skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's pretty cool. I'll see if there are parts from your project that I can steal. You know what I'd love your project to do? To post the sales report to google wave. I wonder how hard that would be. Can you estimate?
Venture Capital Money Drops to 1997 Levels
Deregulate parking.

Right now nearly all municipalities have laws that require a certain minimum amount of parking per square foot of building floor area, with the amount varying by use.

This has three perverse effects:

1. Buildings cost more (surface parking requires extra land, underground parking is insanely expensive), so fewer people can afford to live close to employment centers, amenities, and transit stations.
2. It encourages the ownership and use of cars. If you've already paid for parking in the cost of real estate and the price of crap from the mall, you might as well use it.
3. Unless the parking is underground, everything is more spread out, so fewer trips are practical on foot or by bike.
As a programmer, the thing that bothers me about Cantor's diagonalization (and the whole concept of Real numbers) is that it presumes an infinite number of bits of information can be stored in each number. So it's kind of like saying that you can't enumerate all the values of an infinitely large floating point number using any arbitrarily large, but finite, integer. Of COURSE you can't. Which is kind of Cantor's point, but at least from the perspective of a computer scientist and a mathematical constructivist, it seems a little cheap because I consider the idea of real numbers themselves to be somewhat "overpowered", leading to contradictions inherent in the very idea. I'd make an analogy to the question of can God make a rock so big he can't lift it? Whether you believe in God or not, you can probably recognize that as a faintly ridiculous question; I feel real numbers as a concept are ridiculous in the same way.
> The opportunity cost of pursuing this is huge. Cut your losses at 100 hours and spend your time looking for new clients.

The strategy of cutting losses and not retaliating might seem rational and it is - in the same sense as overgrazing in the tragedy of the commons is. If everybody chooses this strategy, then it becomes rational to screw anyone for 99 hours pay (and switch to another sucker.)
Google Chrome's H.264 support not true "free" software
It's not bad marketing because it's not marketing.

> your language

Some people do not subscribe to programming language cliques.
I'm only interested if it comes with a Wolfmother soundtrack.
Interesting - thanks. I wonder if the problem is that people try to think of infinity as a number that's just really, really big - bigger than all the numbers. If you think of infinity as being the biggest thing there is, then you've got a problem.

You (and others) are not alone. Infinity was a major problem for a very, very long time, with many contradictions and paradoxes arising because of insufficiently careful reasoning.

Here's another explanation:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/CantorVisitsHilbertsHotel.html...

and here's something some people think of as a paradox:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/BallsInBarrels.html?HN
Are you sure he just doesn't need to approve comments before they post? A lot of blogs do that to cut down on spam, maybe he just hasn't go to it yet?
Ok so you fancy yourself some sort of HN rules referee? I gather that you disagree with my other posts, so why not write a rebuttal? That is generally the preferred way to handle such things on HN (unlike reddit).
Interesting article, but I disagree mostly due to my personal preferences: I am more comfortable using GMail+GCalendar+Gdocs in my workflow, buying MP3s cheaply on Amazon, and having the relative openness of the Android phones over the iPhone.

Still, for non-techs, the Apple do it all approach would be very tempting if not for the much higher cost of Apple gear.

I may be calling this wrong, but I think that we are going to the commoditization of just about everything: cheaper bandwidth, cheaper devices, low cost or free software, etc. The market will grow but individually products and services will get much cheaper.

Very long term, will most people be willing to pay for the Apple cost premium?
Why cloud exchanges won't work
To a certain extend, iPhone users do depend on the Google suite of products. If you're a GMail user, you probably have lots of saved locations on your google maps, items on your google calendar, and contacts & voicemail on google voice. The android integrates all of these "must-have" apps very nicely on a mobile device.

Apple hasn't done so great with their mobile.me platform. Had they done better, the iphone would have been a great mobile device for their mail/contacts/maps.
Stop and think about the statement/article you quoted.

Figure a 10 mile stretch of road is built.

A suburban householder drives the length of it when commuting in a 30 mpg (most cars get less mpg) car, 200 times a year at a minimum (this doesn't even include trips to grocery store, spouse's car, etc.).

Yearly, 2000 miles traveled, about 70 gallons of fuel used by the 30mpg car, means $14.00 in fuel taxes (TX gets 20 cents/gallon in taxes), or, $1.40 per mile; each year. Definitely a far cry from the "2-3 cents" quoted in the article.

Is my math off?
In case anyone hits the same problems I did, upgrading Firefox to 3.6 seems to have fixed it.
Without the reals you can't assume that all limits exist. The reals are the only totally ordered complete field. As such, whether they're "practical" or "useful" is irrelevant. They are a mathematical object worthy of study in their own right.

Calculus is easier with the reals than without. The computing you do is an approximation to the reals - trying to do numerical analysis without the reals is horrendous. I've seen so-called "constructivists" attempting it, and I'd rather work with the reals any day.
>transparent unless you have a side-effect

Only if you believe the side effect of using the CPU doesn't count.
This seems like a really bad idea to me (except for the last part).

I've seen capuchin monkeys eat the fruit of Strychnos, the genus that strychnine comes from. That could be a fairly risky thing for a human being to consume, especially if you happen to eat any of the seeds, then all bets are off.

Many monkey species, especially those that eat leaves (these would be the most common species you'd encounter, at least in the new world) walk a very fine line between eating enough of a given plant to satisfy their energy budget and eating too much and poisoning themselves. A human following their example is likely to end of with a stomach full of undigestible fiber, get sick, or worse. Energetically, you'd probably spend more calories following the monkeys around than you'd gain from any food you'd collect.

Now eating the monkeys, that might be a good idea, but the primates you'd most likely encounter would be in social groups, and once you kill one of them, it will be very hard to kill another from the same group.
Apple has too much stock (literally and figuratively) in Steve Jobs. It is not at all clear that Apple has the capability to survive and innovate without him.
I think that you are correct. This is why I expect HTML 5 "apps" to be more important on iPhone, Android phones, etc.
Reals numbers give you the property that if a continuous curve is bigger than zero somewhere, and smaller somewhere else, then it must cross the line at a certain point. You probably want to say that sqrt(2) has a solution. Without reals you don't have this.
Your units are off. You're calculating dollars per mile per year. The article talks about dollars per mile, which could be an imprecise way of talking about dollars per mile per year, but taking the words at face value gives about 1 cent per mile at 20 mpg, the Department of Transportation's average fuel economy as of 2005. If you include the federal 18.4 cent tax, you get 1.92 cents per mile.
You're criticizing me for not looking at your Languages page, when in fact that page has nothing to say that diminishes any point I've been making.

As I already pointed out to you, Python 3 is far from the most widely pointed out version of Python. The actual versions people are use in the wild are the 2.x line. Judging from http://pirate.tangentcode.com/, the unsuccessful attempt to port Python 2 has been abandoned for several years.

When it started it was called a first class project as well. There was theoretically lots of visible support. There is lots of prior art on how to successfully port it to a virtual machine. Some really good people tried to make it work. And the failure to port it resulted in literal pie in the face for the lead developer of Parrot.

I know that a number of things have improved about the project. Parrot is much healthier than it was. But I can't personally bother caring about it until after I see it succeeding with what should be the relatively easy stuff.
I lived in Toronto for a while, and was a subway commuter:

- Built really early. There are a lot of cities that are just getting into the mass transit game, Toronto has been in it for 50 years, and this has allowed time for the culture to adjust, and for large housing complexes and shopping centres to develop around subway stations.

- Expansive, a lot of American cities start with small mass transit systems that don't run very far away from downtown. Toronto's advantage is that the two extreme ends of the subway line are very, very far from the downtown core, so subway commuting is a realistic option for people looking to live in cheaper neighbourhoods.

- Not reserved for poor neighbourhoods. In fact, the poorest areas of Toronto are entirely unserved by the subway system - the subway covers large swathes of lower middle class, middle, and upper-middle, and even upper-class neighbourhoods. This forced demographic has made the system in general much more welcoming as an option for people who would otherwise have the freedom to buy cars.

- Extreme density downtown. Once you leave downtown the distance between stations grows very dramatically, but in downtown there really is a station every 2-3 blocks, and you are never more than 5 minutes away from the subway. This type of convenience has encouraged an incredibly dense downtown (for Canada/USA anyhow) that is a destination.

- Discouragement of "multiple downtown" model. Here on the west coast we tend to develop smaller downtowns in multiple municipalities that are close together. Linking these by mass transit is difficult, and spreads your population thin. Toronto has a unique model in that the suburbs don't have as much of a "downtown", and all the hubbub and activity feeds into a very "mega-city" like downtown core by the lakeshore.
Can you explain why a censored Google makes the Chinese more aware of censoring?
Most of the parrot languages in http://www.parrot.org/languages are sadly outdated or unmaintained. Many of them even not work in the current version of Parrot.
It will be interesting to see if they can manage the transition because, while the underlying tech may be there, there is a pretty big branding gap for them to overcome because youtube isn't traditionally known for providing a high-quality viewing experience.

The quality of the image, the buggy flash player and the general clutter of the site don't really hurt them when people are there to discover free, short form video content but it's a huge brand perception problem to overcome once they start asking people to pay money and sit back on the couch to watch an entire film.
I agree, the 'red flags' I mentioned probably have very little predictive value.
I think you would have to build a Wave Gadget. Would be pretty cool because then you would have the functionality of the playback scrubber to see what your sales graphs looked like at any point in time.

It would probably take a couple of days to open up a service on the server-side, and to write the client-side graph generation. Not sure if a Wave Gadget can pre-emptively fetch data without user interaction though. That might be a killer.
Uh...this isn't political. We're hitting the financials with these rules. Being political would be saying that it's a bad thing. This will hit the certain bank profits, so they are among the sectors that took a negative hit yesterday. The little article summary says "pulling down bank stocks", so the blog entry's diversion into commodities is irrelevant.

I think the proposal helps explains the drop in GS. The Volcker rule is going to put a dent in GS proprietary trading desk activities. It might have even a bigger effect on BoA, as a large percentage of their profits were from trading...

For an even clearer demo of the proposal's effect on prices, look at this chart comparing three banks with huge trading operations and three more regional banks that won't be affected by the proposal.
http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
Energetically, I bet you'd spend more calories following the bird than any calories you'd gain from food you collect. On the other hand, I've been told that toucan is quite tasty.
Can you say more specifically in what way you feel the reals are 'overpowered' or contradictory? As a mathematician, I'm interested in why people think the concept is odd, because it's not intuitively odd to me and I want to understand this alternative viewpoint. Would I be right in thinking it's related to reals being 'infinitely precise?'
"Apple got lucky with the iPhone"

Yeah,that Jobs just gets lucky ... again and again and again and again. He's like the energizer bunny of luck.

Or.
Having worked on a lot of 'portable' cloud VMs/clusters, I don't think I agree with the premise in this article that some of these infrastructure-on-demand services cannot be commoditized. Sure, there are a LOT of applications where it would be prohibitively costly to move data around too frequently, but that is perhaps not MOST applications.
In the simplest sense are just groups of people acting together (usually towards shared goals).

Shouldn't then these individuals contribute out of their earning from these corporations rather than the Corporations themselves?

The Supreme Court rulings always make for very entertaining reading, on another case MARCUS A. WELLONS v. HILTON HALL, WARDEN (death row case they ruled for the defendant) due to:

Only after the trial did defense counsel learn that there had been unreported exparte contacts between the jury and the judge, that jurors and a bailiff had planned a reunion, and that "either during or immediately following the penalty phase, some jury members gave the trial judge chocolate shaped as male genitalia and the bailiff chocolate shaped as female breasts," 554 F. 3d 923, 930 (CA11 2009).

The supreme court site was down for me but here is the cached page http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:W5J1m2YCS_AJ:www.suprem...
Pardon my somewhat non-techy understanding of this, but how do you see HTML 5 changing that? I am not familiar enough to understand the implications.
Quote: "Without the reals you can't assume that all limits exist." Oh, I agree completely. I can't assume that all limits exist.

Modded you up because I agree with your premises, but I disagree with your conclusion. Both constructivism and "regular" mathematics are systems, but rather than views computable numbers as approximations of reals, I prefer to think of real valued calculus as a degenerate case numerical analysis where delta goes to zero.

Here's the thing: most of mathematics was developed prior to computers, and I question how much of what's in mainstream mathematics is influenced by the requirement that ultimately the math had to be tractable to humans without the aid of a computer.
I'm not terribly impressed with the article.

But I think the no native apps thing had to do with control, which reinforces the Apple World thing. But it shouldn't be a surprise that Apple is aiming to be vertical monopoly - that's been it's model for years.
Neil Gershenfeld on Fab Labs (2006)
Using Google App Engine memcache
Bookmarked - thank you.
Although, once you found the locations you could remember them or map them and then later trips would be more efficient.
Absolutely correct. I leapt into rails programming and muddled through for a while, but now I'm taking my foot off the accelerator for a while and reading Agile Web Development in Rails.
That's actually covered pretty explicitly in the Bing privacy statement:
http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/fullnotice.mspx#use
You are correct, there is a doctrine that prioritizes those things, immediate survival is more important than eventual rescue.
I made an interesting observation recently, and I think it's not reinforced enough in the teaching of maths: "infinite" and "infinity" have less to do with each other than you would think. "Infinity" is a particular point in a set. "Infinite" describes the size of a set. There's only one "infinity"[1] but there's (infinitely!) many types of "infinite." By application of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, this would be easier for people to understand if we used more separate terms for the two concepts.

[1] Well, you can have +/-infinity... or you can make it the same infinity at both ends. This is really the only way to go when you deal with the complex plane instead of the real line. But regardless, the point is in topology, infinity can be treated as singular and definite.
Will Michelangelo's David survive the future?

Oh you mean the Classical Music business. Yeah, it will, because as RiderOfGiraffes says, no recording can capture the ambiance or immediacy of live performance. On top of that, few great concerts are recorded. They could fix that if they wanted to: you can go to archive.org and get decades of Grateful Dead concerts.

Will the diamond-encrusted concert halls with their $150 tickets to hear old warhorses over and over survive? No. At least, not if the middle-class keeps getting decimated by our Great Leaders.
What analysts should ask Apple
7 Days and $500: One Man's Plan to Bootstrap A Startup In A Week
glad someone else caught this. I actually read it over twice and chocked it up to being a type...not impressed at all.
A random stranger showing up would be assumed to be the worst type of person. Anyone of good repute would arrive with letters of introduction from several business partners and local officials.
He can go public and warn folks if after three written interactions they acknowledge that he delivered the work but refuse to pay or give a timeline for payment. Has the same effect as spending a lot more time on a client that will never be a reference.

Also, read the book, there are a number of things you can do to manage your "credit policy." Essentially you are loaning the customer N hours of work: if you look at it that way you may engage differently.

Finally, life is short and getting screwed out of 100 billable hours is not the worst thing that will happen to you even in a two or three year period.
> I figured the potential damage to my reputation by making the situation a public affair could end up costing me a lot more in the future.

Hmmm... What exactly would the damage to your reputation be? Hey, let's not hire this guy, he might sue if we screw him!
The posts where you do lay out your arguments are currently not in the negative karma zone, and they appear to be garnering at least some responses.
Can wave gadgets not render standard html? I never thought of the scrubber thing, but you're right, it would be pretty nifty.

Is it not possible to simply push the current html you have into a wave?
See Apple's laptops for an answer to your last question. In a field of $400-1200 laptops, they're selling $2000 machines very successfully.

PCs have already been commoditized, Apple has maintained their premium by offering something that noone else can: smooth integration and experience due to everything designed end-to-end by one company (and OS X).
He does need to approve comments before they post. However, he has approved other comments and made a response since I made the submission. http://img.skitch.com/20100122-8ei6k4jishxjw3h7q91rg1trfc.jp...
Vijual Graph Layout Library For Clojure
If you're interested in the benefits and limitations of checklists, you should definitely pick up the book. It's a quick read, and there's practically a whole chapter dedicated to the time he spent interviewing the guy at Boeing who's responsible for developing checklists for aircraft procedures - both normal and emergency. He goes into more detail about what does and what doesn't make a good checklist, as well as where they can and can't be applied effectively.
All one has to do is compare the search results of google.com to google.cn and the ones not in google.cn are the specific things the Chinese government is trying to stop.

I started a project a while ago called censoredinchina.org which uses this feature to help generate awareness.

I haven't published any code yet, but the goal of the site is to generate images of the censored web pages that can be easily embedded in blogs, etc., where they are more difficult for China's human censors to find/stop.
Yea, I always find out about these things a bit late. Too bad. Probably getting something together by March is nearly impossible.
HTML5, if 'fully' supported by browsers (like Safari and Chrome), supports a bunch of new features that make previously impossible stuff easily doable - the major one being offline storage.
e.g: GMail can store your inbox in your browser's offline storage cache, so you can continue to use the site and send/read emails just like you do with Outlook or other mail clients today. When you reconnect to the web, it'll sync up and send the differences.
True, but far more downvotes than constructive replies/comments. Sort of discouraging to me but I guess I need to find a more mind-opening meme to begin with :)
I'm having trouble understanding what the market for this is. It's not going to win on instructions-per-die-area-per-second (NVIDIA and ATI are already ahead of this mark now, with hardware rather cheaper than $100k). And with 512 distinct CPU packages, there's no way the interconnect is going to be faster than the high speed serial stuff we're already using for stuff like SATA, 10G ethernet, Infiniband, etc...

So it's basically a physically smaller supercomputer running low-power CPUs. It probably wins on real estate and power metrics, and probably loses on cost vs. racks of consumer stuff. Is there a market for that? Note that the investment came not from a VC fund, but from the DoE...
Indeed - as long as Apple is willing to accept less than 100% penetration in the market, there are many people more than happy to live in Steve Jobs' closed world. It sure beats the current competition in my eyes...
Looks nice, max. I thought I'd finally be able to see what some of your apps were but alas, no!
To your first point: When considering issues of liberty we must examine not what is possible but what is considered within the rights of the Chinese citizen. What I mean is, while it may be possible to get all sorts of censored information from within China, that can't be considered freedom when the risks are so great.

That would be like saying that because it is easy to buy a handgun illegal on the black market, it's fine for the government to make gun ownership illegal.

To your other points, you do have some great facts and observations. I certainly agree with the point about stability, however it might be worth temporary instability to achieve long term freedom and human rights.
You have an interesting and perhaps useful conceptual point, but your language is at odds with current usage.

The concepts of infinite sizes of sets and point "at infinity" are different, and should be separated.

The thing is, there are multiple infinities even in the sense you're thinking about. For example, you can have one at the end of every line in the complex plane. That gives you the projective plane. Again, in topology.

The one you're thinking of is the one-point compactification of the plane, but it's not the only one.
The paper linked in the article is gem.