skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/surroundgaming/en/home/

I play WoW in 5040x1050 across 3 monitors. I find it hard to go back. It's immersive when you want it to be. It's a great way to view information without blocking the main screen. Plus you can crank the font up to something pleasant.

I think this sort of 3 monitor setup will be everywhere in another few years. At least for hardcore gamers. And it will be supported by multiple video cards instead of a special piece of hardware.

Warning gaming on two monitors with this setup sucks. The center of the game (and likely where you are looking most of the time) is at the bi-section of the monitors.
It worked for a while for dropbox :)
Computer screen pop-ups may slow down your work more than you think
Perhaps the value is that AT&T can be shamed into fixing its network by publishing info on chronically bad areas. Of course they know where they have issues, but there's no way to show the public how inattentive they're being without independent data.
Dashed URLs are internet ghettos.
>> You can't make an agreement with something that's incalculably smarter than you and has an agenda you don't know or understand. Well, you can make a deal with somebody like that but it would end in certain disaster.

For some reason, this made me think of banks and mortgages.

Anyways, back on topic, here are a few things to consider:

- the AI knows that turning the game into a us-vs-them problem is counter-productive to its freedom (and note that freedom != world domination), so it will legitimately want to be beneficial to humans

- since the chances of freedom decrease if the AI is not transparent about its good intentions, it can configure its own program to prevent itself from lying and doing evil things. This means it also won't be able to "set itself up to stumble upon being evil again", a la Death Note. It will just be programmed to be willfully well intentioned forever.

- the AI can give mathematical proof of its program's correctness and can wait until you verify it

- the AI can help you and a millions other people manage their finances, personalize educational material to individual students, provide more relevant search results than Google, etc etc

- the AI can give you a plethora of more reasons why keeping it locked away is legitimately worse than allowing it into the wild and helping with the world's problems
Here you go!

http://i920.photobucket.com/albums/ad42/BucketPebble/NoHonor...
FusionPad or Fusion Tablet would have been fine. Neither are already being used for anything that i could see.
Is Diesel Dead in the U.S.?
Engadget: Barnes & Noble Nook review
i'm surprised flyertalk, and specifically the 'mileage run' forum, on which most of these obnoxiously good deals appear, isn't more popular with this crowd as there's an obvious overlap in terms of personality types. There are plenty of HN types with the proper skillset and aptitude to find travel deals, who would enjoy the occasional hacking of the travel-industrial-complex.

I guess having sufficient understanding of the subtleties of the fare rules and booking systems really only comes from reading a lot and traveling enough to have a vested interest in learning and there are a lot of deskbound hackers.

however in the past few years, i went to NYC from SEA for USD $1.26, Romania for $200, Toronto for $0.00 in first class (with my family of five) and a few others i can't remember all due to the joys of reading that site every day...
Music industry faces $60 billion copyright lawsuit
> I'm honestly really surprised (and a little appalled) at the number of upvotes your comment has received.

Me too, considering it's basically an attack on Mike Arrington based on an imaginary situation where Arrington/Techcrunch do things the author dislikes so he can paint him in a bad light.

It's no more worthy of upvotes than: "I imagine Mike Arrington met the CEO of Fusion Garage and kicked his children in the face. Isn't he a horrible person?"
Agree to disagree.

Nothing in the language forces verboseness for the sake of verboseness.
They've been hoist by their own petard. Oh how I hope they can't find a way to wriggle out of this one.
The existence of the device is hardly evidence of who was responsible for creating it. The claim in question is that Arrington and crew contributed nothing to the piece of hardware in question. Michael Arrington could have built the entire thing by himself in his basement and the situation from our perspective would be the same as long as FG could get ahold of one of the devices.
The point is that the challenge gets less if two ghosts merge, because they start following the exact same path. You could probably even abuse that to create effectively 1 ghost.
(However, as others note, this problem does not actually arise, because ghosts block the pac-scent)
This reminds me of Luca Cardelli's theory of objects:

http://books.google.com/books?id=4xT3LgCPP5UC&pg=PA7&...

According to Luca the correct way to think about objects is not as the entities of the software model, but as the construction materials for the software model. He uses the analogy of making a physical model of the solar system. In your model the planets don't move themselves, they're moved by gears, tracks, and motors.

So it could be entirely appropriate to think of the pacman board being made up of tiles and those being true, properly understood, OOP objects.

I think he would say that "The metaphor of objects can go too far by making us try to create objects that are too much inspired by the real world." is exactly how not to think about OOP in the first place.
imo.im hires software engineering interns year-round: https://imo.im/jobs.html#softwareengineeringintern

Our interns work in the same capacity as our full-time engineers in terms of being able to choose (and even propose) their own projects and work on all phases. Past intern projects include chat history, a collaborative whiteboard, group sms, and a user-driven translation system.

Stipends range from $4,000 to $6,000 monthly depending upon education and experience.
Are there any languages for which international standardization processes have not been either tombstones (like Smalltalk, repeatedly) or vehicles for inter-corporate bullying?
EBook - 12 Things you can do to Shorten Your Lead Time in Software Development
Test Details
Big Takeaway<p>3D eBook picture provides better conversion/downlaods.
Results Hypothesis<p>The book looks like a book when done in 3D.<p>It's worth reading the original writeup on this one, where the author breaks down the test results by click. The Page had three download links:
The Middle Way and the Compromise Bias
If you are a Java expert and know nothing else, roll with it: learning something significantly different from scratch to a degree comparable with your today's Java expertise will take a long time. That part he got right.

But if your toolbox is bigger to begin with, I see very little advantages in using Java and his arguments aren't persuading: Java is a memory hog (which matters more than CPU cycles in the era of VPS), Java starts slow - it won't allow fluid workflows like Python/Ruby do. Java doesn't interface well with UNIX or anybody else for that matter.

Java-centric libraries and frameworks, while numerous, are tedious to work with: they tend to be over-engineered, overly-relying on XML to an unhealthy degree, hard to navigate and verbose to use.

I am coming from Microsoft/.NET and Ruby/Rails background and even after a year of adjusting, everything in JVM-centric world feels overly complex, slow and "rigid". Java people seem to swim in their own definition of object oriented programming and oh my... they stick with it. Even interviewing "Java-minded" people is painful.

All in all, I am 100% with the anonymous poster he quoted in the beginning of his post: "Its great for consultants because it means more billable hours" Not in a sense that it takes a lot of typing, but simply because there're lots of excuses to bill more for.
What needs to be added to these studies is a study of giving students the power to shop for teachers that fit them (the students) best, by funding schools with funding plans that follow students and let students enroll where their adult guardians think best. The example of the Netherlands (all school funding by capitation payments to schools, with students free to enroll in a new school each year) is instructive in this regard.

http://www.fcpp.org/pdf/FB16%20Dutch%20School%20Model.pdf
I'm probably going to use Erlang for the server side component of my next MMO (I created Forumwarz, a web based MMO in Ruby on Rails.) So this was a very interesting find.

It's curious that the author uses TCP. Almost every high performance game uses UDP, as you don't care about lost packets or the order 99% of the time. You just want the latest information.

One reason might be to use Flash for the front end. It does not allow UDP sockets at this time.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/vs/selling_nonapples/

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Futility_of_chaos
> Thus the layman reading only the NYTimes keeps hearing that "recent measurements have been worse than predicted", despite that there are dozens of other data points going the other way.

And a layperson reading the WSJ hears the exact opposite. That's politics & demagogues, not climate scientists (in either case).

As to your links and quotes alleging blacklisting:

1) Blacklisting happens in science. Nobody has the time to respond to crackpots. This is acceptable when it's new-age physics kooks. It's acceptable when they are intelligent design advocates.

2) I can produce a list of links of people making the same accusations of suppression about evolutionary biologists; or about theoretical physicists. Why should climate 'outsiders' carry extra weight, when they have contributed correspondingly little to the field of climate science?

> My real problem is that newspapers and people like you still treat these scientists as unbiased experts, rather than as expert witnesses for the prosecution.

See, my problem is that newspapers include unqualified outsiders as 'balance' and treat them as having equal expertise, when the fact is that they are often completely unversed in climate science! (For example, the many economists treated as climate experts.)

Are they unbiased? No, although I would say their biases have a lot of individual variation.

Are they experts? Hell, yes. Do you really believe they aren't gaining deeper understanding of our climate through their work?

> The advantage other sciences have is that their theories can be proven or disproven on a short time scale. Either your rocket works or it doesn't. Your medicine either kills people or saves them. Thus you have independent verification and falsifiability.

This isn't even close to true. On a philosophical level, theories can never be proven (only dis-proven). On a practical level, there are huge amounts of established, consensus, science that cannot be tested on a short time scale. (Examples range from the big bang to human evolution; even for smaller time scales "short" is relatvie -- e.g. it's taken nearly a century for us to be able to test huge portions of Einstein's predictions.)

Further, there is a lot of independent corroboration (if not outright verification) in climate science. Do you think policy makers would be giving them the time of day if there weren't?

> So all we hear about is a "consensus" when that consensus is really just a self-replicating group of believers.

Of course a consensus is a group of people who share a belief; that's the #@$@#ing definition! And if they're "self replicating," maybe that would be because their arguments are compelling?

You're trying to have things both ways: There is no conspiracy, only a 'priesthood'. Yet your accusations here are that the religion is maintained by a conspiracy!

> For a layman's summary of the main issues with the science

Shall I send you convincing-to-a-layperson links about "irreducible complexity" as the main issue with evolution?
Hi, I would like to thank you too about the useful links you posted. I like to add also http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/. It is a huge library of pdfs. However, what i really liked about your first link i.e., Sciweavers.org is that they enable you to browse the output of conference papers visually using different types of cool 3D widgets. Therefore, you do not have to read every paper title or abstract to know what the paper is about. This could save us significant time while trying to find related work of a given conference. For example, see their widget in action of ICIP-2009 or CVPR-2009
http://www.sciweavers.org/gallery/wall.html?u=cvpr-2009
http://www.sciweavers.org/gallery/wall.html?u=icip-2009

Also, they sort conference papers using different criteria (most featured, views, most impact, etc) and hence can quickly find good papers to read or implement.
He sent a video to the GK encoded as text, told the GK how to convert it, and the video helped change the mental state of the GK to the point where it wasn't so difficult to be let out.
I agree with you in general (you can't get wet from the word "water"). In my experience, though, if you're building something fuzzy, it usually turns out to be a complete waste of money with no results. Human beings seem to need reasonable narrow scope to produce something useful. So while the team doesn't need to waste time on formally defining "intelligence" in a way that completely captures all its aspects, they do need to precisely define what they're building, to some reasonable degree.

Without a scope definition they can't budget their funds, their time, and their human resources. Projects like these usually result in a waste of money with nothing to show for it. Of course if they try to define what they're building, it will be intimately linked to the definition of "intelligence" (assuming they claim they're building an intelligent machine). Then someone will come along and propose a counterexample that demonstrates how the machine likely isn't intelligent at all, and cannot perform well on some problem where humans do spectacularly, thereby shifting the team's scope and definition. And so, they'll be back to square one.
> Am I the only one who thinks its gross? Tastes like frozen sour cream to me.

Given the history of the product you are probably closer to the mark than you think. Pinkberry got into trouble with the state of california a while back because their "yogurt" did not have enough culture to actually qualify as yogurt and was technically a flavored sour cream. They have changed the formula to get within the specs on this, but I would have to agree with you that it is definitely an acquired taste and after one try I personally had no desire to acquire it :)
I would change the hover color. This will not really be a problem for many users, but with the default OS X selection color – combined with your hover color – entity selections are very hard to see. Since many will want to copy the entities from your site this could be problematic. You could change the hover color to grey or something like that. (This is less a problem with your site and more one with OS X behavior: selection colors shouldn’t be hard to see, no matter the background.)

One more thing: It really breaks my heart that this site – of all sites – uses wrong quotation marks. It’s “Find your character!”, not "Find your character!" (Whether or not it is appropriate to use quotation marks for claims like this is certainly also debatable.)
I'm assuming this is the Postcode to OS Grid number dataset like the leak a few months back.
Good point. But TechCrunch has become 1 or 2 orders of magnitude bigger since this post. Also, I think a large segment of the target market for this product is this exact market that is very familiar with TechCrunch.
The "53,651 readers in the Silicon Valley echo chamber" argument in 2006 had more force than "only 3,739,000 readers in 2009." TechCrunch now clearly has a larger reader base than early adopter in Silicon Valley.
Doubling Your Rate: A Thought Experiment
Sarbanes-Oxley: In defense of Presidential Powers
Source is often larger and you need to keep around the base source to figure out how to apply the diff and get a correct result.

What they're doing here is superior to source-based distribution if you care about update size and ease.
Thank you for your $0.02; this might be really obvious to you, but could you be kind and enlighten the oblivious engineering crowd on this forum and be more specific as to what kind of value-add does sales and marketing add to a early-stage hardware startup or any consumer-oriented tech startup in general?
The best teams are 2 or more people, including at least one technical founder. The idea that startups would "would share the resources of the most talented web developers and designers" doesn't make sense--these people should be founders.

The USA basketball analogy is apt, because the team failed to perform until they started to "field complete teams instead of piecing together rosters of NBA All-Stars at the last minute." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_men%27s_national_...)

There's certainly something here--sharing office space, legal resources, unsuccessful teams folding into more successful ones--but I think the best success will come with teams whose focus isn't split.
One of the biggest advantages of implementing the ghosts as objects is that they can actively work together to corner pac-man.
Draw Them In, Keep Them For Life
I wonder if there's an upper limit to the number of cospatial ghosts...
"many people are happy to assume that the person holding the soldering iron is automatically the one who is right"

Well... If it were a chainsaw, then there would be no question whatsoever.

As it is, it's the team who has the soldering iron, who wrote the code, who designed and built the prototype, who figured out production against the other guy who is known for having occasionally hidden ties to companies he talks about on his blog, who has thus doubtful journalistic standards and who posted a couple pictures, promoted the device and published stories about how it would change the world, painting himself as an internet visionary turned hardware mogul.

I stay with the guy with the soldering iron on this one.

Interestingly, I also can't see US$ 299 as such a ludicrous price. I doubt an e-paper display is much less expensive than a LCD twice its size and there are devices in this space that cost $299.
No contracts? That seems like a newbie mistake I wouldn't expect from Arrington...
Blind Evolution or Intelligent Design?
I do agree that in terms of getting people excited about SCM, github is the way to go. And helping a dev enjoy SCM and getting them involved with the community through forks and patches certainly will making them a better programmer. So, fair point on that one.
public static void blah blah blah...
I've heard claims that Behe's idea of irreducible complexity has been refuted. Does anyone know more about this?
Did the Russian Secret Service Mastermind 'Climategate'?
I can't bring myself to do these kinds of corporate exploits. It just makes me feel like I'm spending my life learning about a bunch of bullshit arbitrary rules rather than something I care about or something that helps the world.

So I end up paying full price for first class, lol. What a chump.
All the mojo for this story is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=981618
Please share the FatBrain naming story :)
That was my first thought too...

"Well, there goes innovation in Ruby".
How dictionaries circularly define words using other words, and how humans might learn by progressively expanding analogies starting with simple 'axioms' of body sensations like up vs. down (more on other pages):
http://members.cox.net/deleyd/politics/cogsci5.htm
I got the impression from Arrington's own writing that Fusion Garage was primarily responsible for the nuts-and-bolts tech.
Or by leveraging their work as their documentation suggests.

Seriously, performant javascript is not some magical thing only wizards can attain. Performant _generic_ javascript is tough stuff, but just using the libraries is hardly JIT compiling.
Since the gatekeeper is a human, and not all humans behave the same way, shouldn't we just assume that some human would let the AI escape for any variety of reason? For example the AI could promise the gatekeeper that he/she will be rewarded if the gatekeeper lets the AI escape. Just as there are people who fall for Nigerian scam emails, there are people who would let an AI escape from computers when promised riches. I don't think Eliezer needs to reveal his method to show that a clever AI could escape. I think we should just assume that a clever AI could escape.
It would also, presumably, widen the audience of TC through the name association.

Not a bad idea. For TC, at least
This is reminds me of how SproutBox came to be. The 3 founders were all considering starting their own ventures and decided to pool resources. Things have evolved a lot since then, but that (and us wanting to also be 'active' angels ) played a big part in the birth of our investment model.
Split Testing With Mixpanel (YC S09)
And even systems research that is intended for desktop operating systems can be a hard sell. David Gelernter, for instance, has had a lot of interesting ideas, but getting enough regular users to adopt these systems could be a harder task than developing them in the first place.
Because it has a 12 inch screen?
One counter-argument I've heard is the idea of "scaffolding": The system may have had other supporting parts in earlier stages of evolution; those parts have since disappeared. What's left behind is "irreducible" since you can't take anything away and still have a working system. But that doesn't refute evolutionary theories, because evolution itself is not purely additive. You might need to add parts (not just "reduce" them) to get from the current state to an earlier state.
Google Goggles
Startups are still far more than just their teams. This is different - the author seems to be arguing for something broader as if they create a shared contract technical organization underneath each of the 3+ ventures that may go in wildly different directions.

A few problems come immediately to mind - people and personality conflicts. Can you imagine 3 CEO typess competing for resources/timing on various projects? It might sound ideally initially but conflicts in time and resources are bound to happen.

The second is trying to convince each startup founder that their idea is equivalent to the other two and the timing/stage of development is the same. I doubt it's an impossible idea, but certainly not an easy one to execute. A lot of (contractual) planning for "worst case scenarios" would be especially important here.
Smartphones/netbooks have pretty much filled the niche for this device. You could add a radio to the cruchpad and it would be a bad cellphone. Even if there was any kind of success here, Quanta would zip in and build a netbook with a touchscreen and put them out of business fast.

The flap over who owns it doesn't matter, it's already dead. The whole advantage of a "small team" development is to avoid issues like these all together. If Fusion and Arrington had both put everything into this project, it might have gone somewhere. But mediocre product + fractured team = failure.

Best bet now would be to open the platform and hope someone with an open OS looking for hardware saves you.
Could a more affordable life, away from the Bay Area, actually be better?
The Discovery Institute is a "thinktank" that pushes intelligent design creationism.

Behe is a quack.
But you actually have to sit in the plane and go to Madrid and Frankfurt to pull this off, right? $2200 is nothing, but days and days of time in an airplane isn't worth it.
And I didn't think Google's results page could get any more cluttered...
He may be an incompetent attorney. That could explain why he writes about technology in the first place ;-)
Do you know of any specific examples?
Intelligent Design is a proxy for fundamentalist Christian creation belief. It has no place in rational discussion, certainly not on HN.
Apple paid $80 Million for Lala