skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found it surprising how good a job this does with topics you wouldn't normally associate with images. For example, c++: http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/html?query=c%2B%2B . Considering that I had no idea what images to expect for this kind of query, I think the selection presented (book covers, IDEs, console windows, flowcharts, and job market graphs) are quite suitable.
Confidence in entrepreneurship is a delicate balance. You need the drive and determination to make things happen and overcome obstacles. On the other hand you can't have so much hubris that you ignore all input and refuse to adjust.

Sorry, but I think there's a flip side to this post that is missing. There is such thing as a "really bad idea". Combine that with all the other factors which are beyond your control and all the confidence in the world won't save you.

Humility is just as important as confidence IMO.
I like the voice. Professional marketing voice sounds unnatural for a tech video. I much prefer a voice that sounds like someone who is involved with the product.
I'm not sure if that information is new.
Anyway, creative idea. I wonder if I can realise that for vim, too.
I agree in theory, but not so much in practice. You have people like Chris Ferguson who approach it this way, and it is what the game is at its core, but it's not the way most players approach it.

While I understand the math (I got into playing poker seriously because of an interest in botting -- I found the game more interesting than the programming), I don't approach it from a game theory perspective whatsoever. I run my outs and the pot odds in my head, think about how a win or a loss on a hand will impact me, but I have to weigh that against my instincts and make a decision. My instincts will typically win out.

Even online, you can get very successful reads on people, and you can control the action by learning how the players respond. Because of the nature of online poker -- many, many more hands than in real life, and many more players -- I tend to believe you actually get more inside your opponents' heads (compared to playing in real life), not less, as most people tend to assume.

To respond to the GP, I find online poker fun because it's challenging. There's a constant stream of new opponents, each one with different strategies. For me, it's fun in the same way reverse-engineering is; I have a limited set of information and need to guess the next step before it's taken. The quicker I can get inside the player's head, the quicker I can turn their strategies around on them and either suck them out on my big hands or push them off a small pot with a well-placed bluff.
Trademark is OK -- but ownership should be unbiased 
It's appropriate for Drupal to have a trademark policy to protect it from being used to describe products/companies that are not really Drupal.

The trouble is that Dries should not own and protect the trademark as an individual. He has a huge conflict of interest -- the first license he granted for a commercial use was to his own company, Acquia, to create DrupalGardens.com.

The trademark should be owned and enforced by a non-profit, such as the Drupal Association, which will have in its charter the legal requirement that it treat individuals and companies even handedly. Whatever policy the non-profit established for commercial use would be public (Dries does not list his criteria for granting commercial licenses) and benefit the Drupal project as a whole, not an individual.

For six years, before Dries announced he owned the trademark, the name Drupal was freely used by many companies and individuals. This fostered great growth in the project.

If Dries has established a restrictive trademark and license policy from day one, we would not have an open source Drupal movement right now -- the perception that Drupal was not controlled or owned by anyone for their commercial benefit was vital to gaining the participation of tens of thousands of developers.

It is thanks to the work of these tens of thousands of people that the name "Drupal" has value, and a trademark is worth enforcing. That value should be the property of the community, not one person.

I would urge anyone planning on contesting the policy to seek legal representation from an organization such as Electronic Freedom Foundation -- getting your trademark application for a derivative of Drupal denied, and then not having a legal team to fight the decision, only establishes further precedent that the trademark has been properly claimed by Dries.
> get politics the hell out of our science. We need to rethink the standards we hold science to in the modern world

If only this could also apply to medical research / health science!
Point taken. But the opposition (in any game) plays a critical role in disrupting safe methodology and keeping data/rules honest.

Note IPCC reports have substantially lowered earlier predictions and findings have more weight. The science is better for the effort to "prove it."
"Machine Learning: An Algorithmic Perspective" by Stephen Marsland is very good if you want to see the ideas in code and if you're not mathematically ready for hastie or bishop.

http://seat.massey.ac.nz/personal/s.r.marsland/MLBook.html
it absolutely made sense to provide government
assistance to GM, even though GM was run incorrectly,
because of the broader reaching effects of letting
it fall at that time

What if the gov just let GM collapse. And instead of giving free money to GM, gave the same money to the laidoff workers to go back to school or find another(hopefully more sustainable) job.
I'm curious, what kinds of application ideas exist that are possible on quantum computers that aren't on regular computers?
Bloosky Acquires Tracking202
My favorite comment ...

The used car salesmen must be pleased that a
lower form of life has been identified.
Factoring is possible in polynomial time.
Once you start playing "the ends justify the means," you're not doing science anymore.
If time is not a constraining factor, then none (Turing-completeness).

Applications requiring much parallelism, like NP-complete problems, may be more amenable to being solved by quantum computers in the future.
You can use sphinx xmlpipe or xmlpipe2 datasource [http://www.sphinxsearch.com/docs/current.html#xmlpipe2] and get rid of the middle-man (MySQL).
Hey Adam, Immad from Heyzap. Would be good to talk sometime about all things flash. My email is Immad (AT) Heyzap
I personally really like Pingdom. It's simple to setup and pretty cheap.
See, I've heard this before. But it really doesn't mean anything to most people. The only concrete example I can think of is cracking modern encryption.

Does anybody have any ideas that would be useful to everyday life? I'm 100% sure that there are a ton.
China Leaps to Second Spot in Global Science
Breaking RSA, and most (all?) current forms of crypto used on the 'net.
Hackers leak e-mails, stoke climate debate
I'm struck that code/data openness is an interesting point in the history of science. On one hand, how can we be in 2009 and still be having this argument? Most fields of science don't require this dissemination. On the other hand, it's amazing the species has progressed to the cusp, where we realize baring your soul to the criticism of all benefits everyone. The transparent society cometh.
I'm inclined to agree. Trade secret would be one of the compelling objections I left room for in my my comment.
Ouch! But given the way people are getting excited about HTML 5, most browsers will implement it... There is no hard and fast rule that something will be in a browser only if its part of the spec. Come to think about it, there is not W3C spec for Javascript -- Imagine a web app without JS!
These are uses I recall from a recent lecture on QC:

Using "adiabatic" qbits (not like this one), it seems you can solve any problem that can be structured as a low energy state. Examples of these are: PCB track routing, city planning, some kinds of pattern matching search in large datasets such as gene maps. There are possible applications to AI because it can efficiently update a neural network or a Bayes net.

Also (not sure what kind of qbits are best for this) you should be able to simulate a quantum-influenced process, such as protein folding, one for one rather than via exhaustive calculation on supercomputers.

Factoring crypto is often cited, but to be honest it's a very boring application compared to the many others.
Contrary to the article, I don't think node.js uses Python at all. (Apart from the build system.)
> Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are creations of regulation as was the dependence of financial institutions on them, which caused said financial institutions to fail when Fannie/Freddie went down

Huh? Am I missing something? Regulation is a rule (or law). Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). That would be like saying the Small Business Administration is business regulation. Also, to my knowledge Fannie and Freddie did not fail. I think we would have noticed considering they cover trillions of dollars worth of mortgages.
Cute.

IBM had something very similar for OS/2 back in 90s ("Interface Builder" ?), drag-drop, events, conditionals, script-like language, etc. Needless to say no one ever used it for any serious projects. It is trivial for simple cases and it was rather limiting for anything as complex as your average real world project.
"rare earth" and "cheap" sound a bit contradictory.
LambdaCube: a 3D rendering engine entirely written in Haskell
The issue would be that the intelligent design people are playing the game of politics while evolutionary biologists are playing the game of science. (This should be mostly uncontroversial, I hope ...)

This may or may not be the exact same situation with climate science, but I don't think think many would dispute that at least a significant portion the opposition to global warming is purely political.

At that point, what paths are left besides losing the game or entering the politics/PR arena as well? The science has suffered as a result, not been strengthened; the most damning excerpts are evidence enough of that.
I agree, this was the eye opener for me. When it comes to data mining, I'll take practise over theory any day.

Diving directly into actual code samples, and a large plus for using Python, this book is one of the few I actually keep on my desk.
Jobs said the same thing, but in that unmistakably his, much terser style. "Stay hungry, stay foolish."

Of course, not too literally: not as hungry and foolish as a savant hunting for prey. We're talking about markets, too. Observe the heavy brain lifting going on in entrepreneurship at the same time. One half of the entrepreneurs brain is, and needs to be hungry and foolish; the other so ruthlessly rational, perpetually self-scrutinizing, plus balancing and aligning private goals with public demand. All of this is neither literally the outcome of nor a requirement for "hungriness" or "foolishness".
I just tried it; it works.

Very nice; thanks
I do assume that. Linux rapidly caught up with the BSDs despite their huge head start, which demonstrates the industry does have a critical mass of developers who are willing to contribute their work rather than go through the pain of tivoization or building from scratch.
DVB transponders
http://kbeezie.com/view/using-python-nginx-passenger/
Right, thats why I'm saying leave all the IE rendering engine bits and pieces, but the IE UI itself is built on webkit. Didn't they lift some BSD networking code for NT back in the day? So clearly they have no problem with doing it :-) (indeed its encouraged by the license). And developers the world over would celebrate!
I'm not sure where means/ends comes from.

My point was that politicization alone accounts for the tone and content of the internal correspondence on display, regardless of the soundness of the actual science.
Government aid of GM was not a one-to-one benefit, as it may have appeared on the surface. If GM failed the effects would not have been limited directly to their workers. Unfortunately, thousands of dealerships rely on the viability of General Motors. That includes salespersons up to managers and owners. It also includes the parts industry which is sizeable itself, so we're talking many thousands of jobs indirectly connected to GM additionally lost. Worse still, would have been the timing. A big reason the credit markets were freezing up and the stock market was tanking was psychological - people thought things would get worse. Think about a stock market crash, which is essentially everyone selling and nobody buying. The selloff doesn't happen right away; buyers turn into sellers because everybody is selling, which can lead to the whole thing crashing.
12 extremely effective guerrilla marketing stunts
It's a tough thing to reference. But I've read from many Japanese authors about the kind of reverence that Japan holds for America even today. It's almost a religious kind of awe, and so when American powerbrokers visit Japan there is a kind of unsaid understanding that the Japanese aristocrats will make concessions and "pay tribute". After WW2 all the current Mitsubishi Group banks very much became an international operation. And it holds tremendous power, and yet is extremely - almost inexplicably - conciliatory to America.

Some Japanese people are unhappy with this vassal kind of relationship between their most powerful institutions (which, let's face it, are the political Kingmakers of Japan just like the corporatocracy in America) and the Western Elite.
WSJ summary of climate research center data breach
"The most driven and successful engineers EVAR!"

Oh yeah? Name some of them.
Voldemort is a fully distributed, key/value store. The distribution model is Dynamo/eventual consistency (there are, however, tunable "knobs": you can choose how much of either consistency, availability and partition tolerance you want to give up in favour of the other two). The storage backends are pluggable, but most commonly used ones are BerkeleyDB and read-only (for data built off-line). Latency is low, throughput is high and there isn't a single point of failure. I am presently working full time on a feature that enables additional nodes (and thus capacity) to be added as a cluster is running (and serving live requests).

HBase is a BigTable style columnar style (with support for certain kinds of range queries: see the Google BigTable paper). The distribution model is strong consistency, the backing store is built on top of Hadoop's HDFS. Hadoop's name mode is the single central point / "special" node (although there's work being done by the Hadoop team on having multiple namenodes, afaik).

Cassandra takes yet another approach, mixing parts of Dynamo's consistency/distribution model with parts of BigTable's data model.

The two are different projects, solving different problems. I am a commiter to Voldemort, but I play with/like HBase and Cassandra as well. One size does not fit all :-)
One possibility is that Isildur analyzed the current standard of top-level heads-up play and found out that the strategy was exploitable by, for example, playing more aggressively in a lot of cases. If that's the case, standard play will adapt.
What's the benefit? The users are still running proprietary software, and the vendor is still confined to the same 10% or so of the computer market.
It bothers me that Derek conflates reading the advice of "business experts" with "learning". I think reading books like "What Got You Here Won’t Get You There" should be considered entertainment through novel metaphors, not necessarily acquiring new knowledge, in the strict sense.
That includes salespersons up to managers and owners

If they can't find another job, pay them directly too. What you are saying is that it's okay to pay a buncha money to stupid executives to distribute it to everybody down the chain. I disagree. I dont think we need the execs to hand out money.
Which is rather depressing, politics has no place in science . . . except maybe political 'science'.

Valid data and good research should always be available, which is one major failing of the peer review. However, the peer review is a necessary demon to keep pure bullshit out of scientific publications.
We use soft deletes in our system (primarily because we have to maintain all data), and we use views to retrieve results. The views also flatten the data a bit, joining appropriate tables, which again simplifies queries.
A grid of coupled qubits can be used to simulate quantum systems. A quantum system many physicists like to simulate is the Hubbard model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbard_model) . A simulation of the Hubbard model can possibly lead to a better understanding of high temperature superconductivity. This in turn can tell physicists where to look for room-temperature superconductors, the discovery of which will drastically transform the world as we know it.

This is in my opinion the most important application of a quantum computer.
If the evolution had the same impact shaping economic policy (or any policy for that matter) as global warming, I could guarantee you a similar scenario as to what we have before us. It does not, and humans place way more value on money than they do dogma, so evolution is safe and global warming will be controversial regardless of our ultimate findings.

Climate data does not make global warming a lightening-rod issue. What makes it such a controversial issue is that, if true, it would require dramatic changes to the way the First World operates.
Thanks for the link, that's an interesting possibility. I probably won't be getting rid of MySQL however, because it serves another purpose for me. I'm not comfortable having my entire dataset in memory, because I'm currently constrained in my server setup and I'm dealing with relatively large datasets per user.
Theoretically none. Quantum computers are universal Turing machines. The main advantage of quantum computers is speedup.

5 years ago (when I took a couple of courses in QC) there were basically 2 quantum algorithms -- Shor's factorization and Grover's search. The former speeds up integer factorization (and discrete logarithm) and brings it to polynomial time, and the later speeds up search from O(n) to O(sqrt(n)).

So just being able to quickly factor integers breaks a lot of encryption algorithms, and a faster search would really help with data processing.

One of the main difficulty with quantum computers is quantum de-coherence. Qubits when they are entangled must be isolated from the outside environment until the final result measurement is taken. That is what is preventing the creation of large, multi-qubit computers. For example, it would be useful to have a 1024 qubit machine to simultaneously represent all 1024 bit states.

Quantum error correction might solve the problem, but we are yet to see practical quantum computers.
Which explains why HN puts the link on every PDF. Thank you.

It won't make any difference, and probably no one cares, but I still think what scribd does is ethically and morally wrong.

I'll shut up about it now.
Unlike games like chess or backgammon there's currently no AI / bots that can beat no limit holdem or omaha. The University of Alberta and others are studying the game but it will be some years yet before we have a poker equivalent of 'Deep Blue' beating the best players in the game.

The major poker sites are well know and trusted and have proved themselves competent in preventing 'cheating' like what you describe. They're very good at all things security, and you can even get a RSA keyfob to log into your account much like some online banks.
"Of course, paper production is only one measure. Citations matter at least as much, and that isn’t captured here."

That would have to be the main issue about this kind of comparison.
Errors are errors. It doesn't really matter from what source they are discovered. It's important for future work that they be eliminated.

The number of times I been able to talk to a climate scientist is few, but always full of hedging. It's a young science and predictions are always difficult (to say the least.) Scientific certainty is a sham. The best bet is to consider near-term action an insurance policy against potential outcomes.
At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege
Or, better said, the instruction set NEON outshines SSE and Altivec. The actual vector unit is a bit lacking performance-wise by comparison, which shouldn't be particularly surprising given that it runs on 100 times less power.
"In other email exchanges related to the FOIA requests, some U.K. researchers asked foreign scientists to delete all emails related to their work for the upcoming IPCC summary. In others, they discussed boycotting scientific journals that require them to make their data public."

That's all the more reason for all reputable journals to be united in requiring that authors publishing in their journal be required to make their data sets available to independent researchers, so only disreputable journals publish articles by authors who engage in such research-slowing tactics.
This is disastrous for any civilization...

And an unfortunate consequence of neglecting excessive power concentration.

Some value may be seen also in taking an anthropological approach!

In my recent brief post on this issue, "Compensation & the Social Network" http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/10/compensation-so... , I point out that the competition for status and wealth takes place WITHIN the individual's social network and NOT WITHIN the social organism as a whole. (plumbers compare themselves to other tradesmen while CEO's compare themselves to other CEO's).

The import of this for the social contract resides in the stresses created where social networks become isolated over time (oligarchy) creating an "Ultimatum Game" situation for those individuals and especially social networks that perceive themselves as no longer a party to that social contract (with consequences ranging from regime changes to revolutions and/or civil decay).

This is why there is a point at which wealth division becomes a direct threat to the social contract. This "point" will vary depending on many factors... but at our current stage in cultural evolution there is nothing more important here than the role of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and what David Brin calls a "Moore's Law of Cultural Change".

This tension between the social network and the social organism extends back to the birth of agriculture... but things are moving quite rapidly now.

For a few thoughts on this (and at least what may be a framework for an approach to solutions) I hope you'll see my post "How would hunter-gatherers rule the world? (Pssst... They do!)" http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-would-hunte...
The evolution of arbitrary computational processes
Up to last week Tom Dwan (durrrr) offered anyone a million dollars if they could beat him over 50,000 hands of poker multi-table heads-up. The best in the world lined up to play but durrrr seemed unbeatable. And in one week Isildur1 destroyed him to the tune of $6 million. Even if Isildur goes broke next week he'll always be the one to break the icon that was durrrr.
I play a bit of poker casually, for fun and profit (PokerStars). Mostly $6 SNGs. What software do I need to get? I had no idea add-ons & tracking were so prevalent ..
I would think a million dollars worth of research would be enough to duplicate what the University of Alberta group has achieved. Then you could hire some low-wage people to sit and play limit-holdem online with your unbeatable bot.

I'd be kind of surprised if an elite poker player hasn't already done this.
Horse power = force*distance/time. Torque is cross product(Force, radius vector to point of contact). For our purpose just force. Since horse power has a force component in it, it can be used interchangeably with toque for the above purposes. I cant imagine an engine with zero horse power capable of producing any torque.
Morality, Compassion and the Sociopath
For a comparison with PetraVM's Jinx, see: http://petravm.com/blog/2009/11/comparing-cuzz-and-jinx/