skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> entire global warming case rests on the results of a single research group.

To me it looks a lot more like the CDO thing with banking. They compare their data with other people's results and throw out what doesn't look correct without giving a good reason (e.g. tree ring reconstruction after 1960).

The argument from this selected data is that "we all couldn't be wrong"...

Meanwhile the horror videos show of glaciers breaking up (a seasonal process) blaming that on climate change. Yet, no mention is made of the increasing ice in Antarctica since 1980. The few that acknowledges this fact blames it on global warming...
Don't you have to actually use a trademark before you can register it? This might have prevented them from doing so earlier?
they don't even own joojoo.com, it's some asian language site.
IANAL either. Arrington says they contributed IP to the project -- that's pretty significant. I'm curious to find out exactly what it is they contributed. They do have the staff for it.

As for marketing, so far it's consisted of a few blog posts. They do blog posts for other products too. I don't see much in the way of any ownership coming from that.
"sales and marketing" != "having a popular blog"

EDIT (for some reason reply doesn't seem to work): TC is a hugely popular site, of course, but my point is that sales and marketing is a lot more than what any website can do. They can have huge impact on a website's traffic (though the long term effect is arguable) but getting readers to follow a link isn't the same as getting them to pay a few hundred $ for a product.
My understanding (from memory of an electronics class a few years ago) is that gold is used for the connectors because it resists oxidation better. Copper is actually a better conductor of electricity.
JooJoo is pronounced "joujou" in French, which is the diminutive form of "jouet", a toy. This form is only used when referring to the toys of little kids up to 7 year old. $500 for a little kid toy? Not for me, sorry.

They are definitely missing the TechCrunch ad agency now to not make such a basic check.
The original idea is something everyone had the moment they saw the first iPhone.
That is why we make an effort to keep at a minimum anything that breaks strong typing check. I agree that at times it is impossible, but you can keep it at a minimum.
I thought facebook handled my attempt at using elinks with humor! "keep it real"
The only people who like Sarbanes Oxley are those who are employed in order to comply with these regulations.

Hey, Sarbanes Oxley compliance auditors need to eat too.
I recommend Peter Schiff for investing ideas, here's a famous video, he's got some bestselling books too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj8rMwdQf6k&feature=playe...
One of the rules was that you had to keep talking (or at least reading) for the entire agreed upon period. Taking a break wasn't allowed in the rules.
This would be useful - if it was free.

This feedback is of course just my two cents, but as a serial-entrepreneur I can't see this being useful after the first month. Otherwise, if a tool like this can be used for all decisions, its basically an asynchronous net-meeting with voting, which isn't anything other software (even the new disappointing Google Wave could do this), but certainly not for $20 a month.

I initial impression is this is something you wanted to build - and thought that because it was a complete idea that could be followed through on that it would convert into a good SaaS. A complete idea is necessary, but not sufficient.

I also think people hit the nail on the head - the privacy issue is huge. If people have their next super-awesome start up idea, they certainly aren't going to discuss it on a web application. They would be handing over their idea to the developers (have you given them a solid reason to trust you?), and even unintentional exploits/loopholes/bugs could expose the business IP of all of your users.

The UI/site looks very well put together. The designers definitely have that department down. But overall it seems like you're trying to sell a solution to a problem that's either already been solved for free many times over, is not that big of a problem, or providing only marginal organizational value-add for your price.

Again, just my 0.02, good work so far!
thejoojoo.com
Arithmetic encoding is usually more space-efficient than Huffman encoding, but it's not used frequently because it has much higher computational complexity for very small gain. However, if you are looking for the most space-efficient representation, it's worth taking a look at.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_encoding

Arithmetic compression differs from Huffman encoding because it encodes the entire dataset as a whole, rather than symbol-by-symbol. At worst, it will provide the same encoding that Huffman does, and it has far better performance on degenerate cases (such as 1 symbol having 75% chance). I think the commonly cited statistic is about 5% better on average, for some definition of 'average.'

For the curious: Arithmetic encoding works by taking all possible sequences, and taking the closed interval from 0 to 1 and chopping it into pieces, where the size of each piece is the probability of the corresponding sequence. Then the encoding of a sequence is the decimal (well, binary) expansion of any number that falls within the corresponding interval.
Works for me on Ubuntu - although I do install my nvidia drivers using Envy, so maybe it's that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envy_(software)
Javascript development tools for browser-based games
This only applies if you're not hungry, or getting booted out of your apartment in a month.
I would like very much to see a summary of the evidence for global warming made which does not use the results of this group. I'd also like to see such an argument made by a known proponent of the theory, since any such summary made by an opponent or neutral party will be attacked as "denial".
While this is funny to read, it's hardly on-topic for HN.
Interesting stuff. Although you might want to get rid of the large background image crowding out the content on your site.
~10 years ago, you could buy inflation protected bonds on a credit card for no additional fee. I bought $10k worth on a card that gave miles and then redeemed them to pay it off.
actually his core argument is completely true. There is nothing in java the language that makes it heavy or verbose. The libraries and frameworks associated with java make it seem that way. But there is no reason you can't write fast lean and clean java code. Since doing java regularly I've concluded that java the language doesn't suck. But a lot of java's apis and frameworks do. That's an important distinction to keep in mind.
Wow -- I can't believe I missed this one.. Sounds like we need one of these: http://37signals.com/about.
As the author of a web framework book, I have to say that the example applications are not actually much less complicated than real applications in any significant way. The real applications are often bigger, but it's just more of the same stuff. The bulk of your application is going to be a web-independent model (read any software engineering book for advice in developing this). Then you add some thin glue to make that model look nice over HTTP. (This includes things like REST APIs or AJAX or whatever.)

That's it. The glue to the book's Address Book example (or whatever) is not going to be any different than the glue of a complex app. All the good stuff in your program happens outside the domain of the web.
But there's a difference between the common weakness ("I focus on trivial details at the expense of the big picture") and the common bullshit response ("I work too hard"). I don't ask this kind of interview question, but I imagine one could tell the difference between those two responses.
But marketing does not give you an automatic right to the product. (Note I am only mentioning marketing, because Arrington did not sell any of the products, obviously). You may tell how great your iphone is to all your friends, but that will not give you a right to any share of the iphone's profits.

If Arrington signed a contract with fusion garage to do their marketing, than he is entitled to what the contract gives him. But to say that he has an ownership interest in the product just because he did some marketing for it is imo just not true. While he may have ownership interest in marketing materials he may have created (such as the crunchpad name) I don't see how he can get ownership of the actual device.

BTW -- this is just wild speculation based on incomplete facts, none of it is legal advice.
You might look into Gentoo Linux. Building everything from source multiplies the disk space & time involved in upgrades.
I hope you don't mind my running this by you all. If I'm asked this question, I will respond that my biggest weakness is that I'm coming from academia.

I believe that many hiring managers will consider this a problem, or at least a potential problem. I believe it may be a good answer anyways because 1) it doesn't actually tell them anything "bad" that they didn't already know, and 2) it signals that I am aware that working in their company won't be the same as academia and that my being aware of this makes me more likely to be able to adapt.

Any thoughts or criticisms?
The taste that launched 1,000 parking tickets
So, why did they name it "penis" in chinese again?
Try using a netbook standing up on the metro on your way to/from work.

Tablets work fine for that though. (I have an Archos 5 I do exactly that with.)
Absolutely.

I'm really confused as to why they decided to roll their own OS rather than put a customized Android system on it.
Why does it only browse the web? How hard can it be to throw a desktop on there?

You make all that hardware and then cripple it with limited software? Whateva. I would pay $499 if it had bluetooth and could run a normal OS.

Also, these Fusion Garage guys need to hire a marketing/PR firm STAT. Fingerprint-marred green screen and scary looking nerd glowering at the camera is bad for business.
Apparently a lot of people agree with this comment. What's interesting is that catching bullshit is the easiest thing to do in a job interview. A good interviewer never has that problem. The hard part is finding out if the person is the best candidate for the job.

Also, a job interview goes both ways: a stupid question may alienate a potentially good candidate. It's a better idea to focus on positive questions: the ones that help you learn what you want while at the same time selling yourself/your company to the candidate.
CrunchGear in China: The Factory
Google Launches Real-Time Search
I think evolution is the best approach, given its proven power. Maybe we need replicators (like genes, only artificial/computer related) that actually codes to build hardware as the 'phenotype'. Then evolution can have something 'real' to select from instead of just a bunch of software. Only real stuff can interact with the real world obviously (opposable thumbs, eyes, ears). With DNA, the phenotype is physical like that.. molding form like hair/muscle/bone/etc.
And it seems to me that a sophisticated sense, like eyes (that can see into the real world, not just 'seeing' inside the isolated simple second life software world model or something) is needed.
Vertical integration and horizontal collusion.
The labels have been found guilty of such, several times, in the US.
it also is Cantonese slang for penis
Do you have any suggestions for good books?
Linode adds datacenter in Europe
Minksy is no dummy, but his ideas about AI and cognition are dated (though I admit it's been a while since I've read anything he's had to say on the subject).
Smooth Sexy Infinite Scroll w/jQuery Masonry
Thanks to the utterly bizarre credit scoring system, the part that could really hurt you is closing the cards. Keep them open and it may well improve your score (certainly your debt to credit ratio would get a boost)
You're right, but in a case where one side is contributing mostly intangible business value, you expect written contracts. The alleged lack of them is damning.

Marketing, of course, is not about the product name. It's feature/function, pricing, ship dates, channel development, and general promotion/branding.
> Google and MS both do systems research, as do several financial firms and software companies servicing the financial industry

Where, then, is the desktop operating system not built of recycled crud? Where can I see a conceptually original system created after the 1980s?

> the field itself is alive and well

I disagree entirely. It is a zombie, maintaining the illusion of life where there is none.

Hell, UNIX still lives, and this proves that systems research is dead:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/handbook.html

Why is my desktop computer running software crippled by the conceptual limitations of 1970s hardware? Why are there "files" on my disk? Where is my single, orthogonally-persistent address space? Why is my data locked up in "applications"? Why must I write programs in ASCII text files, and plod through core dumps and stack traces? Why can't I repair and resume a crashed program?
Ghostery - Now tracking MixPanel and KissMetrics
Since when is TechCrunch just a blog? They have multiple blogs that get millions of readers. They have conferences and meetups throughout the world that are covered by major media outlets. They run the most successful startup contest around, where companies like Mint, Dropbox, and Yammer publicly launched.

It sounds like Fusion Garage and TechCrunch did a terrible job at setting clear expectations about the partnership from the beginning, but to call TechCrunch just another blog is not accurate.
My guess is that the credit card merchant fees cover the cost of the miles. So it's the US Government (i.e. all of us) getting screwed here, not the credit card company or the airline.
Showcase of Creative Blogs with Totally Original Design
░▒█ للبيع iPhone 3gs أسـود ، 16G ░▒█ - بوابة الإنترنت الرقمية ADSLGATE
The Best Tactics in Landing Page Optimization
Crunch pad was not a good name. The word crunch is a terrible word to put in there. It is related to a website, whose audience is rather specialised and much smaller than the intended audience for the device itself. Also, you do not want to name a general browsing device after a specific website, because people that are actually aware of the website may take it to mean that it is intended to browse that site only.

For people that are not aware of the website, the word "crunch" provides connotations of (i) doing numerical computations (ii) working for long hours and (iii) working out, all of which are negative connotations for a device like this.

So yes, crunch pad was a terrible name, but I think joojoo is even worse. That will just elicit bad jewish jokes.
Music price comparison site to challenge dominance of iTunes
Thanks for the links! The first one looks like it has a lot of good info.

I guess I should clarify that I am not afraid of the math heavy papers (image processing is by nature math heavy) but what I meant by overly academic is proving something just to write a paper. For instance sometimes they write a paper on a solved problem to take the overall asymptotic running time down a bit but increase the constant factor and code complexity by a large amount. Think quickSelect vs Deterministic select. Quickselect only breaks down if every random pick of the pivot is the worst one whereas the deterministic select guarantees O(n) but with a constant in the 10's (I could be off on this number but it's high)
It does look like they did more than just lend the project the blog; for instance, TC sent people physically to Asia to do some unspecified thing. But that fits with a narrative of the original agreement being fuzzy, and TC getting more serious towards the end when they saw the project was actually going to come to fruition.
In the US you can file based on "Intent to Use".
I think the reality right now is that, for the most part, they don't. IT centers that have to support hundreds or thousands of users aren't going to buy macs, because they'd run themselves ragged supporting them.

That's not meant to imply that macs fail more often, but if you have 500 computers under constant use, you'll get some form of technical problem pretty much all the time.

Configuration issues are solvable by getting the IT staff to learn how to work with Linux, but hardware problems would become untenable very quickly because IT can't keep taking machines to a mac store to get new parts for it.

Imagine the same situation with 5000 macs... you'd have to have an IT staff of 500 people just to keep up with hardware failures that you can't escape from simply because we live in the real world, and physical things break, especially when they're under constant use.
https://www.linode.com/avail.cfm

Better hurry to snap up those available Linode14400's.
That same french term became synonymous with supernatural fetishism in the US (via west african slaves) and was turned into "juju", which is almost always preceded by the word "bad" as another way of saying bad luck or a feeling of impending doom....
If Arrington is spouting off and doesn't have contracts in hand, he's severely hurt the credibility of FusionGarage among their core market for the product. A countersuit might be in order.
They did mention that ghosts block the pac-scent, so the differential equation for the square would yield different values in the case of an adjacent ghost.

The specific case you mention is discussed in the paper on page 6 - http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/OOPSLA06antiobj... It's well-written and makes for an interesting read. As someone interested in AI but without much skill I found this approach much more intuitive, though I wonder about the CPU efficiency of simulating a dynamic environment.

Will Larson also discusses these ideas in a very nuts-and-bolts manner, albeit briefly: http://lethain.com/entry/2007/jun/07/anti-objects-and-reflex...
Yeah, because ghosts are physical corporeal entities that couldn't possibly be in the same place at once :-)
I thought postcode (PAF) data was owned by Royal Mail, not the OS?
He has two really compelling pieces of (alleged) evidence: a new working piece of hardware and the fact that there were no written contracts.

That doesn't get them out of the woods legally, but if all TC has is incriminating snippets of email, it does make them more credible than TC.
Minimalism Is Mandatory
>If Arrington signed a contract with fusion garage to do their marketing, than he is entitled to what the contract gives him

I'd like to see this contract. Fusion Garage says there were no agreements.
I tried working on this very thing. The biggest problem I ran into is that if we program a system to do something, it will always be waiting for our feedback.

Right now I'm looking for something like a fractal. Where we get large constructs out of a small equation.
I think a distinction needs to be made. The anti-object seems to provide the environment in which the object moves. I don't think the point is for there to be absolutely no logic in the object itself, the logic should merely be simplified.

On the contrary, the ghost object in this example still has to implement the hill climbing algorithm. It could go down the hill (as it would do if pac man got one of the super pellets), or it could ignore the hill altogether. I think this also implies that it could avoid collisions with other ghosts, or even avoid grouping with other ghosts by paying attention to their scent as well. Seems like it would be trivial for a tile to further provide the scent value for all interesting objects in the maze.
I'm honestly really surprised (and a little appalled) at the number of upvotes your comment has received. There's a mob-like response whenever a story comes up about MA or TechCrunch. As far as I can tell, Fusion Garage's response (from this Engadget article) is hearsay as well.
I am most intrigued at how Michael Arrington, a former attorney, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Arrington] would have failed so miserably at doing anything to protect his interests. No contract? No formal IP? Nothing?

That's quite an indicator that he likely had little to do with this device as Fusion Garage claims. If he'd actually done more to bring it to fruition, he would probably have taken the appropriate steps to safeguard his investment. For anyone else I may attribute a lapse like this as simply a mistake, but for an attorney to drop the ball this badly sounds quite suspicious...
I always ask that question and twice have received answers along the lines of "well...I'm not really that good at programming." These people should have been screened out by the hiring managers, but weren't. Their honest answer allowed me to send them home politely, cancel the remaining interviews for this candidate by my coworkers, and avoid wasting any more of the companies time on them.
Which is just lazy, terrible marketing. If you don't own the most obvious domain, do not use it as the name of your product.

If I go to joojoo.com and don't find what I'm looking for, there's not a chance in hell I'm going to start iterating through other possibilities. I'm either going to hit up Google or give up.
> But, I'm not sure the node.js version really would scale to thousands of users.

There are reports on the mailing of broadcast echo tests (which are basically the same thing) running 10k-20k concurrent users. The main problem seems to be running into OS limits for the number of open ports.
vim for everything, everywhere. Vim rules.
The mere knowledge that Enron happened was enough for private actors to adjust their behavior, tilt a little more towards vigilance and skepticism, and thus prevent an exact repeat.

Sarbanes-Oxley was superfluous grandstanding -- the ritual enactment of an attractive but false narrative where regulators rush in as saviors -- except too late, too costly, and wasting attention on the last problem (Enron) instead of the next (subprime/Fannie/overleveraged banks).

The greatest favor the government could do would be adopt the discipline and restraint to say, "yes, sometimes markets blow up in new ways, but the lessons of the blow up may be enough for everyone to adapt and protect themselves -- new legislation isn't necessarily required by every boom-bust". (Unfortunately, the election/news political cycle makes this sort of calm, measured response almost impossible.)
AFAIK Fusion Garage was originally founded as an OS company prior to their involvement in the crunchpad.
Your Startup Needs Twitter
http://redeye.firstround.com/2006/05/53651.html?cid=17189379
Google Aims To Push The Speed Of Light With Realtime Results. Seriously.
Electronic Ebook,Ebooks Read,Purse Jewelry
More importantly, in Pac-Man, each ghost has a separate algorithm that each follows in their pursuit.