skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking as one with a PhD in Pure Math, who goes out and gives talks about how exciting and interesting math can be, who knows and has regular contact with working mathematicians such as Tim Gowers, I can unequivocally say yes, theorem proving is an art.

But there is a stage where the art finishes, and you have to convert the proof into a communicable description of the proof. This is where you have to create a complete narrative, starting from known and agreed statements and deriving a sequence of statements using agreed deductive principles.

The artistry is in finding the why of your theorem, in selecting your path through the infinitely large set of exponentially branching possibilities, and being guided some sense of "rightness," or beauty.

I've always (for some definition of "always") felt that finding conjectures tends to be a science. You gather data, you find patterns, you form hypotheses, you make predictions, you test your predictions, you gain confidence, and eventually you state your conjecture. So far you've been doing science.

Then you have to proof your result. Without an indefinable sense of a guiding "truth" you are then lost. Mechanical manipulations are of little value, you need a sense of where you are going.

There is the art.

Finally, when you have your proof, you need to give directions, to take others through the steps and thus convince them. That is exposition (of a sort), which is a combination of art and science, but a different art and a different science.

So yes, proving theorems is an art, and as with all arts there is much to be gained from training, but there must be the spark underneath to achieve real distinction.

That's what I lacked, although I have enough to see and appreciate it in others.
I've processed about $80K in transactions with PayPal with my microISV with no problems. And I think they're better than all the other solutions. But I never keep a balance because I'm afraid of this sort of thing.

Something like this happened with a charity drive at SomethingAwful: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/paypal-fiasco-summary.p...

There's apparently no way to quickly talk to an intelligent person with the knowledge and authority to resolve a situation like this should one come up. It seems like with the fees they take out they could do a lot better.
That's just wrong. Hofstadter never says that theorem proving is mechanical, and if he did, he'd be wrong.

Demonstrating a proof can be mechanical, which is why proof assistants such as Coq can work, but finding a proof, that's an art.
Back when Da Vinci made the Mona Lisa, he sold it. It was preserved in a museum and copied everywhere long after he was dead; originally, he made his money off commissions. So your argument falls instantly flat.

Something can be priceless despite reproductions of it being available for zero cost.

The question you don't ask is: What is being reproduced? If you're talking about just a band playing a song, then maybe I'd agree with you. I don't have an enormous problem with people listening to bootleg recordings of live bands. As you say there, those are recordings that stemmed from a concert that already made its money.

But when the music is recorded, when you hire audio engineers to get as good a sound as possible, when you slave over making an absolutely perfect recording, then you've created an object whose initial worth is determined by the exclusivity of the releases. When you spend lots of effort to release a CD, you're doing it because you expect the deal is going to be: "If you want these high quality recordings, you pay me a little bit of money."

When that gets released for free, all the efforts that went into making that particular sound are rendered valueless because the band's expected return suddenly isn't happening.
Launch. You'll hopefully be around in a year, so anything you learn now will be useful a year from now too.
They should consider paying Microsoft instead, for the free marketing they received. I had all but forgotten about Plurk before this, and for many people, this incident might be the first time they heard about Plurk.
It's a bit of a train wreck. They're snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The gas jet propelled ones have max speed of 200mph, while predators have 135mph. Can't wait for some sort of anti-predator with EMP gun or something making the 5M investment look stupid :)

[With some kick ass AI doing the find-kill, soldiers shouting "f* NPCs"]

[Note: I know emp guns weight ~50kg]
Back when Da Vinci made the Mona Lisa, he sold it. It was preserved in a museum and copied everywhere long after he was dead; originally, he made his money off commissions. So your argument falls instantly flat.

But then why are we still selling copies of John Lennon songs now that John Lennon is dead?

"If you want these high quality recordings, you pay me a little bit of money."

So then where do you draw the line? Is it illegal for me to play a CD for a friend, because he hasn't bought it? Is it illegal for me to lend a CD to a friend? Is it illegal for me to listen to my own MP3s ripped from a CD while lending the CD to a friend? Is it illegal to lend that CD to a whole lot of friends at once? Is it illegal for me to do that over Bittorrent?

Your argument says all these are illegal, because the person listening to the music didn't pay for it. Personally, I think the issue needs a slightly more subtle approach. But if you think that you can more easily deal with the problem by making it completely black and white, with everyone in the world a lawbreaker for listening to music they haven't paid for, feel free. Just don't impose such a flawed worldview on everyone else.
I've had similar problems with Paypal accounts in the past too.

Although it's an absolute joke I have found they only respond to formal legal threats. At one point they limited my account, with a couple of grand in it, in the same way (nothing in, nothing out, wait 180 days). So I sent them a letter basically saying "release my money or your staring down the barrel of a legal gun" and listed a whole load of lost earnings, recompense etc. I "would be seeking".

For the most part it was empty threats (I could probably have sued - but had no cash to do so) but someone actually rang me the day it arrived; never mentioned the letter but "a standard review of closed cases highlighted mine for reopening"...

It's idiotic.
First of all, like most of the people on HN I too agree these guys are getting a little sappy. Give it a rest and stop crying. This all sounds like the new American dream to me, wait for someone to create an accident and take advantage of it by suing the pants off of them. Your company is worthless, so you're going to sue Microsoft to make your millions?

Second... Plurk won't let me sign up with a MobileMe email address =( - http://grab.by/1fum
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Why bother with anything like an EMP? At the cost of the DIY, it's disposable... just fly right into the thing and physically knock it out of the sky.

BattleBots in Space.

That's a pirated video I'd watch.
...returns to the real world, and finds it's hard to find a welcome when you insist on looking at people like they're rodents.

Seriously, guys? We're still pretending like Rand wasn't batshit?
I have more productive things to do with my non-work time than spending it hacking even more. Diving headfirst into arbitrary codebases is just my day job. And really, it's not like one could make much money by maintaining a VLC port. It'd still be something they did out of love, reduction of evilness of job, or a combination of the two. ('Un'fortunately, my current job is already very non-evil.)

To VLC Team: If you're only making 10k EUR maybe you're not getting the maximum donations possible? I think your audience is big enough that there is more than 10k EUR per annum of gratitude to be harvested. (Pulled out of local donkey.)
Heh sweet!

I wonder how costly some kind of satellite link would be?

(Im getting a new Arduino for Xmas and this has been the intended project for a while - my own UAV :D)
I am pretty sure that many do choose "free"/pirated/whatever
becaus it is simply more convenient to get and manage content this way.
Consider all the hops you need to jump buying physical DVD and torrenting the movie.
Or think about this scenario: you here a song you like somewhere and you want to get it. Digital world: launch your Shazam/Sound hound, let it identify the song, press "buy".
Physical world… I will let you to work out this one yourself. And you may end up buying 10 more songs you don't like just because they were on the same album.
There is the reason why ITMS is #1 music seller in US.

Alas, producers are stuck in their world of physical copies. They do have a problem there—in the digital world they are pretty much unneeded middlemen. Let's remember that if one got illegal copy of some piece this does not directly translates to lost sale — if there was no way to get it for free our hero could just as well decide "to the hell with it". However, illegal copies and copyrated material on youtube, etc. can sometimes work as an advertisement for an artist and mean more ticket sales for the next gig.

So, unbeatable DRM would probably mean slightly more sales, but less revenue for the artists.
I've gotten to the point where I refuse to use PayPal for buying or selling products. --I can't even remember the last time I used them to do anything where it wasn't a hassle.

I suspect they probably see much higher percentages of fraud than other payment processors, and as such have decided they'd rather shut down accounts and reverse payments without warning rather than actually trying to detect and prevent fraud in the first place.
I find it strange that copyright law is becoming more and more restrictive. Before the Internet it was a lot harder to violate copyright laws and also one had far less legitimate reasons to do so. I mean 10-15 years ago no one cared about old movies still having copyright, because there was no way to distribute or watch them in an effective way. Also there are "markets" today where it's virtually impossible to violate copyright, one being playstation 3 games.
The Politics of Power in Cyberspace
But then why are we still selling copies of John Lennon songs now that John Lennon is dead?

Copyright still holds. With him dead, whoever owns the copyright to his music — Yoko? — can do whatever she wants with it, until copyright expires.

Your argument says all these are illegal, because the person listening to the music didn't pay for it. Personally, I think the issue needs a slightly more subtle approach.

Agreed. And record companies have absolutely moved towards the irrational in their defense of copyright. But I can understand why they're being so irrational, and, misguided as I believe they are, I think their heart's trying to be in the right place.

I don't know what the solution is, but the one that blanket approves of piracy isn't the one I approve of. In this particular case with Vimeo, I think that when your lip dub's been viewed two million times, you've passed a point where you can claim you're sharing that song fairly.
I view music as worthless. I don't download music off the net or listen to the radio and I have never payed for music. If music cost a million dollars a song or zero it would have no effect on my life at all.

So where is the loss? Do I miss out on bad poetry or meaningless instrumentals? Simple patterns of sound? What?

PS: No I am not deaf, I just find music to be boring.
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Cyberspace is such a 90's word.
What happens if your browser crashes?
A bit of a nitpick, but no stealth bomber has ever been shot down. That was a stealth fighter.
I suspect that PayPal is the payment processor of choice for all crooks and scammers. Thus, choosing them as your payment processor is risking your business reputation - they will always default to treating their customers with suspicion and if they have your cash in their coffers then they will sit on it given any excuse to be "suspicious" - that's the business model they operate within.

While the cost of processing payments is an issue (particularly with otherwise low cost software downloads) it is important to link your business to partners with a solid reputation for probity and good service.
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I don't know what the solution is, but the one that blanket approves of piracy isn't the one I approve of. In this particular case with Vimeo, I think that when your lip dub's been viewed two million times, you've passed a point where you can claim you're sharing that song fairly.

The question is one of total cultural value. Compared to the value supposedly lost by the original artists by allowing their work to be remixed, how much does society gain from allowing their work to be remixed?

Did the Gray Album devalue the White Album more than it created value?

Did the video of the kid dancing to Dragostei Din Tei (aka Numa Numa) devalue the original song more than it created value? Let us say that it did; what about if we include the additional sales of records that resulted from the popularity of the video? Was value still lost? Could we get into a situation where you claim value was lost, yet the original artists would insist that value was gained?
I recently finished "Market Forces" by Richard Morgan, he's most famous for his SF works, but this one is a near-future thriller where capitalism has gone slightly too far, the roads are mostly abandoned since most people cannot afford to drive anymore du to oil scarcity, so the roads are mostly used by the executives of various corporations for car-duels about business contracts. Our protagonist works for a "Conflict Investment" division, that essentially funds small wars and revolutions around the world, and they win their contracts by killing the representatives of the competing corporations on the road.

Ironically, he's driving a SAAB, which due to market forces probably won't be around for much longer. :-)
What's an alternative to PayPal then?
Thank you very very very much, excellent synopsis and reviews. I think Ill start with 1 and 3 first.
Perhaps they're using it in a sense similar to "pirate radio".
I'm not even sure about the sad face part given the other comments so far. Seems Goliath didn't want to make a fight of it, but David insisted on having his satisfaction.
I am really glad that I've read this. I plan to build a bit unorthodox website and I was intending to use PayPal for money transfers between the users. After reading this I am almost sure that my PayPal account would get suspended at any decent amount of popularity. Can you point out some other alternatives? I was thinking about money bookers.
I don't understand this post. Some companies go a little too far in an effort to squeeze revenue from people. In capitalism "too far" isn't an aesthetic statement, it's a statement about the extra revenue per customer not making up for the loss in customers.

Somehow I don't think the article is about performance tuning though.
Yes. Have you used reMail? The product is awesome and it sells itself. I highly doubt YC was even part of the consideration.

Honestly, I feel like having YC backing you might actually end up putting a bad taste in the mouths of some companies.
I've heard horror story after horror story and yet I've never had any issues with PayPal. I've stored money there, used their Visa/debit cart and even opted into their money market option and made some money (off my money) for several years.

Factoring in anecdotal evidence like this (or mine) always has risks.

I'm sure you could find someone local who absolutely hates the bank you choose to have accounts with, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll have issues.
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I assume that's encrypted for obvious reasons. However, encrypting live video feeds requires a lot more prepossessing power than encrypting telemetry so they apparently left it out.

Honestly, from a classic military standpoint encrypted video does little for you. If you can intercept the transmission then you know where the drone is. The only advantage is knowing what it is looking at, but a traditional army is large enough knowing something is in the area is enough. It's only gorilla style fighting when it becomes particularly useful.
This is one of two unobtrusive browser templating languages (with chain [1] being the other). They're different because they reuse existing page markup as a template, which is an unusual approach outside the XSLT world.

[1] http://wiki.github.com/raid-ox/chain.js
JSCrypto — Fast symmetric cryptography in Javascript
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The core is an image processing system that converts a pair of images into a Piku-Piku, which is a kind of animating 3D photograph. It renders views that are approximately what you would see moving your head from side to side. Those can be recombined in the binocular viewing modes to give you the experience of depth (you need to learn how to freeview -crosseye is easiest- or use special glasses). If you can see in 3D, then try the Depth slider underneath the photo while viewing in 3D. You can directly exchange time for space with that slider.

This is all brand new; I just launched it on Friday. We really want people to try taking their own 3D photos & share them with their friends and family.

You could post them here :-)
13, including the 6 (such as this one) that I just opened from HN.
Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and other cc processors. Or get a merchant account.
Never.

Not in work, for obvious reasons, but also not in non-work code, because my non-work code is seen by a lot more people than my work code, so I feel its even MORE important to act professional there. I also never swear or joke in comments either.

Honestly, I think swearing in commits/comments does nothing to benefit you/code/commits/project.
Agreed, but philosophically, is it still a stealth fighter if the guy the flying it is stupid enough to effectively turn off some of the technology?
Very disturbing and frightening read - especially because I've stumbled such horror stories about PayPal quite a lot the last couple of months.
No, it's not of "total cultural value". That's a bullshit term. It's about the artists first and society second.

The Dragostei Din Tei video didn't use the entire song. It make a lot of people who wanted to hear the rest of the song go out and buy it. The Gray Album is shadier, but it was remixing a much older album, and remixes aren't directly presenting what already existed. They're making some kind of creative alteration. Even then, I don't think it's wrong to assume that perhaps the original artists deserve some compensation. Not a ridiculous compensation that puts the remixer out of a job, but suggesting they have no rights to the final work is similarly silly.

The solution, as Marco writes here, is for more musicians to adapt to Creative Commons, so that people can use their works and contribute to that remix culture. The artists who're fine with that, and I think most of them are, can permit their works to be taken, and the ones that aren't can miss out. But it's their choice, not ours. Suggesting that all those artists only exist to contribute to culture is retarded.
The reason that PayPal survived and is still around is because they took a very risk averse attitude and pro-actively try to combat fraud. Most of their competitors didn't fail because of lack of customers, they failed because they couldn't handle the fraud.

If you want to get a more detailed view of the issues have a read of the interview Max Levchin gave to JL in Founders at Work.
Lies, damn lies, and charts.
While I want the US to pull out of Iraq as much as anybody, I think that you have to dead in the skull to root for the insurgents. Most of the problems in Iraq right now are primarily due to religious extremists terrorizing the locals and fighting with Americans to push their agendas. No matter how bad Iraq is now, it will be worse off if these people take over.
Exactly. They're in the very rare position of enjoying the goodwill of Microsoft. This is like winning the lottery for a start-up, only better. But no, they charge instead. Incredible.
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That's part of the design. Judging by the use and adoption of AK-47 I'd say it is a better weapon in general than M16.

Usually an inacurate weapon is better than a stuck weapon when the soldier is facing an enemy.
Most CC processors are much more expensive if you're only dealing with a small number of sales, they're only worth using if you're beyond a certain size which most mISVs won't be.
Thanks for the suggestions. I will pick up Barron's GRE and the Princeton Review this evening. noisedom:those websites look to be very helpful as well. Thanks
Wondering if anyone has a success story with PayPal?
I am not sure an economic collapse (although we more or less dodged that bullet last year the shooting continues) would not drag a big part of mankind into abject poverty.

We are seriously looking into a billion people having to move because of lack of water, and a huge disruption on coastal communities - and a huge people displacement because of that. We also have to contemplate a diminishing energy budget per person. And all that in the next 90 years.

The future is a dangerous place, even if some pockets of it may look like The Jetsons.
I forgot the word for this...blogscraping I think? This should link to the original blog post:

http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/12/whenever_i_write_abo...
From the paper:

Our approach. In our Javascript implementation we propose
a different approach that keeps the code small and speeds up
encryption/decryption. Instead of embedding tables in the
code, our library contains code that precomputes all tables
on the browser before encryption or decryption begins. Since
code to precompute the tables is much smaller than the tables
themselves, we keep the library size small. We reap the benefits
of precomputed tables by quickly building the tables on the
browser before the first encryption. The only values we hardcode
are the 10 round constants, which are 28 bytes total.

Precomputing the tables takes about 0.8ms on Google Chrome and about 8ms
on Internet Explorer 8. Because this saves several KB of code,
it is nearly as fast to precompute the AES tables as it would
be to load them from disk. Moreover, computing the tables in
the browser is far faster than downloading them over the network.

Amazing implementation.
I sort of agree, but I also think you're over-reacting. Here's why:

Determine value is incredibly hard, thus many people use other attributes as a signal of value: Sometimes it's appearance, sometimes scarcity, sometimes hearsay, and rather often price. Therefore, if a product category had a price of zero, it will be considered less valuable when looking at the market as a whole.

However, that doesn't hold for every individual. For example, I still use quite a lot of Open Source software and it's free as in beer. That doesn't mean it has no value to me. If it had no value, I simply wouldn't use it.

By analogy, most music is already valueless to most people and has ever been. They wouldn't listen to it whatever the price. Nevertheless, some music will remain valuable to some people, whatever the price.
Sounds a lot like the various AdSense horror stories. A recent one:
http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss/browse_thread...
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Oh so when the planet is between us and its star, it pulls the star towards us which blueshifts the light?

That sounds hard to detect.