skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how many other exceptional Antiquity works we don't have?

Well, as my music history lecturer pointed out, we've lost just about one hundred percent of ancient Greek and Roman music. There's not enough left to fill half an hour.

Given that the Greeks and Romans left behind a lot of fascinating writing about music, and that the music was apparently a central part of ancient Greek drama, this is a really big loss.
Aye, and don't forget the loss of the Library at Alexandria...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_at_Alexandria
The legal--or even common--definition of "fault" isn't at stake here. The fact of the matter is that they've got mountains of data that say that if some "random crazy fluke thing" happened to you, then you're more likely to have it happen again. Because that's what the data tells them. Heck, it could be that you just live in an area where people drive like crap.

Look at it this way: let's pretend an accident (regardless of fault) actually lowered the chances of a subsequent accident (maybe you're scared into good driving), and the longer you drove without an accident, the more likely you are to have one (maybe you become complacent or something). In this situation, your rates would go down when you got in an accident. Because it's not that they're trying to punish you, but rather they're trying to just charge based on the X% chance you're going to be in an accident, plus Y% overhead/profit.
Looking at near-term medical prospects for increased longevity
I clarified my point above: forking MySQL will not solve the "GPL-in-the-hands-of-Oracle-salesmen" problem. Any forks will still be bound by MySQL's original terms, which in practice amounted to "You need to pay us if you ever ask us about the license, particularly if you are a rich company, unless you bring a lawyer to argue with us." Keep in mind that Oracle salesmen are 100 times better at it than MySQL salesmen.

My broader point is really about the problems of GPL in the real world, not open source in general. I am a huge fan of BSD/MIT/Apache, and thankfully a lot of contributors these days seem to like those licenses.

I have always viewed open source contributions as a form of charity. GPL is a highly encumbered form of charity (it is still charity, but think of charities tied closely to particular religious points of view). BSD/MIT/Apache is much more freely and liberally given and embody a generosity of spirit ("My charity recipients do not need to follow my religion"). My philosophical preference is the latter.
It seems that the GPL licenses are the most common licenses: http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss/licenses/

I don't know whether it's actually true, but I find it surprising. It sounds like Black Duck Software runs some weird web crawler that collects license data continuously.
Where does the dozen come from? There's only Google Frame plugin.
Thought that might be the case but couldn't find it on any other "Deck" ad sites.

Interesting
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What Gmail needs is an optional rolling deletion policy. When your mail gets to the ~7GB limit Gmail just deletes the oldest mail to stay within the limit. It could suggest you turn on this feature when you reach your limit.

MythTV does this when you fill your hard drive up with TV shows. It's much better than refusing the accept any new data,
cool! but... I'd like someone with more knowledge than I have to comment about the security aspects of this. It seems to me like this would open me to the general dangers and insecurities of the web browser, and to be completely honest, my knowledge of security in that area consists of "don't have other tabs/windows open when you do something important" and when writing CGIs, only accept data in the format you accept.

So, for example, how could this be hardened against something like this? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=812482
Yes, but sometimes free really sucks.

In general, the free things that are good still require some sort of commitment. Money is just one of the most fungible sorts of commitment.
We don't even know when it was destroyed.
http://sup.rubyforge.org/
> There are probably more action figures of Godzilla in existence today than there ever were copies of Plato's works.

And plastic doesn't break down at nearly the same rate as parchment or papyrus.

You make good points.
"Other factors he [Craig Newmark] cites are consistency of down-to-earth values, customer service and simplicity."
To me, those go away if they start charging for posts.

I'd like you to explain that one. Lots of companies charge money and have exactly those qualities.
"..anyone interested in the intersection of science fiction, Catholicism, and the Church functioning as external storage for the memory of the human race.."

Another recommendation: the Coalescent-Exultant-Transcendant trilogy by Stephen Baxter.
Here's the real link:

http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/09/29/yui-3-0-0/
No, we are not selling behavioral targeting data - or any other data - about our visitors to anyone.

Our Product Blog (which is referenced in the screenshot) is hosted on Typepad.

It looks like Typepad injects javascript from Quantcast and cdn.media6degrees.com at the bottom of Typepad-hosted pages. This appears to be related to Typepad's internal analytics reporting. More info here: http://support.typepad.com/cgi-bin/typepad.cfg/php/enduser/s...

Check out some other Typepad hosted blogs (http://www.avc.com, for example) and you'll see the same code. In fact, I can't seem to find a Typepad-powered blog that doesn't have this code. Here's a long list: http://featured.typepad.com

This code appears to be what Ghostery is picking up and calling out.
Comments: Size Does Matter
The premise of it is based on making money

That's not what I read it as. I think the key paragraph is:

Money creates a sort of friction. In the digital economy, magical things can happen when there is no friction. You can scale to infinity. On the other hand, sometimes you want friction.

Especially the last line. By charging a small amount, you remove the ability to scale to infinity. I would charge far less than a dollar per ad, though.
Awesome app.
Trying to thumb through PDFs hundreds of pages long has me thinking that it may finally be time for a 3GS.

In the meantime, any chance of a 'go to page' button?
Film producer Katz used fMRI brain scans to measure scariness of horror movie.
Virtualisation: It’s a Technology, not a Religion
I dropped out of high school at 16. You can still get into good colleges sans a high school diploma. (Though it's much more of a fluke to get into a top-tier school – but honestly, I wouldn't have had I graduated from my podunkville high school either.)

Like many things, a high school diploma is a check in a box. If you deviate from the standard path the onus is on you to demonstrate that you can still cross the bridges that are laid out before you: people will be skeptical by default. If you can make up for that with accomplishments far more impressive than walking across the stage at 18, nobody after you're 19 will care that you didn't.
Gotta agree with you on this one. It's amusing to look at the plots and note the bits that agree (or disagree) with your prejudices, but without some information about the variance this is nothing more than entertainment.
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FSF (and X Windows) freed me from DEC and Sun proprietary software long before anyone worried about Microsoft.
Unless there are very few Hindus using the site, in which case there could be (in the extreme) a single bad hindu-hindu match that skews everything.

We need error bars.
Akamai launches HD Network that delivers TV-like, HD-quality video online.
Must be cloud day - my local paragliding club has just been discussing this HG flight soaring the Burketown "Morning Glory":

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/glance/869276/surfing-with-a-tsun...

For those more generally interested in clouds, "The Could Spotters Guide" http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/cloudspotters-guide/ will turn you into a certifiable cloud nut. Highly recommended it.
How Prolog was used to develop Erlang
It's eerie for me to read that article; I am also a programmer that skipped high school and recently graduated from UC Berkeley.

As far as skipping high school goes, I think I'd recommend it. I was immensely bored in school before I did, and I wasn't a good student beforehand. I got out of school several years early, and had more time to pursue things I was interested in. Now, I have a few more free years than I would have had otherwise, and because I worked through school, a financial cushion to take time off, travel, and potentially start a business.

For those interested in skipping high school, it's very easy, and anyone can do it. You should enroll at the local community college and ask the universities that you are interested in what you should take. Your professors will also be helpful in guiding your curriculum and helping you transfer. One thing to consider, though, is that some private schools like MIT, Stanford, and so on rarely accept transfer students. If you're interested in certain private schools, you should ask their admissions councilors for admissions statistics for transfers vs. freshman admits (and also general admissions advice). Good luck!
They were dead wrong the first time, yes, but they had the right symmetry. Watson was a much worse chemist, but he was prepared to recognize that symmetry.
"Before the crash, a passenger in the car had called 911 and told dispatchers that the accelerator was stuck and the car had reached 120 miles per hour (193 km per hour).

The recall will cover the Camry and Avalon sedans, the Prius hybrid, the Tacoma and Tundra pickup trucks and luxury Lexus models, the IS250 and the IS350 as well as the ES350."

Yikes that's tragic. I am not familiar with floormats in Toyotas and what they might look like in comparison to the accelerator pedal, but I was taught in driver's ed and at the racetrack where I run my car that should you ever run into a situation where your pedal gets stuck there are a few things you should do (which I know might not be apparent during a panic situation):

1) put your foot under the gas pedal and try to lift it up. never attempt to crawl down there to figure it out

2) turn off the ignition. you can safely brake and steer to safety without power. just takes a bit of force as you don't have power brakes/steering..

3) worst case scenario put it in neutral. engine will rev to hell without load and potentially get damaged but at least you can control the car safely and get to safety/pull over.
> The article is mixed

I tend to agree. The title put me off as well. The attitude that existence depends on the event being recorded is too relativist for my personal preference.

The central point, that civilizations tend to underrate their ancient predecessors because the historical record becomes degraded or misinterpreted is easy to agree with. However, the claim that our distant descendants won't have a clue what we really achieved is one-eyed. Five hundred years ago, Europeans had lost much knowledge of the history of European civilizations, and their knowledge of civilizations on other continents varied from total ignorance upwards. Five hundred years of progress in historical research and research methods, together with scientific progress in archaeology, geology, paleontology, climate science, medical science, etc., has allowed us to uncover much that we didn't know about the past, despite the fact that there is still much more that is lost forever. If our civilization suffers a catastrophic event, a future civilization may still be capable of uncovering many facts about us.

Given the amount of knowledge that archaeologists can deduce from fragments of pottery, fragments of human remains, fragments of ancient settlements, etc., and given that the products of nuclear technology can have very long half-lives, I think the author of the article draws a long bow in claiming that thousands of years hence there will be scant evidence that we had A-bombs in the 1940's.
How long before these app store policies start making their way into primary computing devices? It seems like a small jump from an iPhone to an Apple Tablet, and from there the subnotebook space is not too far out of reach.
Akamai probably now has the largest video distribution capacity on the internet.
I see what you are saying. I think the value of the swarm here is the rapidly adaptive nature of the system when there are so many agents. I don't really know what the overhead is for this approach compared to a normal virus scanner. I looked around on the Wake Forest CS site trying to find a paper describing their approach but I didn't come up with much except for a more detailed article and a list of publications by the researcher.

http://www.wfu.edu/wowf/2009/20090921.ants.html

http://www.cs.wfu.edu/~fulp/ewfpub.html#securityPublications

I imagine that the grad students mentioned in the article will be documenting this research as part of their theses. I am interested to see what they have to say, my company has looked at similar ideas in intrusion detection a little in the past.

EDIT: I found this paper at the PNNL site:

http://www.pnl.gov/main/publications/external/technical_repo...
I'm sure it's bad and all, but don't recalls happen for car models all the time? BMW "recalled" my car a bunch of times; what it meant was, if I didn't get the car to the shop for a free repair, I'd have a harder time suing them if the (I think it was the) gas pump caused the car to explode.
Depends on how crowded the workshop was. Small is good. The crypto class we're giving in Chicago in a couple weeks was deliberately limited to 20 people.

If by throwing away half the prospectives, the remaining half can learn faster or more comfortably, then I'd go with "better", not "just as good".
I think the story here was that it was 3.8 million cars. That's high enough to get it into the top 10 car recalls, of all time. Top is probably the 10+ million cruise control switch issue Ford had to recall on virtually all 1993+ cars.
Men-only RoR workshops are offensive because there's no reason to have a men-only RoR workshop.

Former-long-term-traveler-only RoR workshops are not offensive, though they are a bit silly.

Women-only RoR workshops are not offensive, and I don't think they're silly either.
"By algorithmically matching based on answers to questions, you must assume that those answers are meaningful. And meaningful means CONSISTENT. And people are NOT consistent."

In practice, the user base for OkCupid will change. And old users will reanswer questions sometimes too.

"Assuming you are even GETTING like thinkers, (which is tenuous at best) where is it written that like thinkers make great companions?"

That's not how it works. It's not as simple as "answer match questions and we hook you up with people who answered the same way". You can specify which answers your ideal match would give, even if those answers conflict with the answers you yourself give.

"most human beings make judgments based on appearances"

Which is why you upload photos to OkCupid instead of just using match percentages.
My point was that FSF achieved its maximal influence during the reign of Microsoft. And I argue that is not a coincidence.
Intel Arrandale. Cheaper Smaller Faster Better Laptops.
China is not a totalitarian country (or at least not anymore so than post-New Deal U.S.). Authoritarian!=Totalitarian.
"where is it written that like thinkers make great companions?"

OKCupid does not judge match percentage based on similar answers. For every question on the system it will ask for your answer and your ideal mate's answer. The system knows that some things are important to some people - but maybe not in reverse.
Good point. The money doesn't all go to negotiation, so standardized terms wouldn't eliminate all the cost.
Do I really have to spell this out for the HN audience? (Really annoyed by these comments and downvotes).

You don't really think chrome will be the only browser to do this? And also, you will be snooping for plugin compatibility just like people are doing today for browser compatibility.
This list is useless to me. I don't have the time to check out each one of them to see if it is interesting enough to add to my list of RSS feeds. What would be more useful is a short paragraph about the blog, what it covers, who its author is and why I should want to read it regularly. And limit it to 10. I don't have the patience for lists longer than 10.
Virtualization hardware is cheap so there's no major downside in over engineering. You'll probably be paying more for your office desks & chairs than a beefy virtualization hardware platform. Getting tangled up in commercial software licenses per VM is where things can get ugly.
4. People Know what they want

Clearly they don't - otherwise they wouldn't be on okcupid in the first place.
Uploading photos isn't what supposedly sets okcupid apart, right? They aren't using physical attractiveness in their matching algorithms and that is the point I was trying to make.

Your other point has been addressed above; people don't know what they want. Asking them what they want their "ideal match" to answer is as foolhardy as asking them to describe their "ideal mate" neuron by neuron.
I prefer cars with a clutch. You could use the clutch pedal if the accelerator gets stuck.
I am not sure what they mean by "HD" but this is actually slightly worse than the HD clips on youtube.
A book was worth the modern equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars -- that was what it cost to assemble the materials and then copy out the writing by hand. A scholar would count himself well-off if he owned two or three personal books.

Without detracting from your actual point, is that really tens of thousands of dollars' worth? Paper isn't all that hard to make, binding is just a matter of sewing, and copying a book out in longhand is, what, a few man-weeks' worth?
Please review my startup - Savendar.com - use password "forum"
The purpose of Savendar is to provide a place for people to find and share information about sales and promotions online. It's free for any user to post a sale, or leave comments. The difference between this site and existing competition is both the calendar view (savendar = savings calendar) and the description length limit (140 characters) making it easy to quickly browse the offers. Savendar is trying to build a community around this concept.

Obviously because it's still in beta there isn't an enormous catalog of offers, but enough to get an idea how it works.

This is a "loose" private beta. I don't want the whole world to see the site yet, but it's not locked down. You can access it directly here:

http://savendar.com/ui
Jeez. It's a regular party on here. ashen says hi.
The purpose of Savendar is to provide a place for people to find and share information about sales and promotions online. It's free for any user to post a sale, or leave comments. The difference between this site and existing competition is both the calendar view (savendar = savings calendar) and the description length limit (140 characters) making it easy to quickly browse the offers. Savendar is trying to build a community around this concept.

Obviously because it's still in beta there isn't an enormous catalog of offers, but enough to get an idea how it works.

This is a "loose" private beta. I don't want the whole world to see the site yet, but it's not locked down. You can access it directly here:

http://savendar.com/ui
I believe worth is what you can sell it for.
Until we can cure old age, I don't want to cure death. Prolonged old age can sometimes be a curse.
Also it currently only supports US and Canadian cities, but if the idea is well received it's a simple matter to add more countries and eventually languages...
Bill and Kim's Excellently-Posed Adventure
How to fix knockout/playoff tournament format
A nice hack for fixing the knockout tournament format.
The discussion on soccer (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850202) reminded me of this piece I wanted to write about for a long time.
I loved this. Don't understand why all the other top-level comments are so negative.
Announcing StartupToDo.com (Project X)
StartupToDo.com
You forget that copying a book out in longhand required the services of someone who was literate, which at one point was a rare skill. A few man-weeks of highly educated skilled labor was and is worth tens of thousands of dollars.
adaptive bitrate streaming

Ah yes, Akamai as always picking features that maximize the money you owe them.

For the vast majority of content (e.g. anything not live), constant bitrate is a terrible idea: it wastes bandwidth in low-action parts of the video and cripples quality in high-action parts of the video. This is why no major non-live video site uses constant bitrate; it's a terrible idea.

Of course, if you want to maximize user quality at all times, you want to maximize utilization of their connection and adapt the bitrate to the bandwidth available. But in reality, bandwidth is expensive, so nobody does this except in live streams.
The quality scales up and down randomly mid-clip. It goes to 720p at times, but can't seem to sustain it, and drops back down.
Great video. I love the NYU robot example!
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/medievalprices.html#BO...
Especially with the new comment sorting algorithm.
Given a photo by itself, or a photo plus output from a matching algorithm, the photo plus output from a matching algorithm gives more information. My point is that judging physical attractiveness is (mostly!) a solved problem on dating sites, so your main competitive advantage is attacking the other problems.

People do not, in fact, know what they want. But they can make educated guesses.
Then don't use it on your site?
When are they going to use P2P streaming download playback? Like bittorrent but for a youtube video? Or do they do that already?
Almost forgot the old days. Arguably pen writing on paper is not very productive for programming and clerk jobs (not necessarily for creative jobs). IMHO, tablets are still better for the applications which don't require too much user inputs.
I have a similar request, but for viewing .asm files as assembly code.

Perhaps the option to view unknown files as plaintext?
The secondary processor -- used mostly in smartphones --
also draws much less power than a more robust desktop or
notebook processor and so while it's running in the
background it doesn't drain the battery as fast: using just
the instant-on mode will provide up to two days of battery life;

I find this to be the most interesting feature of the new laptop. I wonder if this will start a trend where more and more laptops will feature a "mobile mode", where a very minimal os launches just sophisticated enough for a browser.

Considering this is how most people use their laptops anyway, instant-on and a minimal browser os could be very attractive.
A customer would have a chance of getting code written for free provided that he/she is willing to put in the effort to understanding the result.

More people might be willing to get others to write code for them since there's a chance it would be done for free.

Moreover, such a business model would have the beneficial effect of enhancing familiarity with and appreciation of programming.
That's what neutral does. I'm surprised 911 didn't say anything about turning off the ignition.