skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Something's sketchy. Wouldn't the TechCrunch lawyer have referred to a contract covering their partnership arrangement? The letter by the lawyer is pure scare tactics. It does not point to any specific violation of a written contract anywhere. Was there even a Letter of Intent signed by TechCrunch and these folks? If not, that's just amateur hour over there.
it always seemed like a ghost town, even in its heyday

I spent about ninety minutes on Second Life a couple years ago, back in the days of its hype, and my vivid impression was that it was an urban planner's worst nightmare. Kind of like Phoenix.

Everyone had land -- land was considered important and valuable, right? -- so the world consisted of many separate buildings each alone in the center of its acre of land. But the majority of the buildings were deserted, presumably either because not everyone was online at the same time or because they were all off someplace else. After all, if I wanted to sit around by myself in a house full of rooms that I had carefully customized, why would I have logged into Second Life?

So I wandered around looking for the mall, or the city, or the theme park, or someplace which might actually have some activity. I spent a lot of time traveling around -- all that suburban living makes for long commutes! -- until I finally found a building full of people, but of course they were all robots and when you talked to one they either started to have sex with each other or offered to have sex with you.

Wake me up when they invent a virtual world that's more like Paris than post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.
Angel investors, what they do and how to contact them
Ask HN: Is the ordering of Google News stories of great significance
I have been reading Google News for a while. I am not sure how exactly is the sequence for the various news articles determined on the site- but I'm sure there is a complex algorithm behind it which naive users would not be able to understand (or even users with a graduate degree in CS as Google has not cared to explain their logic behind coming up with this ordering).

This question arose specifically after reading the sequence of news articles on this extremely difficult and contentious issue - where both sides of the news story are presented, but the order in which the stories are presented can make a difference on how the story is perceived in the minds of the readers:
http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/1223/googlenewsordering.png

My question is - Does the listing or ordering of stories on Google News have any impact on how the story is perceived by the readers of this news aggregator. Given that Google News is too large to ignore - is this ordering something that needs to be better understood even by lay-users.
Fast for me (Chrome) but yes the font sort of suxs.
It's not abandoned; DJB continues to use it in his crypto papers. But it's not really a standalone project yet.
Apple acquires music service Lala
Cool robot video for PLEN
Apple Has Acquired Lala
I don't think gamblers suing casinos for millions lost is purely an American phenomenon. There have been similar cases (perhaps a less substantial magnitude) in at least France, England, Australia, and South Korea.
What does this list have to do with the article? I don't really understand what you're trying to say here.
Yeah, is this how getting hardware built works?
> That's apples and oranges! Rails and Sinatra are different tools for different problems, IMO.

Actually no. With rails3, rails will just be a meta gem. If you install rails-core you'll get something like Rack plus not much more which is basically what sinatra is.
This is really, really interesting news. I've been using lala.com a lot lately. I love their facebook integration where you can post songs to your stream with a widget to play it. The streaming service is wonderful, and I've been waiting or the iphone app to get out there.

I'm not sure if this news makes it more or less likely to have an iphone app that plays my lala music.
I am somewhat interested in their comet container which is based on JVM + Rhino. I am guessing they've rolled their own (using their raw NIO or Netty), rather than go with Jetty's "Continuations". I wonder if there's any chance Google will open source it, much like Facebook outsourced FriendFeed's Tornado?

I am also curious about their distribution model (how do you provider a consistent experience if this is to run on multiple machines?) -- or lack thereof (do they use load balancer "magic" to ensure that all collaborating on a single specific session go to a single machine, potentially creating hot spots)?
You raise a very good question. Was there a legally binding contract/agreement between both parties, or was it done "on a handshake" without really having a solid legal backing?
Surprised no one pointed out http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data which indicates 22 per cent, if the stats today were calculated using the pre-Clinton administration method.
Yeah a few people on the blog are wondering the same thing. But I don't see how that would make Fusion Garage look good. Unless you think they're both making it up for PR.
Five uses for Ringerous
Post by phone to Posterous. Here's how it is being used.
> A 50mbps pipe for $150 a month will do wonders compared to your ancient cable modem.

Isn't it more about latency then throughput? If the machine->ISP->broker is closer network-wise (say 20 ms RTT) on a 1mbps DSL line, you'll execute trades faster than on a 50mbps FIOS but with a 80ms RTT.

And then, in general, after a couple of milliseconds the news have already been "factored" into the market by all the quants and their $100,000 hyper-optimized system.

I have always been suspicious of "get rich by trading". Sure there are a lot of successful day traders but I don't think we see all the losers so we get a skewed picture of the risk/return.

Now if I get my hands on that sweet 4 monitory setup, I'll attach a model M IBM keyboard to it and fire up some emacs windows with some Python or Haskell code in them instead of playing the lottery.
I had to look that up. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pining+for+th...
Probably because in their new roles they won't be able to give Etherpad the attention it deserves?

Seems like Google was after the talent/ underlying tech more than the full product itself.
4 Design Clients from HELL!
Climategate: Met Office to re-examine 160 years of climate data
Well, not to nit - it's 2 years, which, given an 18 month release cycle typically, is actually a tiny, tiny drop in the pond. Rather than saying "python's syntax is good enough" - we can simply couch it as "there is enough syntax" to last for a two year rest.
Verifiability in science is not a matter of having one program checked by different people. The reality is much more complex than that. This so called climate-gate says more about the perception of research than climate science (although it has certainly became a PR-nightmare for climate science). I think it is just another case of people have an idealistic, out of reality knowledge of how science works. Verifiability is less a concern than most people meant it to be for research. In an ideal world, it should be, but it isn't how science has been done - I would argue it has never been the case.

Scientists are actually very conservative for most parts exactly for this reason: in practice, it is just not possible to rely on consistent repeatability, etc... When you have an established, widely shared view on a topic, it takes great leaps to break it. Most research is not done to break the consensus, but to reenforce it. That's why today, if you want to show that climate is not caused by human activity, you will need to present data which are not as good as the ones one has now, but which are much, much better. So it is most likely true that if you want grants, etc... the easy way, going along the consensus is the right path.

That may not be how people think science should be done, but that's how it is done in practice in my experience.
I think that for most researchers, all this affair sounds like a storm in a teapot. The behavior may look shady at times, the experiment is not always great, but that's exactly why for a new consensus to be created, you need to have better proof than the existing consensus. And yes, politics come into play, yes a lot of it is mean and some of it is not ethical. But this does not invalidate science in general - it invalidates how people think science works.
Yes, latency is really important.

Good comment here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ultimate-trading-station-...
There for me too.
Intel kills consumer Larrabee
you're right, you are not a lawyer
well it was inevitable...and I wish them luck.

But suing someone in another country seems like an impossible proposition. It's one of the inherent risks of offshoring, if the other person screws you over, you really don't have any real recourse.
VOIP Services
I hoped this would happen, and I'm excited. Although iTunes to the cloud is one step closer to rendering OS X's advantages irrelevant.
I realize http://to/ is a TLD and slashes don't really have much to do with TLDs; they just got me thinking about URLs in general. Relative URLs with the protocol specified is something that hadn't occurred to me before. Thanks!

One question- I'm not too sure how a DNS lookup works from start to finish, but creating your own arbitrary zones wouldn't work for most people, would it?
Concerning the practical issue of repeatability, that's why most fields require a new fact to be independently repeated by several people. At last year Scientific Python Conference, A. Martelli made an interesting point about verifiable software: the best way to know for sure if your software gives the right answer is to have several, different implementation done by different people. He gave the example of the space shuttle, which has several independent systems with a vote in case they don't agree (wikipedia has some information on it:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Flight_systems).
Why was swollen leg
Great starter tips.

I've been programming for almost 20
years now (some of that in school), and just recently began exploring web programming (started looking at php over the summer).

I found the information helpful, even though I can code pretty massive simulations with complex algorithms in C++ for a desktop environment, I couldn't build simple ruby/rails apps. Slowly learning about the fundamentals of persistent web databases (migrations), http restful I/o, and many languages for data access and views on that data (HTML,php,JavaScript,java,scala/lift,ruby/rails,python/django, along with many APIs). This is probably going to take me more than 10k more hours to learn well.
Time to eat more veal and lamb :) The wikipedia article has a somewhat limited selection of example datapoints, but if you want a somewhat larger list I found the site http://www.grubiq.com/ has a little widget that lets you select by nutrient, including methionine, to get a more complete list of foods and amounts.
cemerick,
I've hacked both Ruby & Clojure, so I can comment on the way Ruby handles stings.

Ruby has a concept of a 'string', as opposed to a "string". 'This is strict input, no escapes'
"This is input with escapes"

I think that the suggested \" method is the best solution in Clojure.
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Watch Amir Khan vs Dimitry Salita Live Stream Online Boxing - Watch Live Streams
Sell Celebrity Photos
video marketing services
That is possible. On the other hand, you don't really see too many start ups in nations where the Arab population makes up the majority either, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, etc.
I'll be out $5 (and I was expecting to spend more this weekend) if they cease the streaming service. Just today, Etherpad abandoned their product. If Lala follows suit, I'll probably never pay money or commit seriously to a small startup's "cloud service".
When Startups Don't Create Jobs
Congratulations Etherpad!!

--

Why does everyone assume google will destroy the clean interface of Etherpad? Why, instead do people think the Wave interface won't be customizable, since it is an open api?

http://code.google.com/apis/wave/guide.html

"""The Google Wave API is an open platform allowing developers to extend the functionality of Google Wave itself . . ."""
They may have some claim to use the word "crunch" since all of their websites have this in the name.
The thing I like about Rails is, unlike some technology stacks I could name (why hello there Enterprise Java), you don't have to know it all on day one. The first version of my site was an awful lot like Baby's First Bookstore, Rails 2007 Edition. It has gradually accumulated more features and sophistication as I've grown as a web programmer.

A lot of the complexity in Rails is hidden until you need it. If you don't understand Rails caching yet, that's no problem, you don't have to understand it until you actually have to use it. Ditto the more advanced ActiveRecord tricks like named_scope, or the deep rabbit holes in the general vicinity of templating engines.
haha, he's the heir to oriental trading. that's a lot of noise makers down the drain.
I have only a limited understanding of the details of BACON, but from what I remember it was what is called a "production system" and somewhat akin to an evolving expert system. Something like BACON starts out with a set of rules and then tweaks them looking for patterns that can be generalized into new rules. Novel for the early 80s, but in practice these systems seemed to be limited to very specific domains.

Eureqa is a genetic programming system (running over a graph encoding, bonus points for that one :) that evolves a set of rules from basic components to fit a set of data and hopefully be able to make future predictions. The general concept is not really new -- some of Koza's early examples of the power of GP were evolving Kepler's third law using astronomical data points as the input and evolving Ohm's law in a similar fashion[1] -- but developing a general toolkit and packaging it as a useful tool is somewhat novel. One thing that probably distinguishes Eureqa is that I would expect the output to be more parsimonious than that developed by a production system like BACON. A system like BACON is also more complex, involving various layers of detectors and rule emitters, while a GP system can be very simple once you have figured out the best set of operators for a problem domain.

[1] It should be noted that BACON did these tasks as well, so they are more of a general rule-building yardstick and put GP at a similar level to the well-developed (and well-funded) production systems research of the era.
some more:
unit testing - annoyingly rather handy, had a good argument about why it's better not to use it, well I use it, I lost that argument but gained a lot.
design patterns
open source projects - a great benefit to your skills, there's something that needs kicking for any level.
learn why it's handy to use version control rather then just use it (tip - it's because if something borks can roll it back a lot easier)
linux - not just learn it, know it. bash scripting, piping commands and expect all have saved me multiple hours
rss - handy
Don't conflate Wave-the-framework with Wave-the-product. A lot of time and effort were spent on Wave-the-framework, whereas Wave-the-product feels like a first cut demo. I assume that Wave-the-product will go through a number of revisions that will be more Docs like, and I expect EtherPad to be a part of that.
How is this supposed to produce any sensible result, since their testing servers are in vastly different locations than anyone's desktop? Their testing server can't even REACH the caching resolver running on my home gateway, and even if it could, it would be many more network hops away from it than my PC is.

I realise running bind or djbdns' dnscche is not for everyone. However, even your ISP's DNS server will be much closer to you network wise and thus experience less latency. No one should ever use OpenDNS or Google DNS.
I must have missed the part in the article where Arrington says why I should care about this publicity stunt.
Reputation evolved to solve this problem. I wonder if there's a way of implementing a (better) feedback system.
I really hope that Apple realizes how good Lala is and doesn't shut it down. I'm listening to it right now, in fact, and it is incredibly nice to stream music from the cloud to my netbook. This might even be a good thing, perhaps now their iPhone app will be accepted more quickly and they'll have the funds to further invest in a desktop client like Spotify's.
I don't know if AppJet was profitable (enough) or not, but I would be some kind of an exit was inevitable. Could have been worse then this for them and their users. Good luck to them anyway.
What if the CrunchPad blowout is a marketing ploy?
A star attorney turned investigative reporter doesn't lock down his contracts? Irresponsible.

Mystery investors popping out from nowhere killing a deal with the most influential tech publication in the world? Ridiculous.

This thing reads like Shakespeare.

TechCrunch would lose a huge amount of credibility which would damage their $100m brand, which would be insane. Arrington is not insane.

BUT - what if the guys on the other end are doing it?

The story is being covered EVERYWHERE and at the press conference they plan to show off the tablet - this story will likely be covered by all major news papers.

I'm saying this all with half seriousness, but it's amazing the frequency of reporting on the drama, vs. the previous frequency on the CrunchPad.

It's worth considering for those of us in the start-up world how dynamic this story has become, and how mainstream, when the drama entered the picture.
The IEEE 1394 allows devices to make arbitrary DMA requests. Depending on your MMU and kernel this may allow it to read and write to the entire physical memory space including anything that may be mapped there from other devices.
my husband and i don't eat out. in fact, we live in a cooperative with 7 other folks in order to efficiently share rent, utilities, grociers, chores and cooking. $45? oof. there's some software i pay for, but that's because it's worth it. as a startup software developer myself, i also feel empathetic to the cause. i rarely buy things because "it isn't expensive so why not."

it's true that this might not be strictly necessary. i could buy 7 etha edits a month or pay rent....and since i only need 1 etha edit forever, it's orders of magnitude less expensive compared to rent.

still, the numbers just tell me why it might be ok to make the purchase. if i threw away 1/7th of rent every month that would add up to a non-trivial amount. so, yeah, it better be worth it.
Code completion is a pretty big factor when writing Cocoa, though.
Here are the results from more than 25 countries http://www.manu-j.com/blog/opendns-alternative-google-dns-ro...

Not 1000's of domains names though. But if you see the results, they are pretty consistent most of time even for a small number of results
Point #1 is in the same vein as Peter Norvig's Teach Yourself Programming in 10 years. http://norvig.com/21-days.html
The novelty is that Arrington often documents the failures of others, but is now documenting a failure of his own.
have to sign in to see app ideas, contact is via mailo, sort by app ideas?
If inheritance is a religion, I want to convert.
at first it appears to be a reply by an autistic person. but if you finish reading it, actually makes some sense. Cocoa/Interface Builder could be a good example...
IE8 destroys the design: http://i.imgur.com/qNEW1.jpg

It looks fine in FF, but as a general rule I won't bother using a site that is untested or doesn't support IE (especially without good reason). You're eliminating 70%+ of your potential market in one fell swoop.
I think we've passed the point for publicity stunt speculation. There's enough blood spilled that this couldn't have been the intent.
To me it sounds like you're so eager to complain that you're jumping to conclusions in order to complain about them. Why don't you just wait and see what happens?
Man, this was my last hope at having decently-performing graphics hardware with well-written and well-supported Linux drivers.

Maybe someday AMD will release enough information about ATi's cards that the open-source drivers will become as reliable and featureful as Intel's...
Reuters Redesign
I agree that as a company we're in great position to capitalize on this opportunity. Repurposing our core real-time editing technology to create something like EtherPad may be a very good idea. But turning Squad into EtherPad isn't.

The next direction for Squad is better project handling via a tree file browser, SFTP, version control hooks, etc. not adding formating buttons or making shares embedable. I think Squad and EtherPad were diverging like say Dreamweaver and Word. That's not to say we wouldn't like to capitalize on both the Dreamweaver and Word markets. :)

Here is my suggestion, I say you (or someone else passionate about this) go over to http://sproutbox.com/apply and fill out an app for recreating something like EtherPad. If you're selected, you'd be working with the same team that built Squad. We'd donate a big chunk of real-time editing code and you'd have something up around the time EtherPad shuts down. Win Win.

But hurry, apps close tomorrow at 11:59pm.
Tit for tat - Google Search
That's too bad. More competition in the consumer market would probably have been good for consumers and for the pace of technological progress.
Not sure why you're being voted down, as this was the first thing I thought. Admittedly, I'm not a statistician, so perhaps someone else can explain why this kind of thing is valuable?
And he's now facing up to 28 years in jail. Way to blow it, dude.
It shows how amateur they are. Not good when doing business with retailers and the public dirty laundering will hurt relationships with possible future *crunch hardware partners.

I don't think a "Hey, we've reached an agreement" post from Techcrunch in the future will fix this damage.

But yeah, it shows how optimism and making deals on trust can blind even those who apparently should know better.

Business, friends, and family. Try not to mix them.
I don't know how to take your comment seriously. You haven't used either product and you are suggesting that one is better than other? On what basis? I have Kindle and I think it totally rocks.
In Lebanon, there are tons of startups. That's because the Arab population isn't oppressed by their own government the way they are in Saudi Arabia (women being executed for witchcraft and so forth).

I can't believe someone down-voted my previous comment. Is it now anti-Semitic to say that the Jews aren't genetically superior to everyone else?
I'm detecting some patterns in language-related blog posts lately:

* Python: What we're doing is correct! Can't you see that it's correct? Just look at the gleaming correctness before you!

* Perl 5: We're not dead. We're actually growing by a number of metrics. Why do you keep saying we're dying?

* Perl 6: We're Perl! Well, actually, we're another language in the "Perl family" ... but we're still called "Perl"! Actually, we're more Perlish than Perl. But also less so due to various improvements! Here, just look at the tutoria... hm... umm ... see you on IRC!

* Scheme: Check out my new implementation!

* Ruby: [empty]

* Lua: Wait. We're supposed to be blogging?
does that whole bottom static bar bother anyone else? I've noticed it a lot now, CNET for example. Lots of sites seem to try to copy the FB chat bar, and it's bloody annoying.
Cuz it's easy to make a lot of money when you're in finance and in Western civilization, Jewish culture got started way ahead of Christian culture on finance.

Blame the Papacy.
Er, Israel is a mainly Jewish country. He's suggesting that being Jewish might be correlated to entrepreneurial success.