Comparison as distance', 'Interpretations,' 'Corresponding Quantity']

response.pods['Result']
=> '24.5 light years'

But with such a strong financial disincentive to develop for the platform, it's not likely that I'll register as a developer to create something like this. Feel free to contact me if terms change.
I can't imagine enterprise level organisations allowing Google to Earn money via advertising.

I'm not entirely certain what you mean by this. I would take you literally, but taking that sentence literally would be mad (Google does earn money via advertising, and every enterprise-level organization "allows" it in the sense that they don't explicitly "disallow" it (what would that look like, anyway?)). Could you clarify?
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The problem is that they will be broken up "poorly". The bigwigs will keep the good parts, and give the crappy, debt-ridden parts to the government, or let them fail.

Kinda like GM (although I'm not sure there were any good parts).
What does this mean? We are moving 5 times faster? We are almost through it? We still have much worse times ahead? This will last at least 5 times as long?
It's not that explicit. The terms talks about different kind of virtual currencies, my understanding is that "consumables" are allowed, as long as your currency isn't trad-able back to real money
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That's exactly what corporations are actually for: allowing investment without exposure to liability in excess of the investment.

What I suspect was done here was that Investments sold the voting rights to Holdings for A$1, which in turn sold them on for the A$4.5M. It's a clever little trick that can almost certainly be dressed up to be legal by more knowledgeable people than myself.
More accurate titles:

Dean Kamen's Cyborg Arm

Dean Kamen's Cybernetic Prosthesis
I can think of no sentence that more sounds like the 2009 I dreamed of than "Dean Karmen showed some video of the impressive, mind-controlled robot arm he's invented".

You look at the video and it's clear that the only thing preventing the creation of gigantic robotic exoskeleton battlesuits is budget.
I try not to play games that wouldn't appear in a top 100 list.

I only have limited time to play games, why wouldn't I have high standards?
If local search is going to be super valuable then I think and interesting challenger to Google's dominance would be one of the credit card companies. They already know all the merchants and take a very interesting part of Google's business like Craig's List did to the newspapers.
Bill Gates pledges 120 million to boost African, Indian farmers
That's kind of like an airplane pilot getting drunk and crashing a plane, killing hundreds, then saying publicly that pilots shouldn't be allowed to drink.
Yup, you can write arbitrary data to it in any format you like. See "Writing to a custom-writeable view" at http://code.google.com/p/geo-api/wiki/MethodView.
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walking by a ledge and thinking of throwing your new laptop off it

Whoa, that just gave me chills. When I used to work for fast food, every time I walked by the deep fryer with a bucket of ice I'd wonder about all the things that would happen if I just decided to dump in the ice.
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/

The pace of progress in quantum computing is slooow, so Scott may not have much to say for a while.

http://motls.blogspot.com/

Good physics (sometimes very technical, sometimes not), if you don't let Lubos' politics bother you.
I think we're all well aware that typical users tend toward overly simple password choices. That's why helpful measures such as password strength gauges and password content requirements have become so commonplace. This is nothing new.
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Unless you're re-segmenting the existing market.
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There really is no better response than: hahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Don't hate that. I like people who admit they don't know everything, I think many people like that.
Just to be clear--with customer development, you don't ask customers for your vision. That's still the founders responsibility. So yes, I think @ev and @jack would have still written code. They would have then asked people (not laggards, but people they already think might be interested) if their MVP has legs.
iphone eCPM is around 0.50-0.70, and the typical demographic of an iphone user is an early 20 something.
Mintspeak: ...unlike most start-ups, we're dealing with people's
financial information.
What we really mean: We run a serious business and you don't.

I think that mean there are specific legal requirements that have to be adhered to.
I think their main features were 'it's easy to use and pretty and it works well'. They cared a lot about those.
Also it seems like this was just luck. I don't think he expected to have the liabilities waived (by being bought back by the bank).
Splitting up the banks won't eliminate the "too big to fail" problem. If a systemic crash (like the one last year) causes hundreds of smaller banks to fail, there will be just as much pressure to bail them out as if one giant bank fails.
"Those banks have an implicit subsidy allowing them to borrow at lower cost because lenders believe the government will always step in to guarantee their obligations."

I like how the answer for meddling that causes problems is more meddling that is going to cause other problems. Maybe we shouldn't be listening to the major player who screwed our monetary policy for 20 years.
Le's say you are twitter founder pre-1st-line-of-code, who do you ask?
Cool. Can you say anything about the implementation?
The Japanese have got some interesting prototype exoskeletons

http://www.dannychoo.com/post/en/25131/Japanese+Exoskeletons...

http://www.c00lstuff.com/798/Japanese_Robotic_Exoskeleton/
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Right, I guess what I'm really questioning is who let him take on that much liability without having him personally guarantee it. I can't get a small business loan for my brand new corporation, pay it all to myself as compensation, and walk away saying "oh well, the business failed."
I think he is correct in his apathy theory, but if Facebook and YouTube told these XP/IE users that they no longer could use their sites until they'd upgraded, millions would get off their lazy butts and upgrade from XP and or IE.
And, although our long-term memory for images and words that we've assigned meanings to is quite good, we don't do as well with passwords, which (ideally, at least) should look like a near-random string of characters. It's another challenge entirely to remember which password to associate with a specific account.

It seems like this is easy enough to solve with a little instruction: have users make up a phrase that has to do with the account, and use the first letters from each word as the password: it's unique, non-dictionary, yet memorable.
If you're referring to the bank buying back shares as a "favor" to the investors who didn't know better, I don't think that was part of his plan, just luck.
Heh, I ran a Red Alert fan page back in the day too! :)

It was a Geocities page and had one of those massive long URL's and may have even used an animated gif or too also!
Its not just about being able to test (although I have serious doubts that any suite of emulators will be able to give anything more than a rough guess as to how an app will perform on a wide variety of potential platforms) but also about what features will be available, what APIs will work, and how much code you will have to write to deal with some funky condition on Vendor A's phone that makes it differ in some subtle way from Vendor B and C's phones. Eventually they will probably figure it out, but for the next year or so this game is going to make browser feature detection look like a walk in the park...
Researchers [kinda] create portable black hole
I had a teacher in High School that put her job on the line to pretty much make sure that my friends and I didn't end up doing this sort of thing. She would leave the computer lab unlocked for us at night and kindof look the other way when we would stay there until all hours playing in our own little DMZ.

People everywhere take note: these kids aren't evil, they don't have an outlet for their curiosities and skills. I have a feeling that many of us posting here probably skated a very thin line between where we are now, and ending up a story on a tech news website about teenage hackers or in jail.
Although, to make the analogy complete, you have to start with the assumption that people didn't know airline pilots shouldn't be drunk while flying. It seems obvious in hindsight but at the very least, this pilot thought drinking on the job was ok.
Wolfram|Alpha uses algorithmic computation! Sign me up!

"Wolfram|Alpha uses a unique paradigm for modeling data, based on algorithmic computation, that allows for implicit relationships among the data and the emergence of new knowledge."

http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/faqs.html ("Comparisons")
From I seen so far unless you're playing with low level stuff the software is consistent across the devices.

For now Android is far from the J2ME scenario, let's hope it will stay that way.
Maybe, but there is a problem with this approach. Unfortunatly, politicans forget history pretty quickly (at least they act like they do). If something similar happens again in, say, 20 years, there will be preassure on them to do something. In this case, I predict they'll again prop up the banks.

Greenspan's solution is meant to solve the root of the problem. Remove the temptation and, in theory anyway, the government will let banks fail.

Additionally, if you really beleive in institutions that are "too big to fail" then you can't do this. I'm not sure if I do, and at least one person below doesn't, but maybe Greenspan does.
I think you can be as sure about that as you are sure that writing a desktop application for MS Windows will run on most machines running Windows regardless of the underlying hardware.
Nickb if u cant run newmogul I will. Please let me know.
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You can. Once you agree to the developer agreement, the "Free" option opens up on iTunes Connect. I spent a few hours tonight retrofitting my server to basically rejigger my app into a "trial mode" -- complete with no code changes in the app :)
applauds effort

A lot of people hate on Bill, but the man sure knows how to invest his money wisely.
I think your translator is broken -- there's just a bunch of new Android phones all coming out at once, whereas before last month there was only the G1 on T-Mobile. Hence the explosion.
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Why does it matter who the developers are? The source is available. Build it and compare it with the binaries.

http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads2
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The main difference is screen sizes and densities -- their latest blog post talks about it in depth: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/
I thought that that's what I wrote. Thanks.
The emulator is quite configurable, so you can set up a profile for each set of hardware. Of course there are things like tilt sensors and accelerometers that just don't translate well.
This is exactly what Northern Rock did in the UK.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/plans-for-no...

Compared to Gordon Brown, Greenspan is an economic genius.
Verizon is getting better.

They crippled the HTC Touch Pro horribly (including cutting its RAM in half for no good reason), just like most of their phones.

But the HTC Touch Pro 2 came out completely unmolested.

Hopefully this represents a change in strategy...
No what I mean is that he sold the shares, these shares came with a liability. When he sold his shares to Thiess John Holland, why didn't the liabilities go with them?
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The shares had an outstanding capital raising thingy going (don't know the terms)

Each individual share held the requirement to pay $2 at some later point.. So what he did was purchase a bunch of shares worth about -$1.99 for 1 cent each. It's on the market - so noone had to approve he could actually pay the later $2 installment.

He then managed to separate the value (voting rights) from the liability (oustanding $2/share) and profited from the value.
More discussion in:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=836952
I think we have an issue of defining pseudo-science here.

Definition 1: A field that can't be can't make falsifiable predeictions. By this definitino, astrology is certainly a real science.

Definition 2: A field that makes false predictions. By this definition, most peoplle thing astrology is a pseudo-science.
I think "wall of text" referred to the fact that your post is one huge, impenetrable block of letters. No paragraphs, nothing to chunk it down to be readable.
Besides possible applications to solar power, what else can this do?
Here's Gartner's prediction of Android going from 2% to 14% by 2012: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139026/Android_to_gr...

There may be as many as 40(!) phones coming out in 2010.
One issue is the vocabulary of the word equivilent.

With poloynomial time problem reductions (which is what is usually used with showig a problem is NP complete, though I too haven't read the paper) equivilent just means something like "an exact solution in A translates to an exact solution in B." Unfortunatly, in general, an approxmimate solution to A doens't translate to an approxmiate solution to B.

Note: This part is me really guessing so please don't take it at face falue.

If I had to guess, I'd say that this is like densest subgraph in the sense that:

The mortgages are the nodes.

High correlation --> Edge connections.

So there might be a straightforward translation of approxmiate solutions. Like I said, just a guess.
> However, this advantage might be significant when it comes to games some of which have a tendency to push whatever hardware they are on.

This doesn't line up with the experience in desktop software where the the PC dominates gaming despite having a multitude of difference hardware environments.
One thing that upsets a lot of my friends (with no military background) is the difference between the military and civilian uses of the word "plan". To the military, plan literally means, make a plan. To a civilian to plan implies an intent to do something. So when the media reports that the military is drawing up plans to do X, they freak out.
Is your design documented? Is the implementation documented? If so, promote your current two guys to team leaders, hire some kick-ass programmers to finish the job. Pay a substantial incentive for hitting a mutually agreed deadline.

Oh, by the way, do you have a business plan? One with dates, budgets, revenue targets? If so, pull numbers out of that, do a discounted cash-flow analysis and a big chunk of that is your development budget. It's either doable or not.

If you have no documentation, no business plan, then you have nothing, just a dream morphing into a nightmare.
He only sold the voting rights associated with the shares in that transaction.
Well, that, and they're not very practical. They're big targets, expensive, and don't provide any real advantages in modern combat.

Sarcos corporation developed hydraulically actuated arms with full haptic force-feedback interfaces.

http://www.sarcos.com/teleop_videos.html

I especially like the little video of the large-size arm casually holding an anvil like it's a mug!

If you want mecha, you could do a full-body haptic harness with such existing technology. Make the mecha big enough so that it could contain the pilot and keep his head's orientation the same as the mecha's, and the pilot's own inner ear becomes your dynamic stabilizer!

If you want to build a smaller mecha, immobilize the head/neck and put the harness in the belly. It would still have mobility like someone wearing full plate armor.
Call me a pessimist, but when I see such a huge amount of money being donated - I can't help but wonder how it's meant to trickle down to the people, how it's made sure the people know how to manage it well, etc.

I guess details like this are too complex to go through in a general news article.
I was thinking of shared hosting for all those little web sites too. They must add up to a lot of power/cooling
In a way he did make wealth by increasing the market's efficiency no?
This comment is undervalued, a lot of times people don't necessarily know what "if I just get 1% of the market" really means because they haven't gathered any data
Ok, so basically the system wasn't really set up to deal with this strange asset. Because if I sell a put option (which means I may be required to buy shares later on), my brokerage is definitely going to enforce margin requirements to make sure I can afford those shares if things don't go my way.
Another problem is that a former Fed chairman should know how to break up the banks instead of simply saying 'break up the banks'. There's already a clearly defined line in which to break up each bank. It's called the Chinese wall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall#Finance

However, by converting the major investment banks to bank holding companies, Paulson basically got rid of this division. There should be risk-taking investment sides of large investment firms which do not have the luxury of being bailed out (i.e., people who trade CDSs, etc.), but equally there should be large commercial banks that form the backbone of our financial industry and provide the largest channels of liquidity. And these two sides of the company (buy side and sell side) should always be separate companies.

But obviously there need to be people with actual investment banking experience or who know enough of how the industry works, but also have an interest (which to most financiers would appear highly irrational) in fairness for the general public.

Such people just don't exist yet. Hopefully in the future they will tho. Anyhoo.
Well, I am glad Kamen decided to fall back to his core competency.
Ask HN: Who started the "removal of the last vowel" trend?
Many web start-ups drop the last vowel in their name, I assume mostly because of domain availability. For example flickr.com and tumblr.com, amongst others. What were the first companies that sparked this trend?
Ask HN: What bothers you most about being a NYC startup?
Obviously question only applies to New York based companies.
Basecamp, sure.

But I think the best example is a customer support ticketing system. This is pretty much an attempt to record email conversations in a structured way and be able to attach files to them.