skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is the intuitive idea of an effectively computable function (of one or more natural numbers given as arguments): given the arguments, you can compute the value of the function using a "procedure" (or a set of rules) that does not require any creativity. Example: Addition of two natural numbers n and m. We know how to calculate n+m :-)

How can we formalize this notion of effective computability? On possible formalization is the notion of a Turing computable function, that means a function that can be computed by a Turing machine. One can show that addition, multiplication and many other functions can be computed by a Turing machine.

Now it is clear that every Turing computable function is effectively computable (just use pen and paper and write down what the Turing machine is doing).

The other direction is known as Church's Thesis (named after Alonzo Church) or Church-Turing-Thesis: every effectively computable function is Turing computable.

The thesis can not be proved, since "effectively computable" is an intuitive notion.

Two other formalizations of the notion of effectively computable are abacus computability (similar to Turing machines) and recursive functions. One can show that all these notions are equivalent.
next time i'll more carefully monitor my word choice in haste, but then again why bother when I have trolls that auto-check my grammar for me?

Maybe you should concern yourself with the proposed legislation, instead of illustrating that you have waaay toooo much time on your hands.
great point
Counterpoint: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1221994

Also, I'm thinking some of this Microsoftian 'us against the world' mentality could be from ex-Microsoft employees which have moved to Google and Apple as managers. From the outside, it seems like the combative teams, at least at Google, are either based in Seattle, or had ex-Microsoft employees in them (Android).

(Disclaimer: complete speculation/hypothesis.)
Yeah, I went over there hoping to see candid shots of them in bikinis, WWTDD-style.
Viigo Joins RIM
This is kind of interesting for me because Viigo utilizes Hecl as a scripting language for their application.
Some of the photo titles come out wonky due to character encoding issues.

If I click Vote, but am not logged in, why not redirect me to a login page?

The photo sizes are really small. Why not make them bigger? After all, the whole point of the site is to see and vote on them.
Which city is this happening in?
Not true, I found several emails in the thread interesting. For example, this one where Linus gives a good rant on DRY vs KISS, http://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/22/12
Thanks. I'm sure it'll be fair and balanced.
Yes, top students reap rich rewards, even as egg donors
Pwn2Own winner tells Apple, Microsoft to find their own bugs
This reminds me of how celebrities often meet up at the Ivy when they want to attract buzz/speculation about potential projects or simply to make at statement.
Sweetener control becomes a lot easier if you elect to add it yourself: For example, to keep my own cravings at a minimum I've moved towards a combination of fruits and individual sugar packets, or more often noncaloric sweeteners, for sweetening. The sugar packets are 5g each(as are sugar cubes), which means you would have to dump eight of them in your coffee to make it as sweet as a 12oz Coke(40g).

Nobody dumps in eight sugar packets into plain coffee - they buy a sweetened coffee beverage instead, which is about as sugary as the Coke and costs more to boot.

Candy bars and cookies are similarly difficult to portion control, because, again, they're overconcentrated.
we've also deprecated file-based commit notes (that is notes that are attributed to a file, but not a line).

I guess the new way will be to put an inline commit note at the top of a file. That's good, I like just having one type of note. Lower "cognitive overhead", like when search and address bars were merged in Chromium [1].

[1] http://www.chromium.org/user-experience/omnibox#TOC-Reduce-c...
Code Complete rocks. It's easily in the top 20 books for any developer. Maybe top 5

Having said that, remember the idea is to stick with a theme, so if you choose good coding, do "Clean Code" by Uncle Bob a few other books along the same lines.
How would that help? How would you know what tests to order? How do you interpret them? How do you know that if test A has a certain result, then test B should be ordered to check for cross correlation with something else?

It's really easy to say "just order my own tests" but the reality is that it would be pointless for most people except... trained medical staff!
Also check out the super-brothers video: http://vimeo.com/3807518
It doesn't have to be local per-se. I've gotten 50 responses so far, so I'm trying to figure out how to go about assembling this in a sensible way.
You end up with people having to justify to their bosses why they want to use something called Racket for work, or justifying to parents why their kids are learning Racket in schools.

I doubt it.
Woah... "Creativity as an Exact Science". TRIZ needs to be submitted to HN as a separate item. It can make for one interesting discussion.
Ten tips for creating profitable "freemium" startups
I love what Casandra does and I think it's the best of the NoSQL options out there.

I'd say that the differences between types of NoSQL databases preclude any attempt to choose a winner. It's makes no more sense than trying to pick the better between NoSQL and RDBMS.

I think this illustrates much of the problem with the NoSQL moniker - it seems like an attempt to group a bunch of completely different data storage systems by arbitrarily excluding a single one.
Furthermore, this is an operational expense as opposed to a capital expense, which is a bit nicer on the books.

Something about this seems broken. Why would it be inherently "nicer" to spend money on a service as you use it than on a product that you get to keep?
The Surprising Psychology of Impressiveness
I'm completely against celebrity gossip, but this article does have one tidbit of useful information for Bay Area residents: Charlie Ayers owns a cafe in the Town & Country Center. I'll have to check it out!
We are three right now, we're not sure if us (the initial attendees) will be matches - that's part of what we want to find out. we'd be happy if others find cofounders and we don't. All of us are already working on side projects, but are not far enough along for that to be a hindrance towards joining someone elses project. We don't want any special position over the other attendees - in fact you'll get root on iter8.org and if everyone decides to do a startup without one or all of us, we would not complain. We do this exactly to find out who to work with. We're secretive because we have jobs right now, and bragging anonymously doesn't work.
You may choose a public place for the neutrality.
But you only choose the outdoor table for the attention.
Steve Jobs' image is too controlled for that to be random.

They were probably just passing time until they got spotted, making fun of some common annoyance (newspapers, from the sound of it) so they'd be sure to convey the desired friendly, casual image.
I think we had different understandings of the grandparent:

I don't think people building those systems are supposed to talk about them...

In a former job I worked on systems similar to what was described and my former employer would be very unhappy with me if I revealed so much as their hardware setup much less schema. I am not supposed to talk about such things, and there is an NDA that says so....

Whether it is legal for an authorized person from the company to discuss those matters is a separate matter.

Also, I must point out that this is not security through obscurity. Security through obscurity cannot be relied on, I agree. But in this case, it is a matter of preventing you competitors from knowing what you are doing.

You know your competitors can develop the same thing you did in time, but you want to make sure they have to spend that time rather than being "inspired by" reading over your source code or even stealing it entirely. In some competitive environments, even just knowing what your competitors are or are not capable of at that moment can be a huge advantage.
Emotional support system for entrepreneurs
I don't agree. If they cannot control their contractors, there is no way they can choose and hire competent software engineers.

What they should do is just create an open bidding system for the work and make sure that the bids are well publicized, so that not only IBM and accenture will bid. And then they will pay the bid amount only when the whole system is ready and functioning according to specs and schedule.

Thus any cost overruns are not NYC's problem.

There is a million time keeping apps out there, I am sure there will be plenty of candidates willing to modify their app to the city's requirements.
A friend of mine works as a trainer on this project and he does a great job because the software is so convoluted - you need a great trainer.

He likely bills $60/hr to a sub-contractor, who then adds in his likely $100 profit and bills SAIC (the main contractor on this project). SAIC probably bills the city $250/hr for my friend's services!

The numbers are guesses but I spoke to my friend and he said that the vast majority of the billing goes to the main contractor and subcontractors.

At any rate, its a big waste.
I immediately thought three things:

1) Cool! I want to clone it; baring time, I want to buy it.

2) Since I have neither time nor disposable income right now, I have some serious g33k envy.

3) Jay Walker's library should have this. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=996939)

Well done, man.
Does Steve ever get tired of wearing the same clothes every day?

His shoes are pretty excellent, though.
An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument toward the person" or "argument against the person"), is an argument which links the validity of a premise to a characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise.

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
interesting, OSX wasn't supported by virtual machines just recently. I'm more interested in running OSX in OSX though, does VWare Fusion support it?

or Xen?
I read Accenture (coughAccidenture*cough) and IBM and up-voted right away.
This is pretty significant news. Pew's last estimate as to home internet penetration in the US was hovering at around 74%ish, last time I checked, and that's over the decades it's been around now.

A 50% penetration rate for smartphones, and their web-ready state and app markets, within a scant few years of its start says interesting things about where software development's headed in the surprisingly near future.
This response to Forbe's article doesn't address the central premise:

"Shocked by the incredibly poor database performance described on the Digg technology blog, baffled that they cast it as demonstrative of performance issues with RDBMS’ in general, I was motivated to create a simile of their database problem."

The central question here isn't so much the maximum performance you can get out of RDBMS system, or how it compares to a NoSQL solution, but how Digg is getting such terrible performance out of their RDBMS design! The numbers are just don't add up.

This article is just a bunch of straw men and that avoids that main issue. And arguing that $7,500 is too much for a serious web SaaS vendor to spend is just comical.
So my thinking on this is that the way these NoSQL systems will make their way into Healthcare is through the great backdoor of analytics. Virtually all available EHR/EMR systems available today allow various mechanisms for data retrieval based on primary indices. Unfortunately that avenue does not lend itself to secondary data reuse which will become more and more valuable as Institutions realize their data is valuable not only for academic research but for operational efficiencies re. money in the kitty.

Even more unfortunate still is that virtually all these installed systems do not have the performance capacity or advanced search-ability to adequately mine this growing horde of data. Administrators, under capex constraints, do not allocate resources for secondary systems which would duplicate data for mining purposes while alleviating strain on the principle production system. The no money budget problem will lead in house programmers to build these research systems on top of open source NoSQL solutions. There, the technology will prove itself.

Additionally, "NoSQL" comes in different flavors. Generally, all of them forgo the Consistency in CAP for Availability and Partition tolerance, which is fine for many use cases - just not primary medical data acquisition use cases. As the field matures programmers and system designers will learn how to make this work better to the point where one day NoSQL systems may be used as the primary data repository for medical data. However, that day has not come. For instance, Riak allows you to tweak knobs in order to favor of certain aspects of CAP theorem at different times while in production (specifically the w and dw parameters, http://blog.basho.com/2010/03/19/schema-design-in-riak---int...). But having just started working with Riak in the last month or two I would still only use it as an analytics tool exposing my medical record data to m/r jobs at this point. And before jbellis smacks me, I think Cassandra is awesome and I'm looking forward to spending some time with it but I'm still not putting my med app data in Casssandra just yet as a primary data store.

/Disclaimer. I work for a major University Medical Center and write business web applications in this area./
Could Tiny Bubbles Cool the Planet?
I've always said that 2 smart people can get way more done than an army of consultants in a shorter amount of time. (for the record, I'm an ex-consultant)

But this is business and this is why these companies make as much money as they do. When you are in charge of such a project and your ass is on the line who better to blame than a large Fortune 500 type of company (i.e. Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, etc). You can't get fired for failing a project with a vendor that is considered the "best" but you can for using "Jim's Custom Development Shack".
It has a centralized structure. There is a hierarchy of responsibility, etc. There is an 'entity' to attack, whether it's the servers, or the editors/leaders/etc. Which is different from something that is truly distributed where each person is -- for all intents and purposes -- equal to anyone else in the group.
Hyves.nl: always in touch with your friends
Interviews with creators of programming languages
Asides from the lobby groups, there's also that the issue is wear flaw (ie, gradual issue) but being presented as a sudden behaviour, and the mean age of those who have apparently been affected is 60+.

Toyota sell a lot of cars all over the world. Nowhere in the west has covered this to the state I saw while In the US, nor with the same vitriolic language - NBC news talking about how Toyota might be called in front of congress to explain the flaw. The only think I can think of to explain this is bitterness at the demise of the US auto industry in the 80s.
executive summary:

gruber was wrong again and is correcting himself, don't waste your time
I have a Hackintosh Samsung NC10, which I've been using for over a year. I use it as my main workstation in the office in preference to a HP box running Ubuntu (with a second monitor and using the Linux box's keyboard/mouse using synergy).

I use it extensively at home and when out and about, for general internet use and for software development - I wrote a VoIP Twitter mash-up on it. I've got a perfectly good Ruby development environment, and I've even got Asterisk installed on it.

It did require some abuse to get going, and it's still on 10.5. It has... personality. But I do use it every single day, far more than my 24" iMac.
Literal, fanboyish answer: "Buy a Mac Pro or Mac Mini and stick it under the table and use whatever monitor/keyboard/mouse you want."

Practical, not-as-fanboyish answer: I'm guessing that your aesthetic taste varies from mine (since I like how Mac's tend to look.) In that case, I'd say "don't buy a Mac." Apple chooses to bundle hardware and software. Thats their decision and pretty much their bottom line; use it. Or don't.
StackOverflow runs on a
3.33 Ghz quad core x 2, 48 GB RAM, 6 drive RAID 10

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/12/stack-overflow-rack-gl...

So if Digg is as 10x times the size they would need a (assuming perfect scaling)
3.33 Ghz quad core x 20, 480 GB RAM, 60 drive RAID 10

Oh, but you can't get anything more than 8 sockets in x86, and Windows only runs on x86 now. So assuming you switch away from Windows, you'll need a Sun or IBM for that.

Sun's kit is only Dual-Core and the processors aren't as fast (either per Ghz or in clockrate), so here is the 64 CPU model you'd need and it's already got 64 disks:
"For a 64-processor gorilla, 2.4 GHz SPARCVI dual-core chips, 6 MB of on-chip L2 cache, 128 GB of memory and a 64 x 73 GB SAS drive raise the price tag to $10,100,320."

http://www.serverwatch.com/hreviews/article.php/3688771/Serv...

And not forgetting you'll probably want to upgrade the 128GB of memory it comes with and you'll need two of these really (the other for failover)
How do NoSQL databases allow you to do a better job at "secondary data reuse" than a traditional RDBMS? Is it just a matter of (1) Denormalization (2) performance gains from not needing to worry about transactions?
Nice concept, I would love to see it as a web app. But this implementation... WPF? Xcopy? Internet Explorer preview?
there is 0 new interesting factual information in that article. it's just usual pro-market anti-government libertarian mantra all over again.
I've been doing something since October that was initially just two of us, but is now three.

The criteria for joining was the person had to be of sound character, open-minded and ambitious. They dont necessarily have to be part of a start-up.

I initially did something on Skype, but i didnt feel it worked as well as it could have, so moved it offline.

We meet once a week, and we congratulate each other on our achievements on the week, then we 'reflect' on our challengers from the previous week, and then we discuss our challenges for the next week. the whole thing lasts about 3 or 4 hours.

I took some inspiration from another mastermind group i attended online last january, and then built upon it further in the way that i felt it worked for me.

I'm really glad i took the step. Initially it was really hard to come up with a working structure, but the guy that joined the group was me was very flexible and open-minded, so got the thing refined in just a few weeks, and now i feel it works great. Has really helped me think differently about things, and learn more than i could have done on my own, and with assurity i can say, its had the same result for the other 2 guys now.

We just felt it works much better face to face. We've all been very dedicated to it, and we dont just discuss professional achievements and challenges , but personal ones too (within reason).

Just thought i'd share (not bragging ;-) )
Yeah, but he is wrong. Nothing compares to a good method actor. Look at some of the most brilliant and memorable roles in movies and they were not done with merely "a strong voice and superb diction." Say Al Pacino in scarface or Marlon Brando in the godfather, these people became the character (and both had really bad diction, btw).

I think his instructions are for average actors, who think they are Marlon Brando and do a bad Brando impersonation when acting. These are the actors that drive directors crazy, so directors always tell them to keep it simple.
Except of course, TFA is not that, but instead, "Train riders, we're not complete idiots for driving cars."
Problem: as I understand it, the issue is with the state of residence of the investor(s). California today has a critical mass of angels (but how much further can the state decline before enough of them flee???).

But let's say I was in Arlington, Virginia (not hard for me to imagine since I was there from 1991 to 2004 :-). My potential investor pool would ideally include residents of D.C. and suburban Maryland. If Dodd passes I've now got to worry about three different sets of state laws, and I'm sure at least one will be insane.

As far as moving to Montana to get that great angel investment (hardly out of the question, look at Simplot and Micron in Idaho), well ... how likely are you to be successful there? Recruiting people to come there wouldn't be quite as hard as to Yellowknife in Canada, but, seriously....

There's reasons the SV startup ecosystem is so good, and Boston's is good enough to make it the undisputed #2. Expecting to go just anywhere and replicate the same success strikes me as unrealistic.
Can You Spot The Partisan Legislation?
much better skeptical article with numbers to back it up minus libertarian bs http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1186609
On Distributed Consistency
This seems a bit confused.

Apparently Apple higher-ups are really pissed at (parts of) Google, Android mainly, but Google higher-ups are really pissed at all of Apple ("managers are talking about waging war").

Two possibilities I see are: either Apple is unaware that the whole of Google are conspiring against them, or this is entirely on Apple's side. It's possible that Gruber's Google sources are all within the Android team but surely he would have pieced that together on his own?
Hacker Sentenced to 20 Years for Breach of Credit Card Processor
> The science of nutrition and biochemistry in general is anything but primitive.

Really? Given a particular food item/meal/diet, can we accurately predict all of the effects it will have on a particular person? As far as I can tell, our knowledge of nutrition (even the most “scientific” bits I’ve seen) are largely based on a few stabs in the dark, lots of hearsay/anecdote, and either exaggeration or lots of hedging.

Add in questions about which food items are most useful when eaten at the same time, what part of our daily schedule should have which foods, how nutrition intersects/interacts with sleep/exercise/mental activity, etc., and I’ve never read anything that leads me to believe we have even the beginnings of an “advanced” understanding.

We can make some broad suggestions: eat a varied diet; hold off on the sugar; try to get some aerobic exercise; sleep enough; get enough sunshine; etc. But human bodies seem to be pretty tolerant of many possible diets: which can we tolerate, and under which do we thrive?

Our daily diets – for example eggs and cereal for breakfast, sandwiches at midday, a piece of meat and some mixed vegetables or some pasta or whatever at night – are basically culturally specific, driven by historical accident: in different parts of the world, diets, work schedules, types of physical exercise, &c. vary substantially; which of these differences are because of legitimately different needs, and which are arbitrary?
I've been using Clojure a lot and have been lamenting the fact that Clojure, while great for building applications isn't great for shell scripting. Racket may be just the tool I reach for when I can't write it in Clojure.

2010 looks like it's going to be a great year for Lisp.