skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Feedback requested for an argument about P =/= NP
An argument that P != NP

1) Multiplication problems (ab, a AND b) are less computationally expensive than addition problems (a+b) by a factor of about 2.

2) NP problems can have in the worst case scenario somewhere in the vicinity of N^K OR operations.

3) P problems have OR operations on the order of NK operations.

4) The increase of AND problems as P --> NP scales linearly in terms of increased computational cost by (1) so we mostly
consider the increase of cost due to OR problems as P --> NP.

5) The cost of NP diverges rapidly from P as the number of addition problems (OR operations) increases.

6) By (5) whereas muliplication problems (AND operations) scale linearly as P --> NP, this does not occur for OR operations.
An N-SAT problem with many OR operators will always be more difficult than a problem with say N AND gates.

7) Because of the diverging cost of OR as P --> NP, NP cannot be reduced into P, as that would put OR and AND operations on the same
footing which cannot be done by (1).

8) As by (7) NP does not reduce to P, P != NP.

Justification of (1) that OR is more expensive than AND:

The problem 2 * 3 is solved by taking pointer p and increasing it by length p, that is to say,
moving p from pointing at memory block 3 and moving it down 3 blocks to point at memory block 6.

The problem 2 + 3 is solved by adding a pointer p1, and adding this to p, such that p + p1 gives
a state in which p1 is pointed at memory block 5.

The second operation (2 + 3) is more expensive than the first operation (2*3) because
in the second one we needed two pointers, p and p1, whereas in the first we only had the one pointer,
p.

Thus OR problems (addition operations) need in general more pointers to solve than AND problems
(multiplication operations) which translates into being computationally more expensive.
More discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1264818
Mesofacts, Memes and More: 25 New Tech Words You Need to Know
The other part I don't understand is how the telecoms think they're actually going to get Google to pay this in the first place. If they tell Google they won't carry the Google traffic over their connections if they don't pay (sounds a bit like blackmail?) I'm sure Google would just say "Ok, see you later!". The telecoms that do that would just end up losing customers because really, who would want a connection that's either: a) filtered in general or b) filtered from Google traffic?
11 of the Best Free Linux Voice Over IP (VoIP) Software
I guess the period of observation is the key variable here, since it lets you determine the normal and retrograde orbital periods that "solve" the equation.

I don't think it's always a 10x difference, but I haven't thought too hard about the math. I think the difference depends on the relation between the observation period and calculated orbital period based on the observations.

I can imagine a scenario where the difference would approach 0, the only difference being direction. For instance if your observation period is +/- 1% of an orbit, the major difference in orbit between the two predicted orbits would be direction, with only a minor difference in magnitude.
We've got quite large desk and good quality screen. So we just zoomed in on font size and that was ok. I would not do it on a projector as after few hours on a projector eyes tend to don't see anything any more.
We all like to write a game like following, but...

Create football stadium and football players.
Start the game when user presses spacebar.
Make players have red shirts and white socks.

http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/Could-You-Explain-Programmin...
I'd like to know if this point is meant to apply to self-hosting VCSes.
The Gift of the Survival Dance
Are these iPad stories ever gonna die? Honestly, why is this news? pg eats breakfast, nothing. Jobs eats breakfast and we spend 6 weeks talking about how awesome the cornflakes are. We get it. Cornflakes are nice. Can we move on?
> trying to teach them stuff they do not care about flies in the face of good user experience

The worry about "user experience" is the cholesterol-rich fast-food of design. It's terrible, dumbs users down, but, somehow, it's addictive. Imagine a world of immediate gratification and zero frustration. That's what many people are tying to build.

> they just don't give a shit about stuff that is cruft

Not everything you don't grasp, or that was decided before you were born, is cruft.

> The fact that tiny URLs are such widespread

Tiny URLs are a reaction against poorly-designed, overly complex URLs that convey little or no meaning. Nobody needs Bit.ly to go to http://www.google.com. I'm all in for not failing when a user fails to type http://, but I am completely against hiding it under a magical hood that will protect users from the dangerous unknown techniques under it.

Knowledge is power and, therefore, it belongs to the people. The better it's distributed, the better.
i like that because it's a string's method returning a string.
Possibly, but that div is a literal chunk of HTML so that's arguably closer to a string than the normal jQuery selectors.
The Tufte books are brilliant. For dynamic charts, his first book (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information) is the most relevant, it covers the theory - how to tell a good representation from a bad one - and the basics.

Readings in Information Visualization ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Readings-Information-Visualization-I... ) is a collection of papers covering a wide range of techniques for a wide range of tasks.

Apart from that, it's mostly a matter of picking up interesting ideas wherever you find them. flowingdata.com is nice, same with http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/
Hey Joel, how about a legal and tax Stack Exchange by state? This is the type of material I would expert to find in there.
I can see that being a problem too. I think in that case you would have to change the validation code to look for those exceptional cases. In all honesty the validation as it is now is designed to handle content on more conversational sites (versus technical ones).

I'll be interested to see what people use the validation for and there shouldn't be any problem expanding the code to handle more edge-cases...
Any HN developers outside of the United States - drop me an email and I'll be happy to go UPS/FedEx you an iPad. Heck, I'll even let you use my US Post Office box (650 Castro Street, Mountain View, CA) if you need a US address to sign up for the iPad developer program.
Thanks, is this linked from your main site somewhere? I couldn't find it last night.
Thanks! I don't expect it would be too hard, most of the logic can be taken pretty much as-is. Let me know how it goes aaron@aarongough.com
I like the quick fix the site designer used to switch from a static layout to a fluid one.
You really think that driving down 101 (or riding a WiFi bus) and to Castro Street for lunch shows you what living in the South Bay is like? Wowsers.

FWIW, almost all of suburban South Bay housing has a grocery store within 20 walking minutes. (There may be a spot in the middle of Atherton that doesn't. The rural areas of Woodside and Portola Valley don't.) I mention that because of the claim above about how to "fix" American suburbs.
The need for gov't intervention is symptomatic of a lack of competition. This is the issue that should be addressed.

In a competitive market, an ISP wouldn't be able to pull this off because its customers would revolt if services that they cared about weren't there.
Great!

More time for Steve to think how to lift the developer restrictions. My buying decisions for iPhone OS gear are delayed until then.
maybe you are right; but personally, one of the big reasons I started my own business was that I saw really, really good people only made 20%-50% more than absolute mediocres, when they were 10-20 times more productive.

If it were possible to make big bucks without starting your own company would I have continued to work for others? maybe.

The thing is, some people say "Once I have enough, it doesn't matter" and certainly, the $100K/year that your average bay area computer person makes is 'enough' to live on... but double that and you will be able to retire in less than half the time. Retire and work on your own terms, if you like.

For me, that is what getting more money is about. I don't really care about having a nicer car or anything, but it sure would be nice to be able to, say, take a year off and travel, and not worry about what employers would think about the year-long gap in my resume.
You might want to check out the processing language at:

http://www.processing.org/

And look at the examples section.

A lot of it is about artistic sorts of representation, but it is programmatic. There are a few books that the authors of the language wrote, including the visualizing data book mentioned by duck. (They are mentioned on the front page of processing.org).

It is a pretty neat language, and the core functionality can be used as a Java library. (I have been working through the 'processing a programming handbook', and it is more about using the language than about ways to display the data (So you might want to pick one of the other books)).
I have to say I'm impressed with the turnaround time to have hnhackers.com up rbitar. Sure it's a simple straightforward site, but it looks good. The original link was posted less than 24 hours ago. The domain name shouldn't have even propagated that fast lol.
Synopsis:

Yes. And use my url-shortener-disguised-referral-links to sign up, giving me a referral bonus of extra space.
And to finish that quote...
"pointed to pictures of girls when asked who played with dolls and chose boys when asked, say, who likes toy cars."

Yeah one kid's arm had no gender bias, but the rest of them were full of it!

Also is the 40 kids 40 kids with Williams or 40 kids total? Either way it's a pathetically small sample size, but one is way worse...
lol where were you 5 years ago?
Interesting, but somehow doubt that many people have the set-up to handle this number of data.
How about using mouse tracking like the page analytics guys do. What people are hovering their mouse over is what their reading ... and that constitutes a "vote".
Cat operating an iPad
I've never done pair programming in a professional setting, but every time I've paired on a personal project it's been really awesome. Then again, my pairs were great coders, so I can't comment on what would happen if your pair was terrible.
I paid £390 for the iPad itself (including US sales tax of 6%) and the Bundlebox fee. This is about equivalent to the anticipated UK price of £399 for the 16GB Wifi iPad. Then I paid £120 for the VAT (a necessary evil, alas) and 2-3 day delivery. With slightly slower delivery, it'd have been £100.

So it was £500-520 in total. This seems reasonable considering I have an iPad almost two months early - gives me a nice head start on some things.
There probably aren't. I don't know if tells more about the projects or the state of software in general. I'd bet on the latter.
While operational research is an interesting discipline, it's a niche one so it will hardly reach what joel&co consider a big enough audience.
They should start their own site using an ad hoc platform (i guess it will not be a problem if some of the SE features are missing), imo.
Doesn't include deleted articles, so no hope if you want to recover one of them. This is a pity since Wikipedia deletes too many articles.
JQuery 1.4 Cheat Sheet
I like the idea of the site, but it should be opt out by default for anything you scraped from the spreadsheet. Once someone claims their password, they can decide what info to display if any.

Scraping user data from one site and putting it up on your own without their permission is not cool IMO.

I agree with the negative comments about the $100/hr+ subtitle. Apart from the implicit elitism, it isn't even true for a lot of the people in the original spreadsheet.

Also, as has been mentioned in other comments, the reclaim password functionality is broken, so I have no idea what I can or can't edit on my profile.
Leland Wilkinson's "The Grammar of Graphics" http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Graphics-Leland-Wilkinson/dp/0... is also excellent and fully implemented in the R programming language/statistics package ( http://www.amazon.com/ggplot2-Elegant-Graphics-Data-Analysis... )
Well, "rolling your own programming language" wasn't mentioned in this fail list, but I feel it could have been, since build systems and vcs are mentioned. Hence the fail points for Emacs. Now, it can also yield win points for using an especially well suited programming language.

(Bye the way, I love Emacs)
Tufte is great, but he's extremely heavy and a bit dated. He is about 80% brilliant 20% completely missing the point. It's very strange.

If you are looking for a smaller book I've found the WSJ Guide to Information Graphics by Dona Wong to be pretty decent and pretty straight forward, and it's about 100 pages. It's not too focused on finance either, although that's what I got it for (I do front end development for financial analysis company - lots of charting).

http://www.amazon.com/Street-Journal-Guide-Information-Graph...
This relevant how?
Somewhat confused arguments here, given that Google has started an initiative to make the web faster (through reducing file sizes and HTML cruft):

http://code.google.com/speed/articles/
The article says Tb not TB, but in reality it appears to be TB. That's quite a difference. Still seems heavy for text, but I assume the full text of every revision is in it, not just diffs.
He's on HN, BTW: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=wingo

At this point, though, for me anything that is not BSD licensed is a non-starter. I'm not that much of a license zealot for other things, but for programming languages I think it's pretty important. A lot of the value in a language comes from having lots of users (and thus libraries, support, etc...), so cutting off people who want to include it in a proprietary product seems like a bad idea.
Murdoch Vs Google: Round 2 Begins
Free MP3 Downloads
eMusic has Music downloads available from tens of thousands of artists. Top songs and albums available in all genres from classic rock to jazz to hip hop to rap.
Just to clarify - I'm assuming this is sarcasm. Don't want to risk someone taking this as a good thing.
That’s interesting! Can’t they bring that up the next time they discuss their peering agreement with Google? Would they really stand no chance of negotiating a better deal – even if enough of them work together?

And why are they making this particular argument they are making now and don’t demand something which might sound more reasonable like regulating the market of peering agreements or something?
>* Your code tries to install into /opt or /usr/local [ +10 points of FAIL ]

I think this one bothered me the most. `/usr/local` is the correct default location for user installed software, per the "Filesystem Hierarchy Standard". If the software's static file must be contained in a `./<package>`or `./<provider>` directory (vs bin, lib, share...), it should probably go in `/opt`.
Looks like we got TechCrunched too: http://www.techcrunchit.com/2010/04/14/rally-software-buys-u...
Usually you can find the specifics of these sorts of contracts on FBO.gov, but upon a closer inspection of the article, the $20MM win to Booz was a University of Maryland contract, so I can't dig up any specifics.

In all fairness, even if the work WAS just to stand up a mailing list and a wiki, I would expect it to be no less than 3 million. Many contractors spend up to a million just to WIN THE BID (though unlikely for one so small), but hell, just meeting the requirements of the RFP process requires expert personnel who charge upwards of $300 an hour.
So you create a barrier by rejecting "bad" comments versus creating a barrier by using signup/captchas etc.

I'm not really buying it. The problem in communities isn't really bad writing or quick comments, it's usually trolls who will circumvent something like this quite easily.
Ah ok, I understand a little more now. Seems like starting with a narrower focus would be good though - being the place for movie reviews, or science news, or politics etc is probably an easier starting goal than trying to be THE place to go to for news.

There's so many places to go for news online now it's kinda overwhelming.
Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin to the comedian) has an incredible book on gender differences in psychology called "The Essential Difference", where he puts forth the theory that Williams Syndrome is a condition diametrically opposite from autism: whereas autistics exhibit hyper-masculine behavior, children with Williams Syndrome exhibit hyper-feminine behavior. As he describes it, children with WS have verbal and social abilities that far outpace their physical development, while suffering severe mental retardation in pretty much all other areas, especially spacial and quantitative reasoning.

As others have mentioned, the condition also results in physical changes including pale skin, stunted growth, and abnormal facial features. It's not something one might wish upon one's children.
Congratulations..Do you mind if you I ask how are you taking the payments. Did you implement the billing system for user registration and recurring payments or used an existing payments ? We are a start up building our SaaS products. We are in a phase with a need to implement accepting online payments. Any guidance in this regard is greatly appreciated.
Information is Beautiful is great for fun stuff, but there are a ton of bad practices on that site, it's not for serious infographics. Be careful copying from it unless you are really able to tell where he's having fun and where his charts are serious (because he's very capable of both).
I see your point, but saying hi every now and then, or talking about stuff while walking to and from school doesn't really hurt. Besides, being ALL alone makes it pretty hard to get some constructive criticism from others, and you might suffer from depression/low self-esteem and such.

But obviously, don't party every single night if you want to become a rocket scientist.
Where epistemology fails: A quick comparison of UZR and Plus/Minus
The author isn't surprised. One main idea of the article is that general-purpose computers are necessarily fading from the limelight as special-purpose computing devices such as the iPad come into their own. The other, more significant, main idea of the article is that this is no cause for alarm.
> It's a convenience so that every iterable object in the world doesn't need to implement a join() method.

The way to do this would be to have an IterableMixin that implements join() (and a load of other stuff) so long as the subclass implements a small number of basic methods.
The Best Word Your Customers Will Ever Hear
While I tend to agree, that tactic can backfire if the ISP's get together and present a unified front. If Google is only avail on 1/5 of the major ISP's, Yahoo or whoever pays up will see a crapload of new business. It's much easier for an end user to simply switch to using Yahoo! than to switch ISP's (for example I basically have no other choice for high speed other than Comcast)
It's not just a marketing trick. Keeping product warehouse inventories low reduces risk and allows a company more flexibility when changing products.
I guess it works for training new engineers -- they can learn from each other as well as from experienced folks. After a while though, the outcome will be that one either has the talent and the 'knack' for it, or they don't. Those with talent and skill will outgrow the need for training wheels and structured support.
Children with the condition are also severely mentally handicapped, and have stunted growth and abnormal facial features. It's a disorder.
I can actually see how it would be in Google's interest to consider investing in areas where the network is, say, "sub par".

Legal action doesn't seem like a conducive way to encourage that idea....
What about the Affero GPL? It's a GPLv3 that also allow you to receive code modification when a software is used in SaaS mode.
I'm not sure if this is the level of protection you are searching, this has always seemed a bit to strict to me (as gplv3)...
Dumb unexciting business models can still be very profitable. For example: toll booths on highways.
"The most common symptoms of Williams syndrome are mental retardation, heart defects, and unusual facial features... many cardiac problems, commonly heart murmurs and the narrowing of major blood vessels as well as supravalvular aortic stenosis (SVAS)... hyperacusis and phonophobia which resembles noise-induced hearing loss, but this may be due to a malfunctioning auditory nerve... problems with visual processing, but this is related to difficulty in dealing with complex spatial relationships rather than to issues with depth perception"

It is entirely in keeping with Mother Nature that in order to get what you want, you have to make significant tradeoffs.
Thanks for explaining. Be interesting to know how many people use RSS. I've never got into it FWIW. If I really loved a review I would of course bookmark the site and pop back every so often though.

I do think a narrower focus would make building a community easier though.
Agreed. I was assuming that you have read your Tufte :) and can tell informative visuals from those that are primarily pretty or entertaining.
Scheme is certainly a nicer language than emacs lisp, but is it really worth all the effort of replacing it? So much code is going to have to be fixed or rewritten. Why not spend that time adding new features or building something new entirely?
Google is so ubiquitous to people's web use now it would only take one to not join the filtering for the idea to collapse.

XYZ ISP would have a killer selling point ("we have Google!") and would almost certainly make a killing...
It seemed like a good time to raise this again in light of the Mobile Multitasking discussion.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1264119
> Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a monumental book.

Agreed, its absolutely excellent. Thanks to Y Combinator for listing it in the book list.

> Additionally, if I were you, I'd stay way from statistical approaches to displaying information...

Not agreed. In my opinion you might have missed what I felt was a main point of that book: Always learn the appropriate statistics required to understand the data, choose a correct visualization method to communicate those statistics effectively, and once you've understood it fully, confirmed the results, and removed all the cruft, then publish it.
That sounds massively anti-competitive and probably very illegal.
Yup, that worked. Lost password, enter the email you entered in the spreadsheet, boom.
40 + 15 days to compress? how long it would take to decompress this thing
That would still be incorrect. For all the searches I tried (including a number of people for whom "other people write more about them than they write themselves" is true) the results are laughably bad.

Maybe if they changed it to: "Cpedia will almost always be wrong and nonsensical."

But then, why release it?
In the EU (At least in the UK), you have vast competition amongst ISPs with everyone undercutting everyone else. There's probably around 100 ISPs I could choose from to get my ADSL line from.

I think the toll booth would fit in more with some US areas where there's only 1 ISP available (AFAIK).
Flash Video Content without Flash
Mmmm, this irony is delicious.
The cable and satellite TV companies are the closest comparison I can think of for an existing example of their dream model. And guess what? The experience is miserable for everyone except those raking in the money.
Villagers forced to form their own telco to get fast broadband
The study this organisation did polled several puppets and the consensus was that everyone's a little bit racist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbQiSVeQwVQ