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wicknickson A Look Inside Our 210TB 2012 Web Corpus

I loved the inter-lingual web page linkage visualization project. Any idea why Traitor won the contest? It seems very similar to regular "create inverted index with map reduce" problem, or am I missing something?

wicknickson A Look Inside Our 210TB 2012 Web Corpus

Good crawlers should typically avoid wikipedia links, to avoid the number of HTTP requests on wiki servers (and keep their costs down), esp. because they make available whole data dumps for download through a separate cheaper channel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

wicknickson The algorithm for a perfectly balanced photo gallery

Congrats!

The photos didn't appear correctly aligned though -- some 70-100px "whitespace" at the right edge of the screen. And resizing the screen removed all content.

edit: I'm using Firefox v22 on Xubuntu.

wicknickson Gödel, Turing and Cantor: The Math

Oh wow! This is a great write up on Godel's work. Anybody who even vaguely cares about fundamentals of computer science should definitely give it a read, and if possible a thorough read.

Slightly related: Although a more technical/deeper discussion, but the book "Godel's Proof"[1] by Nagel and Newman is a very approachable text in this domain, and explains many aspects of the incompleteness theorems.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6dels-Proof-Ernest-Nagel/dp/0814...

wicknickson Swiftype: The Biggest Search Engine You’ve Never Heard Of

Swiftype is a site search engine. The title makes it sound more like a generic web search engine.

wicknickson OpenBR – An open face recognition/biometry library

If it makes you feel any better, their publication[1] reports low accuracy on a popular dataset called LFW (which stands for Labelled Faces in the Wild). Most face recognition technology works very well on mugshots. Frontal Faces -- with almost consistent lighting and alignment. These technologies do not perform well on personal photos.

[1] http://openbiometrics.org/publications/klontz2013open.pdf

wicknickson Kathy Sierra: Your app makes me fat

That sucks so much. I read her Design Patterns book when I was doing my undergrad in Electronics. The lessons in that book are somewhat of a 'commandment set' for me. Its terrible what she has gone through. Feels like hearing about a good teacher who went through a bad time.

Glad she's back. Hope she continues. Very thoughtful and excellent article.

wicknickson Show HN: This page will disappear in 10,000 views

I find it very interesting how the fact that making the rules of the game "obvious" changes the way people approach. If you think about it, almost all content on the internet follows this rule: share-or-die.

But here, after slapping the die part on the face, people are forcing themselves to post the link on twitter. Very cool!

wicknickson Free email address validation API for web forms

DNS Validation

I wonder if they will also be able to tag domains/addresses as potential spam-bots.

wicknickson Node v0.10.14 (Stable)

v1.0 is coming up soon. Just found this ROADMAP talk about it here: http://blog.strongloop.com/the-road-to-node-js-v1-0/

wicknickson Increasing the D Compiler Speed by Over 75%

Very interesting. Do you have any URLs or papers that go into more depth regarding your statement?

wicknickson Global land temperatures since 1900 visualized

Good to see your comment. I thought my machine was just too slow.

wicknickson FP vs. OO, from the trenches

No need to apologize. How do you factor in relationships (between objects)? I feel that with the different kind of relationships between objects, the kind of operations would change, and therefore different paradigms would provide different strengths.

Thanks!

wicknickson FP vs. OO, from the trenches

I do agree with bluehex: an example would definitely helped. It seems you have a new perspective on the topic, which is great but the current version sounds more mystic than informative. Here are one most confusing thought: Why are you bringing in people into the equation? Are these end-users? Or programmers? If they are end-users, why do they care what programming paradigm is used?

The idea about mixing OO and FP at different levels is a good one. Have had similar experience.

wicknickson Localtunnel: instantly show localhost to the rest of the world

Reminds me of showoff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2467107

wicknickson Narrato – a personal journal you won’t give up on

Who knows..? They might be teaching that in schools half a century from now.

wicknickson Quine Relay

I don't think people want to spend all their time trying to fight cancer or heart disease. Once in a while, you really need to get your mind to work on entirely useless things. IMO, that sort of mental workout makes people tackle the real hard problems better.

wicknickson Python quirks

In Python 3.x, this gives me a "SyntaxError: assignment to keyword" error.

wicknickson Sails.js – Real-time MVC Framework for Node.js

You can always change the destination directory. I usually store my project dependencies locally, so this command works fine:

npm install sails

This command would store the libs in ./node_modules directory [1].

[1] http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/03/23/npm-1-0-global-vs-local-in...

wicknickson How Google is Killing Organic Search

I'm not convinced with the arguments in this post. Auto Mechanic and Italian Food are both vague queries. Auto Mechanic could mean the definition of the term or places around you or even . And its not super hard to get rid of advertisements. If you really want better "organic" results, type in a better query -- "Auto Mechanic, Bay Area" or "Italian Food, New York".

I think its almost taken for granted that all search is interactive. If the first try is not precise, refine the query and try again. Its not correct to compare the Google of today with the "organic" search engines of a decade ago. The world, and the web have changed tremendously since. It can be argued that Google is trying to help the consumer by showing multi-faceted search for vague queries (which can potentially narrow search requirements) or provide cues about forming the next query -- and if a company can make money doing that, whats wrong in it?

wicknickson The Rise and Fall and Rise of Java [video]

You have to agree that there is some truth to O'Grady's arguments. There has been a lot of hate about Java in the recent times, but its not just inertia that is keeping Java in the market. There is just no competitor to that language and its ecosystem. The youtube description refers to these new languages "newer, more hyped alternatives". As much as I would love functional constructs, syntactic sugar in Java, such features are not solving the real problems one expects from a programming language in the long run.

wicknickson Sublime Text 3 Public Beta

Same here. My experience was with Emacs though. I learnt some of the key binding, but installing plugins for almost every need I had (syntax highlighting, debugging, color scheme) just wasn't cutting it. Sublime has very intuitive key bindings, and its blazing fast. Definitely the best editor out there. I still use emacs to edit files through the console, but the majority of my daily editing happens through ST.

wicknickson Manta: Unix Meets Map Reduce

Exactly! Some of the research is very new though, and still needs more work. The timing is just about right to get some new languages/ideas flowing (given there being lots of talk about Java taking the back seat, and no other language really taking up the lead).

wicknickson Sorry, NSA, Terrorists Don't Use Verizon. Or Skype. Or Gmail

I cringe at the idea of traveling nowadays because of all the drama at the security checkpoints. Taking off hoodie, shoes, keys, laptop.. Its painful enough to remember to put them on once, that I need to do it again at the airport with a long line behind me.

wicknickson Manta: Unix Meets Map Reduce

The next big data framework must be a programming language. Most languages make the assumption that the data it is processing, is available locally. This was true until the last few years for almost all situations. But not anymore.

wicknickson Pink Floyd: Pandora's Internet radio royalty ripoff

Just to add to what noonespecial says:

1. Royalty rates increase every 3-4 years. This is one of the big reasons why companies like Netflix have a hard time retaining contracts with content owners.

2. There are many middlemen involved in the online music/movie business. By the time everyone gets a cut, there is not much left in pool. This also ensures that everyone gets a very tiny portion.

The online media industry is a complicated mess, and I don't see any long-term solution to it coming up soon.

wicknickson 57% Fear Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents

You are taking my statements out of context. Almost all my comment talks about HN's reaction to the NSA news. Did I support collecting data from social media websites? No. In fact, if you look at my reply to @Uhhrrr on this thread, you will notice that I mentioned that no org (political or business) should misuse personal information.

wicknickson 57% Fear Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents

I can't remember who said this, but my response to your comment can be best articulated with this quote "all philosophical arguments root from grammatical inconsistencies".

So, I apologize if I made you feel that way. That was not my intent. The only other time I remember such an outcry here at HN was when Steve Jobs passed. A big and depressing event, indeed. I just don't understand why we complain so sparsely about "bigger" problems as we are doing about these privacy issues. There have been some discussions about education policies, but they come and go. Privacy issues have been lurking around ever since social media emerged, and as I said, I am worried that this event makes it go overboard.

wicknickson 57% Fear Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents

Yes, I tend to be optimistic about what big corporations and governments can do. After all, they are the people with the resources to change the world if they wanted to. Call me naive.

I remember the Bush Wiretapping Laws (seems like a successor to FISA).

After saying that, I am not "for" any organization (political or business) to misuse personal information. Personal info is personal, and it should stay that way. But the fear some people are portraying seems irrational and overblown, and this will lead the tech community to self-impose some harsh "laws", which will not play out well.

wicknickson 57% Fear Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents

Fun science fact: Fear causes people to think irrationally.

I find it hard to believe that so many people have jumped out of their wits over this NSA news. After all, there are so many more harder and pressing problems in the world. Global Warming, Child Slavery, Drugs, overpriced health care, mortgage and education loans? But on HN, the most intellectual community I am part of (imo) is so worried about automated programs parsing through their mails and tweets, its surprising. Dude, wake up! Your content is NOT so cool. Its like everybody else's -- emails from mom telling you missed on events, defaulting on payments, failures in relationships, failure in school. Everybody goes through those things, and have records to show it.

When I see an article with the title that makes me believe that a bunch of scared folks are now going to set decision making processes for the future, it makes me worried. Very worried. Such community moods have been known to make the worst choices (always conservative than progressive) for the future generations. Today, people complain about the war US took to Iraq, and what a bad decision that was. Five years from now, it will be privacy policies that were set in, after "57% FEARED NSA will misuse their personal info."

Is privacy important -- yes, it is. But should we blow things out of proportion? No. That's never going to lead to a better world.