skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're conflating what I was saying with the idea that we should just say "it's complicated, everyone should give up," which is just silly. What I'm saying is that if we don't stand on the shoulders of giants, there is a limit to how far we can go. And specifically, I'm talking about subjects which are counterintuitive at a basic level, and are not well learned by informal discussion, but instead demand rigorous study. The pernicious thing about these subjects is that it is hard for an outsider to judge good from bad without doing the math or scientific experiments themselves. Most subjects thankfully don't fall into this category, but economics, quantum physics, a lot of medicine, and a lot of math do.

This, by the way, is precisely why it is so difficult for us to "rent" certain expertise when you need it: non-technical people have a hard time hiring a good programmer because they don't have a basis to judge programmers off of. As it turns out, the guy who can talk the most convincingly is often not the person who is the most knowledgeable or skilled.

An aside:

"Then you've chosen my second choice, living with it."

That's ridiculous. The idiomatic phrase "live with it" means that you put up with or endure it. It is pretty much the opposite of working to change something. By your logic, "be frustrated" would also be "living with it" as anything short of killing myself or becoming a hermit would. This is just being obtuse.
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GIMP will work but might require more effort than you want to spend.

Will anything in Open Office do this?
I wouldn't obfuscate the support or billing contact address for my company, but on my personal site? Or code documentation posted on the web? You betcha.

There's a big difference between pushing work on your customers and pushing work on people who don't know you and are trying to contact you the first time.
I took a hybrid course which is online but you meet with a real teacher once a week and my biggest problem was that we used blackboards software to do discussions and such and it was a terrible experience.

It made me wish I had just taken a normal course.
I agree (with the immediately previous).

Unless you're dealing with business executive types (that wouldn't notice if you were lying anyway), most of the time, to most of the people, a Java programmer and a C programmer and a Ruby programmer are all really just programmers.

They may have different ways of dealing with problems (the C programmer will lie awake trying to remember if he dropped a free(), while the Ruby programmer will stay up nights trying to figure out how to stop copying that list O(n) times), but the point is that they're still dealing with the same problems (it's always memory, isn't it?). The techniques may be different, but the questions and basic concepts never change.

In math, this is far from the case. In geometry, you never have to deal with infinity the same way you do in set theory. In fact, you don't even have to understand the idea of infinity the same way as a set theorist, and because of this, you _can't_ become a set theorist (unless you want to go back to undergrad and disappoint your parents _again_). It's like saying that a Java programmer doesn't need to understand that memory exists. Maybe they don't have to directly allocate and free it, but they still need to know how much they have and what happens when they use too much of it, and they can certainly recognize the same issues in any other language, even if they don't know how to fix them.

Mathematicians just don't have the same amount of common ground, and it's not even that they can't (because there's too much or something), it's that they don't really even want to (because they see it as boring or a waste of time (and in the case of analysis, they'd be right ;-)).
Depends what you mean. There's work around for graphic designers and musicians. The only job in art history is, umm, teaching art history.
Bikes get stolen pretty quickly here too, even with the vélib bikes readily available (and only about 20 euros for a year pass), if you leave them in the wrong places. A friend of mine's had two stolen in a month because he left them outside at night.
I agree, and though I wouldn't presume to place myself anywhere north of the meaty center of the bell curve, I'm nevertheless confident that I can see the Achilles Heel in his world view: he does not hold logic to be a mere tool - one that can be misused, and one with intrinsic limitations. [1]

Logic can be misused because it is only as good as one's starting assumptions. Moreover, even when you have some very nice sets of initial axioms, like those of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, logic necessarily leads you (if you can follow Gödel) to the conclusion that any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete.

And, it strikes me, that elementary arithmetic is small potatoes in in comparison to the grandiose goal of obviating faith through a logically-proven god.

This guy might be fun to have a beer with, though.

[1] I didn't come to this conclusion through the linked article alone. Watch the youtube video that ice_man posted, and you'll see it in the first 60 seconds of him talking. This video, by the way, is an excellent study in propaganda filmmaking techniques. (Watch all 3 parts.)
Dalvik has a pretty robust JNI implementation, and you can certainly put native code in an Android application. The NDK is getting more and more useful every release, and there's always building with the full distribution to have access to everything else. I've done it, and it's not that painful. I only worry about what might happen if Android starts showing up on other architectures. You'll have to pack in libraries for every single architecture.

I applaud Rubin's team for choosing Java as the high level library and UI implementation. While ObjC might be speedier on iPhone, it's a huge learning curve for someone that wants to write a UI-heavy app.
They can kill any entitlement we enact, so no

They can, but in practice they do not. In practice politicians who mention killing entitlements do not get elected. Politicians know this, and willingly set up "booby traps" -- entitlements that nobody will ever oppose yet cannot be sustained. That's because it gets them elected in the short term, and who cares what happens in the long term?

Of course war occurs, but that won't always be true, and we should strive to not need it.

We should strive to avoid the use of violence when it is not absolutely necessary. Unfortunately for your position, there has never, ever been a period when violence was not necessary somewhere in the world. Now perhaps by working to avoid each individual war we eventually get rid of war altogether, but I find that logic very tenuous. Looking at all the reasons for war, none of them have gone away or lessened at all over the course of thousands of years. In fact, from looking at history it appears there are times when armed conflict is the best moral choice a society can make.

So I find your position laudable, yet misguided both on its goals and means to achieve them. I also wish that no innocents would ever get harmed, but I wouldn't run up the debt in an effort to prevent this from happening. To me it seems misguided and doomed to a horrible failure involving just the thing you seek to avoid.
Ask HN: Automatic Translation, why not?
I'm currently working in a project which was the creation of a series of tools to improve language learning in an original way. I've recently incorpored in the project which was being executed a while ago.

The thing is, some of the people here are convinced that we could make a translator better than any of the translators in the market(google, babylon, etc...).

In my opinion the group doesn't have possibilities of succeding in the topic because of the lack of experience in the field and of course, because it's a really hard problem.

I would like to find material to show them that we're going to lose time and money trying to make something we can't. The approach to the problem is the sentence analysis, identify every element of the sentence being aware of the context in order to choose the correct tranlation of a word.

I've been reading the Stanford course of NLP but it doesn't especify why the approach mentioned above is discarded.
The Perfect Server - Ubuntu 9.10 [ISPConfig 3]
Wow, I wish I could upvote your comment twice.

Well, not really, but it just made my morning to see someone being so reasonable (as in your last sentences) instead of just yelling "He's a pretentious idiot who can't talk clearly".
How Critics Reviewed The Mac 2.0 In 1984
I see your point here and I mostly agree. However, as a software engineer I am constantly learning the "machinery underneath" and it frustrates me to see people make absolutely no attempt to learn even the basics. I mean "A piece of software" would suffice as a response to his question. I guess I know what my mechanic must feel when he deals with me.
Amazon gave me the equivalent of 10,000 free hours on a small EC2 instance when I was working on my last book. I used a few hours of this to prepare a custom AMI with all of the examples in my book set up with Ubuntu and all required infrastructure. I'll be able to keep updated book example AMIs in S3 forever now without it costing me any money out of pocket.

I also used some of this free time to do a 4 day machine learning run on all current English Wikipedia articles.

I will always create an AMI for all of my future books - awesome for readers to be able to have everything all set up. Also, they can clone my AMI, and have a fast start to deploying anything in my book that they want to use for their own projects.

For Amazon, this seems like viral marketing at its best :-)

I think that it was very savvy of Amazon to do this because I ended up writing a lot of material in the book on using Amazon AWS (Elastic MapReduce, S3, etc.). I now spend lots of time experimenting and blogging about AWS, and I ask my customers to host on AWS because I am now so used to using it.

I used to host customer work on VPSs or cheap dedicated servers, but now Amazon is definitely my deployment platform first choice and recommendation. (BTW, I host some of my own stuff on AppEngine because it is even cheaper, but the extra effort of dealing with AppEngine makes it not as attractive for customer projects.)
Good ol' John C. Dvorak:

San Francisco Examiner, John C. Dvorak, 19 Feb. 1984

The nature of the personal computer is simply not fully understood by companies like Apple (or anyone else for that matter). Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices.
If I display my email like the way this fellow detests, it obviously means I anticipate my readers to have enough reason to type an email address out!
With your method, you would have to get an email address after every word: in your own words "i would just read until the first space and append". At the first space ("bob "), you have no indication this is a valid prefix of an email address.

Secondly, I don't see how bob is a high value target. Someone who knows what spam is, and knows what a spam bot is, and knows they want to obfuscate it, is probably not someone who would make a purchase if they did receive spam.

I think that's one reason spam bot crawlers don't try that hard to obfuscate addresses: the recipients are of less value than those unobfuscated.
Install Your Free Programs All at Once on Windows 7 | TechJaws.com
I suspect you already know about this, but the google apps/domain service lets you add aliases and mailboxes painlessly.
Because we can still sort comment by just up voting. But removing down voting would slow down the sorting process, therefore less power is there to disrupt the organization of comments.

I'll agree this may be viewed as one disadvantage of the system, but it also means there is less power in the individual to to push down the comment. It would require a bunch of up votes all the other comments in order to push down a comment.

That's why letting people to only up vote is less capable of silencing an opposition or unpopular view.
Pretty much, you can't trust users to send DVD's back in the mailing envelopes in any kind of reliable state (at all, one to an envelope, with the barcode facing out the window, with the correct disc in the correct slipcover, with the disc in any slipcover) so they have assembly lines of people to tear the envelopes open, check the right DVD is in the right slipcover, and so forth.
One of the roles of a good teacher is to be able to look at the face and body language of a student and think "he's not getting it, I'll try another approach."

Another is to draw a student out, or egg someone on, like a conductor.

There's also the subtle communication and enthusiasm that races around a small group of engaged people, that I doubt we'll ever be able to replicate online.

Giant 101 classes taught in auditoriums by RAs are probably good for online teaching, but I would generally feel that you better be cutting me a break on my tuition if I never see my professors' eyeballs.

"Oh, you went to the U of Whatever? When? What major? Hey, I think I was your professor! What'd you think of that blackboard app? Yeah, pretty shitty. So hey, did you pass my class?"

Not saying we shouldn't, just that we'll lose something valuable if we go all in.
It's still far from trivial if you're doing this on millions of pages, especially as you'll have to sandbox the JS in some way, which may or may not subtly break things in other ways. I suspect the effort isn't worth it.
Email harvesters probably don't want to run javascript because then they would be open to traps (like infinite loops or other cpu consuming scripts) that could be targeted at them.
Yes, but that's like hiding behind your finger. It is so easy to de-obfuscate that it is just a matter of time.
I am less worried about receiving spam and more worried about not receiving good mails. Are you sure that Gmail's spam filter has zero false positives as well? If you are sure, how do you know? I can not check my spam folder manually because it contains thousands of mails.
Don't forget that it's a dynamic system. As more of the low-hanging fruit emails get picked by spam email harvesters, then there is more value in the harder to decode emails since they haven't been spammed. There is a tipping point where it would be "worth it" for someone to start to decode the harder other types of obfuscated emails.
A somewhat inverted approach (snail mail => web): www.zumbox.com
Ask HN: KDE vs. GNOME, which is better?
Which of these two do think is better, and what makes it better?
Sorry, omitted a word. A very bad person. Shutting down soneone's elses art because it includes, among several other things, a picture of one of your own, clearly used to make a social commentary about art, is shitty. Especailly since that particular Hirst piece is itself derivative if not an outright copy. No pretending.
Am I missing something? 1000 hrs /(24 hrs/day) = 41.67 days

And I don't think 'genetic algorithm' means what you think it means. All a GA does is try to find the max/min of some function. It is basically just hill climbing with a bit of randomness and a catchy name.

To find 'fishy' transactions you would use some sort of unsupervised machine learning algorithm to identify patterns/clusters in data (and that's starting an entirely different discussion).
Satire != ripped off.
Techcrunch vs Scammers (see blog post vs ads on the right)
This review doesn't touch on the lack of good desktop syncing software. I think people underestimate how big of a selling point this is for the iPhone just as it was for the original iPod. iTunes might not be the most fantastic app but for power users but it solves a lot of everyday problems for people who don't know any better. This phone, and basically all of the iPhone competitors, are lacking. They seem to be pitching this phone towards a more technically literate audience based on the advertising campaign so perhaps it won't matter much. I think the true "iPhone killer" is going to need to match or exceed iTunes and have a conduit to a market place for buying content to really catch on with a mainstream audience.
The computer history museum is wonderful. For all that our field of endeavor is (relatively) young, the museum makes it clear that we already have a rich, varied and illuminating history.
Better for what?

I like kde3 over gnome for assorted config options (like different backgrounds on each desktop) but maybe that makes no difference to others. On the other hand kde4 copies the most annoying ui features of Vista so I avoid using it.

These are also not the only windows and desktop managers, so why is the choice between those two?
Yes, and no. Certain areas of the city and Oakland would become further gentrified. There's a large demographic of folk who are happy riding BART but won't get on a bus or Muni.

How has car traffic been in SF this week without the bridge?
The way it works is through premium SMS billing. The $9.99 monthly subscription is just ONE text that is delivered to your phone every month that costs you $9.99. The provider can send you other texts during the month as a part of your subscription, these are billed at standard prices. When this industry began, the texts you received during the subscription were ALSO charged at $1 or so, so you can imagine what kind of revenues those companies were making in the beginning. But Mobile Marketing Association and the carriers seem to have gained some conscience, albeit very late.
Conquer Your Cravings
> the disadvantage of being out of touch with a laboratory and not able to read expensive scientific publications.

Not everyone can have a lab of their own, but is access to publications really that expensive? Here in Sweden, I just had to register for a course at the local university (which was free), and then get a computer account to have access to all the publications everyone else at the university have access to.
Unfortunately, Nokia paid the price for dancing with the carriers for too long. I do wonder if Apple is headed down the similar road with the iPhone (i.e. dramatic success that is eventually overtaken because of the entanglements of their required partners - carriers and media companies).
You are right on both counts. I mentally misplaced the comma somewhere, but the point that that machine is no more powerful that what I guess most people here have stacked around somewhere.

As for the generic algorithm, you are _also_ right.
Publication date of 1984: 1949. Bad writing is bad writing.
What does "Mac 2.0" in the title mean? AFAICT, the quotes in the article are about the very first 128k Macintosh.
"Pretty quickly" in this case was at least 15 years. COBOL was the main language of the early 80s and Java of the late 90s - and it's not as if C++ has disappeared either.
At one point I was checking it religiously but I've come to trust it after never finding a legitimate mail in my spam folder after a long period of time. I still check it from time to time, and again, I don't find legitimate mail tagged as spam.
Brilliant story and a lesson to all entrepreneurs. VC's are not always the endgame to your efforts going big.

An entrepreneur flourishes best under the most meek conditions.

This story is more of a real life example of the last HN article to make front page called "If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=912105
Cache sizing and memory latency are linked.

Up to a point, implementing larger caches can improve aggregate performance in higher-latency processor design configurations. Beyond a point, larger caches aren't performance- or cost-effective. Conversely, lower-latency processor designs mean that cache misses are less costly, and that L1 or particularly L2 caches can be smaller.

For a reasonable comparison of what changing the latencies within a design can provide, here is a LANL write-up from the Alpha microprocessor environment, and where Alpha EV7 had (for its time) low interprocessor and low memory latency and with toroidal processor links as compared with its Alpha EV68 predecessors and hierarchical or bus-based systems:

http://www.c3.lanl.gov/PAL/publications/papers/kerbyson02:EV...

Among the x86 designs, the Xeon Nehalem-class processors have substantially better latencies (around 27 ns and 54 ns remote) than previous generations of Xeon processors. And rather better than the Alpha latencies discussed in the LANL document. Which means the effects of different cache sizes or access patterns can change.

Branches, too, can play havoc with the instruction streams and with the efficacy of caching and of instruction decode. Branch often and performance can suffer. Highly pipelined designs can take bigger performance hits with branches.
If you are young, energetic, and college-educated with a solid background in an engineering discipline, there are jobs for the taking in the oil business.

The average age of an employee at an oil and gas E&P (exploration and production) company in 2009 is 55 years old. These are highly prized employees with experience and knowledge that is in short supply in the industry.

Over the next 25 years (through 2035), the global hydrocarbons industry is estimated to invest 22 TRILLION dollars of capital (2009 USD) to meet what is expected to be a doubling of world energy demand.

Do the math.

Computer scientists, chemical engineers, geophysicists, mechanical engineers, biologists, petroleum engineers, etc... It doesn't matter. You would be surprised at the voracious appetite of the global hydrocarbons industry for new technology and talent.

I'm obviously biased, being in the business myself. But, the next time you're at a college engineering job fair, spend a few minutes at the booths of the E&P companies. You may be intrigued.

There's no business like the oil business.
Didn't see this one coming and I'm not sure why. Brilliant move on Google's part. Did this get press anywhere and I just obliviously missed it?
some research projects that might be relevant (although not quite what you were thinking about):

statistical bug isolation:
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~liblit/pldi-2005/

CHESS - automated finding of concurrency bugs:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/chess/

you could start from there and traverse thru related work
Yes...a cautionary tale about giving too much weight to the Intelligence Quotient metric, and how it might lend a semblance of credibility to conservative agitprop dismissive of Darwin, the university system, and progressive federal expenditures. ;-)
Yes...for instance, I've always used Window Maker on Linux.