skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Future of Gesture Input
In true hacker spirit I would have farted when he slurped and tell him that is ... our custom:)

On a more serious note your letter is not a good idea. In general any anonymous letter is not a good idea. Put a signature and offer to help him to understand your culture more, it will be more appreciated.
I actually hate that behaviour, specially as the family computer does have several user accounts.
Trishsa Biting Finger
Communism is not socialism is not totalitarianism.

Sweden is a socialist state, and a family is a commune.

Just because ideas have failed spectacularly in some places and on some scales doesn't mean they don't work well elsewhere.
"We are mad because this plumbing is insufficient, and we're not getting enough water! So we're protesting by running all the water we can, all day!"
The patent office doesn't care about "plugin vs native" functionality. They care about technology at a more abstract level.
Blog spam to this article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091209/ap_on_re_us/us_fea_lifes...

I think kids don't say "please" and "thank you" more often in letters to Santa because they're generally told to 'tell Santa what you want' not 'ask Santa for what you want'. I guess I'm just saying I don't think it's the kids being rude as much as the expecatations parents and others fill them with in regards to Santa.
I might be one of the few who enjoyed it, didn't watch the whole thing yet. Even though I have never watched his earlier talks to make a comparison, at 71 he might not be in his best form when giving talks.
That's listed as item 9 in this section: http://qntm.org/?destroy#sec5
So, the argument is because the hash is displayed it can be reversed by subsequently hashing every known combination of characters with every known mail provider?

I'll give a shiny nickel to the first person that can reverse this hash: 9b60573dba6b13029b245bbdf7d01323

Moral: Not everyone uses some variation on their name nor do they use the most common email providers.
158 individual contributors so far. I'm impressed, although it's just 8% of the target number. Many people must be finding Clojure more usable than I do. (I like to get a backtrace with the location of the error, when errors happen, at least like in Python)
You're right; let my comment be stricken from the record...
I see a bunch of people making crappy games. I don't know about the masses, but I have one game on my iPhone. It is Katamari Damacy and it is the free trial (I may end up buying the full version). I like games but usually I think of all the other things I could be doing with my time and choose not to play. On the other hand, I am always searching for useful utilities like the RedLaser app. If there were more utilities and fewer crappy games, perhaps I'd spend more money at the App Store.
takes less than 1 minute to install...
How difficult / expensive is it to set up a company in China?
Yes I was surprised to see a Chrome ad at Tottenham Court Road station on the London Underground the other day.
> I've also noticed a lot of people I know living over in the Windows world seem to harbor an uncontrolled hate-on for iTunes and Quicktime.

It's because Apple's software runs like garbage on Windows boxes. They eat up resources, install unnecessary stuff, run useless background apps that east up memory, take over bindings between file types and better applications (really, quicktime? I really don't want you to become the embedded player for .mpg files in all of my browsers, so I'm stuck with a 1"x1" postage stamp on my 26" monitor and no full-screen option).

On Macs, the software is sublime. On PCs they simply suck.

Those specific pieces of software alone kept me away from Macs for years because the PC ports were so terrible.
Copyright law generally does not excuse "innocent infringers" and is pretty strict in this sense (here is a link to a discussion of copyright that sums this up in the first two paragraphs: http://www.ladas.com/NII/CopyrightInfringement.html).

This sort of liability can extend to average people as well, as for example in this news report of a 2-lawyer firm that hired an SEO guy as a contractor for a $1K job and wound up with a $60K+ liability (and certainly must have spent many thousands more in attorneys' fees) as a result of that contractor's having lifted some copyrighted promotional materials wholesale from another law firm's website and used that infringing material as its deliverable for the project (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202432820979&src=...).
Ask HN: Review my idea (CCDB)
CCDB: Computer (or crowdsourced) Component DataBase

The CCDB is a crowdsourced database of computer components, their specifications, reviews, and average price across retailers.
Newegg, my favorite electronics/components retailer does not provide a good interface for searching for parts. Even their "Power Search" tool does not let me perform complex searches, such as this, which would have been very helpful when I was searching for components for my build:

List memory kits with:
4 pieces or less
AND EITHER
DDR2 AND a CAS latency of 5ns or less
OR
DDR3 AND a CAS latency of 9 or less

Sort the results by:
DDR version (weighted at 1)
price divided by total capacity in GB (weighted at .05)
number of sticks in the kit (weighted at -.5 so that kits with fewer sticks are more favorably positioned).

The CCDB has a search interface that can support the query described above. Rather than sorting just by price or speed or any other parameter, it constructs a "favorability quotient" which is calculated based on a user-supplied formula, which it then sorts by. After listing all the parts that fit the criteria, it takes, for example, this product: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145261 and sort it like this:

+3 for parameter 1 x 1
+1.625 for parameter 2 x .05
-2 for parameter 3 x -.5
to give a favorability quotient of 2.625.

This is definitely for power users, but I might find a way of simplifying it (Measy-style perhaps) for average system builders.

I am learning Django, and I came up with this idea while doing so. I don't want to fire up any Django vs Ruby on Rails debates, but I need to know if there are any important reasons why Django would not work for this idea.
> After we get enough traffic to run through our test

And therein lies the trick.

Google and Facebook can do multivariate testing easily because they get 100k pageviews without blinking an eye.

You probably cannot.

In fact, the more variables you start to simultaneously manipulate, the more likely it is to guarantee that you will not attain statistical significance for any decision (i.e. your study will be underpowered).
downmodded- totally not cool
Flash messages litter the webscape like confetti in the Thanksgiving parade
It's an American phone.
what's that? Does it has something to do with textiles? Maybe some introduction or description wouldn't hurt.
one more point - at times, the people who become grownups and move away in disgust were, at one point, part of the political group that created the things that now disgust them.

People have started to call this the "Chris Daly" phenomenon. This is in response to the recent actions of sup Daly, who has been a very lefish and fierce advocate for the homeless, rent control and tenants rights, etc...

Well, recently he purchased two houses in Vallejo, one which was a forclosure. He moved his family, including his Children, to vallejo. He maintains a residence in SF, and does indeed live in it (with roomates). But evidently, he doesn't want to be a landlord in the city where he fights for tenants, preferring to purchase property elsewhere in places that are more landlord-friendly. Nor does he want his kids living around the people whose interests he defends so aggressively.

This is a pattern - people move to SF when they are young and idealistic, and then leave when they are older and have children.

They don't even have to be all that idealistic. I have a buddy who lived in SF while he was a young and well off budding lawyer. He's definitely a moderate/liberal by US standards, but you have to understand that this puts you to the moderate right in SF. Anyway, when he lived here, he was livid about regulations on where he was allowed to run his dog off leash. He cared in theory about schools, playgrounds, kids, and so forth, but these issues didn't affect him personally. He cared about kids, but he became an activist about his dog.

Now he lives in Marin with his two kids and dog, where kid issues impact him personally. I'm sure he'll still love his dog, but no doubt his priorities will change.
GitHub url, big and center.
Buy nothing for Christmas
Step 1: Procure an Iludium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator.

Step 2: Make sure there are no meddlesome rabbits on your planet...
The Importance Of What You Say
The article mentions this figure includes messages received.

Perhaps a numeric breakdown such as below would be more helpful:

Sent x

Received y (legitimate)

Received y1 (spam)
I hope that more moves in this direction will eventually bring down the price (to zero) for wifi access in airports and hotels.

I'm sick of the "most of our customers have expense accounts and don't care, so we'll charge $10-$20 for access" philosophy.
Alexis on how to make a splash in social media [video, 4 min]
I don't think this changes much. You've always needed a government license to run a server, so virtually everybody either already had government permission or was running their stuff out of Hong Kong.

This the new ban looks more like they're making sure that everybody with a .cn is "in the system". You can still start a website, you just need to go through one of the approved vendors for a domain name.

I'm not in China any more, so jhancock or some of the other China guys can probably tell you more.
Why not tell those that judge someone based on his eating style not to? Especially when those gestures are not considered gross in other cultures.
Wanted.  game designer.
hi. I'm building a team which will hopefully become a company that specializes in ARG games. a fun area. we've got great engineering and design talent, management bandwidth, decent access to funding when we need it. we'd love to have a killer game designer on-board early. bias is more towards casual gaming than "Modern Combat". and, yup, this is equity only for a few months.

interested? check my website and drop me an email: www.cloudbreak.com
Presumably it's a win for the people who prefer Chrome to the other browsers, yes? Or is your assumption that those people are coerced somehow and that their preferences don't enter into it?
Yeah, I think an anonymous letter would make the person always wonder who wrote it and have a general sense of embarassment. It's a tough topic to broach but if its bothering you its probably better if you just do it directly. I usually try to make a joke out of things so people don't take it too bad, but it sort of depends on the person.
Luckily as it happens I am an expert in JVM Garbage Collectors :-). All of Sun Java's Garbage Collectors have a stop-the-world phase, the concurrent ones minimize the length of that stop-the-world period but it still has one.

If you read the section on the concurrent collector on the link you posted you can see it says "During each major collection cycle, the concurrent collector will pause all the application threads for a brief period at the beginning of the collection and again toward the middle of the collection. The second pause tends to be the longer of the two pauses and multiple threads are used to do the collection work during that pause"
So is Firefox the new IE? Safari still smokes Firefox.
What is the target number, and where did you find it? Your 8% estimate seems very low, and does not agree with the graphic progress meter in the upper right which is at around 55%.
"the current AJAX technology imposes an enormous overhead since virtually all the time in the server is spend parsing HTTP headers."

Except for the times when that HTTP header tells you don't need to download some huge amount of data...
The DC government, while still terrible, has vastly improved in the last decade, so much so that it's not even recognizable. This is reflected in the city as well, which in very large swaths are not even recognizable compared to 10 years ago (in a good way).
> You seem to forget that the nineteenth century was extremely harsh (sorry, I lack a better word) for the working class.

Life had been harsh for almost all of history for the vast majority of people. During the nineteeth century, the general poverty that had been spread throughout the land congregated into cities for a chance at a better life there. Life was harsh, but not because of manmade oppression so much as the fact that life had always been harsh. With industrialization, quality of life improved dramatically.

> It is also a well known fact that the industrial revolution had an effect on the workers - the average worker lost 20 to 30 cm of height

From your link: "Their stature low--the average height of four hundred men, measured at different times, and different places, being five feet six inches." That was taller than almost all of Continental Europe at that time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#History_of_human_h...

Height in England currently averages 5'10 for men; over that time, the whole world has gotten taller than England. The industrialized nations heights rose faster than non-Industrial, poverty and malnutrition was lower.

To this day, Industrialized places are much more pleasant to live than non-Industrial. For instance, South Koreans born post-Korean War are currently 5 inches taller than North Koreans. They're a lot healthier and happier too.

> Speaking from the 21st century, it seems easy to dismiss Marx as irrelevant. He wasn't.

Just the opposite. Not irrelevant. Lots of bloodshed happened from his ideas. Everywhere that implemented them had their scientific, economic, and artistic progress completely stunted, along with bloodshed and social control. I'd take this lightly, but it can't be taken lightly.

> He just shows from how far we come from.

Hopefully, yes. His ideas belong on the same scrap heap that fascism does: A way to rally a crowd over emotionally charged language that doesn't add up in real life.

> Besides, saying Marx brought the khmers rouges is like saying Nietzsche brought the nazis.

Did you read that Khmer Rouge link? They tried to do a Marxian revolution exactly. They were dogmatic about it, it's scary how bought into they were to orthodox, agricultural, labor-based Marxism, anti-capitalism, anti-bourgeois. They really, truly, deeply bought into Marxism.

"...the Khmer Rouge imposed an extreme form of social engineering on Cambodian society — a radical form of agrarian communism where the whole population had to work in collective farms or forced labor projects. In terms of the number of people killed as a proportion of the population (est. 7.1 million people, as of 1975[2]), it was one of the most lethal regimes of the 20th century.

The Khmer Rouge wanted to eliminate anyone suspected of "involvement in free-market activities". Suspected capitalists encompassed professionals and almost everyone with an education, many urban dwellers, and people with connections to foreign governments."

Check the Khmer Rouge link out thoroughly if you haven't yet - it's the most literal attempt to put Orthodox, pure Marxism into action the world has ever seen.
Marx's work predates the marginal revolution, so he can't be personally faulted for not understanding concepts like marginally decreasing utility.

But at least as I understand his work, much rest on his association of labor with value. And if you want to focus only on commodities, well, this is where the effect of marginal utility is most pronounced.

And since marginal utility pretty much destroys the relationship between labor and value, it should be sufficient to discredit Marx's economics. (not that this is the only argument)

without the threat of communism we would be probably still forced to work without unions...

I can't imagine how you built such an idea. Particularly since unions in particular are fundamentally communist.
There are two very different ways of approaching basic linear algebra. Given that you only understand one approach, how can you presume to judge the trade-off between the two methods?

My firm belief from having learned and taught the subject is that the linear function approach is superior. For instance when you are discussing concrete algorithms for physical simulations, it makes it easy to connect your understanding of the physical process you are trying to model with the equations you write down. That is because you understand how the matrix of numbers represents what you are trying to do.

By contrast having people write down long calculations and gain practice eventually leads to competency through familiarity, but in my opinion it takes longer before the math starts "connecting" to mental models of what is being written down.
knee-jerk reaction to socialist ideas.

Among a well-educated and logical population, knee-jerk reactions are always improper.
"""These beams converged on a pinpoint-accurate spot where they created a lesion that damaged a tiny area of tissue, blocking the pathway that caused the OCD symptoms.

This is modern psychosurgery, a hi-tech, experimental, descendant of the now infamous frontal lobotomy"""

Accurately damaging a small, specific area which has been identified as causing a particular problem is a far cry from jabbing ice-picks through the eye sockets, scrambling the frontal lobe and claiming it's a treatment for anything from depression and hysteria to "being a bit of a twat".

Surely it's more a descendent of traditional scalpel neurosurgery? Still sounds a bit creepy, but there's no need to tar it with that kind of negative association, is there?
Marketing for engineers
The only thing you can control is your effort.
This is something I've thought was important for a while. It didn't make sense to me that you could Digg something without even reading it. Of course, the same situation seems to exist here on HN. I'm not really sure if there is a good solution to that problem though.

The only thing I can think of is to get rid of upvoting - instead, auto upvote when a user clicks through. If the user doesn't like it, they can downvote the article (maybe some friction in having to find it again). Kind of a different spin and I'm not sure if it would work or not, but an interesting thought.
Added a bit of explanation of spot pricing, per your request.
lets be real, this site is all about the quality of the submitted links and the quality of the comment system.

I think you should focus on COMMENT system 100% and the quality of the links will improve as a result. For instance, i continue to be downmodded basically because i offer an opposing view to the whatever the current topic is. I try to not insult, and I try to back-up everything i write with facts, or state them as opinion if it is only such. If I was posting off-topic spam, I expect to get downmodded, or if I am shock-jocking just to get noticed (I don't see the point of that one) I would expect to get downmodded, but your 'Point' system is seriously broke.
I just went to email you, to discuss a few of the additional ideas we had in our original plan, see if there might be a way to differentiate it sufficiently from RedLaser and Google Goggles to make it work.

Unfortunately, I can't find your email address :-)

If you want to contact me, kevin at massive.io.
Philip K Dick's estate unhappy about Android phone called 'Nexus'
If you place an order today, it'll be printed and shipped today. Ground shipping should be okay depending on your location (they will be shipped from Louisville, KY), but 3-Day might not be a bad idea.

Feel free to drop me an e-mail if you have any questions: scott@weareinstrument.com
Which was made what it is today with heavy contributions from Apple. Man, that's gotta sting a little bit :)
I'm staying with Firefox for the time being even though Chrome maximises screen real estate and scrolls better (larger increments). The reason is the Tab Hunter extension.

One of the biggest issues I have is finding my tabs, and Tab Hunter is ideal for that purpose.
Then it spends literally all the time parsing HTTP headers. :)
All of which may be true, but considering the scale of the city (population, buildings, economy, public infrastructure like the subway), it runs like clockwork.

SF isn't even a borough of NYC in comparison.
> Confidence intervals are based on both the sample size and the standard deviation.

And since we don't know the standard deviation, we need to estimate it from the sample. So we need a lot of samples for that.

> Given the 100 mile radius of 3 out of 4, you can have some confidence that this is not random.

All the "100 mile radius" tells you is that its concentrated in areas with programming companies. It's not surprising that there are no contributions from Nebraska.

> It is quite likely to change with new samples, but it is not meaningless.

If the (unknown) probability of a corporate donation coming from the east coast is p, and we have N samples, then the chance that at least N-1 come from the east coast is p^N + choose(N, 1) (1-p) p^N. When N=5, if p = 0.5 then there's an 18.75% chance that we'd see 4 out of 5 donations from the east coast, just by chance.

For it to be significant at the 1% level, you need p = 0.28. So even if the west coast were 3 times as likely to donate as the east coast, you would still have 4 / 5 corporate donations from the east coast 1% of the time.
I have a barcode scanner for Android that already does the book one. You scan an ISBN barcode, and it lets you immediately do a "Search inside this book".
Azure Reorganization Raises Questions About the Future of Ray Ozzie at Microsoft
Thanks, I did briefly switch from Pharo to GNU Smalltalk and then back. I don't remember what my reasoning was, so maybe GNU Smalltalk deserves another look.
Do Happy: Start Late
I contributed, even though I don't use Clojure on a daily basis. However, I do think it's something that I'd like to see a version 2 of, so it was a worthwhile donation for me.
I have seen this argued before. However I've had trouble finding the people who find rote formulas a better way to learn.

By contrast my experience has been that if I sit down with someone who has been having trouble with basic linear algebra before long you can practically see the lightbulb turn on as it "clicks" and they see how things connect and why the formula is what it is. Even if they only do concrete operations from then on, it is a win that they can figure out how it goes from first principles.

Certainly when I had free reign over an introductory linear algebra class, I taught the linear function approach and nobody had any difficulty with it. See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra... for a description of how that experience went.