amstr

I fear that if the technosphere continues to use "privacy" and "freedom of expression" as fig leaves to protest any kind of anti-IP-theft laws, the public will eventually get disenchanted and we'll end up with even worse laws than ACTA & SOPA/PIPA. It's like pro-lifers who extend their disdain for abortion to claim that any kind of birth control is murder.

Plus in the case of ACTA, it is transparently self-serving of Poland and other Eastern European non-ACTA-signatories to oppose ACTA. Those countries, after all, are net consumers of IP.

You're right -- HIPAA et al only cover data that could be traced back to the individual, and this set clearly cannot.

Interestingly, there was a similar dataset presented at PSB (pacific symposium on biocomputing) of colocalizations of symptoms together with drugs in Bing queries attempting to find novel drug side effects. They too had no problem releasing the data.

Sorry, just saw this reply. Hadoop comes with a distributed cache that is generally used for small files -- a common example would be doing a large join against a small table that would fit in memory. For example if you wanted to filter out stopwords or something, the currently accepted way is to put this stopword list into the resources/ directory of your JAR, which is not really optimal for data that might change frequently.

http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/r0.20.2/api/org/apache/...

and for discussions related to Cascalog: http://groups.google.com/group/cascalog-user/browse_thread/t... and https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/cascalog-user/l5SEW3...

I have not seen any info on using Cascalog alongside Avout, but the idea makes sense.

I have one, and it's OK -- you can notice broad differences with different activities or different mental states. The video game that comes with it is supposed to allow you to control a character, and that didn't work for me or other people who tried it at all. Also the plastic casing is really bad and broke quickly on mine. All in all neat but overpriced.

The two things missing from Cascalog that would take it from great to godlike are 1) an easy way to use the distributed cache and 2) a way to run Cascalog jobs on the cluster without the compilation/hadoop jar cycle. I don't know if #2 is even possible but it would be ridiculously powerful.

No problem! This sort of thing is what Hacker News (should be) all about :)

Interesting video -- watching it made me realize that my ad-hoc "electrodes" were too small (2x2 cm), explaining the mild skin irritation. I wonder if it's common also to have a temporary, very moderate blurred vision in the right eye (only during stimulation)? It would make sense considering the cathode inhibits depolarization there. I'll keep reading.

Thanks for posting, this has been an interesting experience.

So, after reading this account, I felt compelled to wire up my current-limited power supply at 1mA and ranges from 6-9V using saline-soaked paper towels.

Got some mild phosphenes during the first try by putting the anode too far forward -- although not in my entire visual field like the author, instead just at the top, and the phosphenes stopped once the electrode was securely connected.

OP, what duration do you use? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17940759 indicates that "short-term" is <1s and "long-term" is 10m. It's hard to say objectively, but I think after about 1m I can feel increased concentration and wakefulness.

According to http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00763230 , 2 mA is quite safe and actually more effective than 1 mA.

I actually agree with the overall thesis -- Google is integrating its services in emulation of Facebook and Apple in order to become more profitable.

The "poor" parts are 1) the over-the-top sensationalist language and 2) the implication that it's okay or even beneficial for Apple and FB to integrate but that Google has "sold its soul to the capitalist devil" in doing the same.

Regarding the Chrome ads, this would be a complete non-issue in any other industry. Suppose I go to Amazon to buy a computer-related book and am there shown an ad for Amazon Web Services. Are AWS now being shoved down my throat?

Yes, I'd agree with you that tight integration for Apple and Google provide different kinds of "systemic risk".

For Google, the risk is they control too much of your information.

For Apple, when Apple owns the entire software and hardware stack, the market price of hardware skyrockets (the opposite of the effect Microsoft had by commoditizing hardware), and by its monopoly on App Stores for iPads/iPhones, it is able to gouge content creators for ~30% of the price of books/apps.

IMO, tight integration of BOTH of these companies is bad for society, but I found the author's singling out of Google to be unwarranted.

Apparently when Apple has a unified ecosystem, the purpose is to "perfectly tailor its devices to its users" but if Google does it, it's "maniacal" and "tyrannical"?

The state of tech blogging is so, so poor.

Regarding SEO: The Facebook "Like" button for instance has been embeddable on any page for awhile now and affects results for FB searches, ads, etc. So people have been playing the "Facebook Like" game alongside generalized SEO for awhile now and have not found it terribly difficult. In fact the "+1" is pretty much a clone of the "Like" button, so what's novel here?

The disturbing thing is that people here at news.yc -- hopefully a fairly informed bunch -- seemingly aren't able to see past the infuriatingly self-serving nature of a "Don't Be Evil Toolbar" created by "Facebook & Twitter" employees. And, Facebook, which happily used its dominance in social to lock out users from bulk-exporting contacts during the Google+ launch now complains that Google is leveraging its dominance in search?

OP: I'd be really interested to hear your take on why tech blogging is so pro-Apple/Twitter/FB and anti-Google. I have no connection to Google but it seems to me that Google is by far doing the most good in the world compared to the other 3 (Although Twitter has also done good things during e.g. the Arab Spring).

This timeline seems to be unaware of package.el, ELPA, etc, by proposing bundling MORE packages by default in Emacs (IMO Emacs' default installation is already huge).

Also, I don't see the keybinding changes gaining any traction, because they would conflict with too many existing packages. As one of many examples, C-c (proposed for Copy) is already used for lisp compilation.

Jurafsky and Martin's Speech and Language Processing complements ESL and Introduction to IR well by focusing on 'high-level' NLP, but its downside is that it focuses perhaps too much on linguistic terminology & theories instead of algorithms & implementations.