skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For sure, I was speaking in the context of the packing problems, and even simpler discrete combinatorial problems, which really are pretty simple. But I wouldn't dismiss trivial pruning lightly; many problems can have their search branches pruned early based on their costs exceeding the current best solution, and as that solution gets better, it will start pruning higher up the search tree.

The knapsack problem, as you know, is NP-Complete.
It is interesting when you consider that supply is still constrained.
Actually Christians do seem to constantly apologize and distance themselves from Christians with whom they disagree. Every time Pat Robertson opens his mouth you'll see swarms of Christians clarifying THIS IS NOT WHAT I BELIEVE. I think "fracturing the community" is great if it means promoting what is just and right. It seems Muslims have a much harder time being critical of their own religion and it may actually be the cause of many of the problems.
So I'd buy this, but how do I as an adult with lower than average self-discipline improve this facet of myself? Is it something you are born with? It seems paradoxical to try to achieve high self discipline through determined hard work.
If they don't want people to redistribute the code, why on earth are they GPL'ing it?
And it's gone...
Employers should take note: a new way to discriminate in hiring!
No, it's not designed to insult muslims. This is a completely mistaken impression.

Given that you have that impression, I understand why you reacted the way you did, but your impression is incorrect.

It's like saying that when I use a gun to defend my house from a burglar wearing a red hat, that my aim is to kill people with red hats. Completely missing the point.

The aim of this movement is to defend free speech (my house) from extremists (burglars) not people who happen to be muslim (wear red hats).
I don't think this is it. This was a research project that was undertaken with the express knowledge that it probably wouldn't be immediately useful. It was an attempt to see what components of an OS might be able to be moved to .Net.

I'm thinking more along the lines of the "filesystem is a database" idea they had.
Quantum of Deployment: Etsy's deployment architecture
Gödel's incompleteness theorems are proof though contradiction which as I said can be interesting. (Or I should say they are part of the set of proofs though contradiction.) However, the paradox is not interesting it's just paradox = bad assumption.

So, don't read to much into Gödel, you also can't prove 1 + 1 = 2 except by making an equivalent assumption. Yet, that does not mean what you think it means.

PS: I don't think HN has jumped the shark, but I do try and keep it clean. IMO, it was fairly close to the acceptable line but to close to the HN equivalent of a funny cat photo, (hey look a paradox how cute), but a longer post taking about a well defined paradox and it's implications would have been acceptable and had a much cleaner discussion.
Free Software Foundation statement on WebM and VP8
Managing Large-Scale Category Structures on E-Commerce Sites
If anything religion is just the rationalization of intrinsic human tendency for violence, or perhaps fear. Getting rid of religion won't fix the problem.
30% is mDNS which is multicast presence notification -- iTunes sharing, Bonjour etc. Blame Apple.
What starts with "T" & lets you broadcast a message to millions of followers?
So why decide to insult one giant group of people who didn't threaten anyone (all the Muslims that didn't send out death threats) instead of another (all the Christians that didn't send out death threats)?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1364553
There's already startups.com (but it doesn't cater to the same HN group). The problem with SE sites is they are geared more to solving problems and less about having a dialog.
That comment can safely be ignored. It makes lots of vague accusations about Venter, and one concrete accusation - that Venter is responsible for patents on genes involved in breast cancer. That accusation is wrong: it's a reference to the BRCA patent by Myriad genetics, which has nothing to do with Venter.
This response isn't counter productive. Immature and childish yes. Counter productive no. It helps to point out the importance of free speech.
"And all learning is done on one's own, really."

Sad to say, not everyone works that way. I'd say that more people are dependent upon others teaching them than anything else.
I don't understand why Apple hasn't made an App Store and SDK for the Apple TV like with the iPhone/iPad. Maybe then it would be worth buying.
I don't think we do understand the problem. What is understandable about being offended when someone draws a picture of a person? It's absolute nonsense and doesn't require any respect whatsoever.

What if I'm offended when you wear your hat backwards and threaten to kill you? What's less special about me than about muslims?
> What I'm trying to say is that the profile of the US (the general symbol of Westernism in Islamic states) is already extremely low. A lot of people consider the US rude and intolerant; that's just the image that has unfortunately developed. Ordinary people in those states are probably looking at this and thinking "well this just proves it doesn't it".

That's odd, I thought this day was about fighting intolerance, not supporting it.

Funny. Intolerance is being used in two diametrically opposed ways here:

1) Can Muslims tolerate other's rights to express themselves?

2) Can Freedom-Of-Speecher's tolerate Muslim's intolerance?

Is tolerating intolerance tolerant or intolerant?

It seems almost like a koan.

I think the truly tolerant person would be very much like a "stoner" here: tolerating both those who draw pictures of Muhammad, and tolerating (read: understanding) the outrage of Muslims. "OK man... I see you're drawing a picture... OK man... I see you're stabbing that other dude..."

That right there is ultimate tolerance. Holding to no belief in other words.

Where do you find yourself?
Gripe: "artificial life" already has a somewhat lengthy history of usage, referring to emulating biological activity or traits in software or hardware. It's often shortened to just alife or a-life.

It's related to genetic algorithms, genetic programming, and the like.

It would be nice if the using-real-chemicals-and-alive-stuff hacking were called "synthetic life", or something to distinguish it from existing terminology.
Track down your stolen laptop
If you are producing 10 and suddenly you can't even produce 1, that's a burnout. If you been producing your whole life 0.5 and you need a solution based on the potential findings of this research as a diagnosis and an accompanying therapy, to stimulate your brain to produce 10, then maybe I understood what you meant.
Clang++ Builds Boost
Sure there's a reason. But it's not an acceptable reason, a tolerable reason, or even a reason that should be the least bit of respect.

[NB I did not downvote you]
If you want to fight extremism, try aiming what's fueling it, not the end result.
Harvest looking for a UX Designer with ZERO experience
I didn't bother looking at the link, but with regard to the above comment, humans - at a scale - are predictable. We wouldn't have successful fields like psychology and economics if that weren't the case.
I'm not sure in this case - it would seem to me that the community here is basically split 50/50 on this issue, and there does seem to be a lot of emotional modding going on.

That being said, generally on HN one-liners that don't really add substantial elements to the discussions are downmodded to oblivion in an attempt to keep this place from degenerating into reddit ;)
You know what? You're right, certainly moreso than people are giving you credit for. Writing a backtracking, depth-first-search brute-forcer really isn't that hard (especially if you have continuations). It's once you've also added e.g. unification that you're well on the way to reimplementing Prolog.

Shame on me for being snarky.
I'd imagine that if they hadn't given that control to carriers and manufacturers, we wouldn't have had a carrier to release a flagship model on...
Absolutely! In case it's not clear you are dead right (I hoped that came across).
About the box at the top for new and upcoming links: If you click "what's this?" and then "close help" it doesn't actually close the help. It just removes the close help link. Saw that you're busy in one of the later comments, but I thought I would mention it.
There's an "update all" option (providing permissions haven't changed) in the market now -- that should quell a few complaints!
I am totally confused. Is Google going to sell a box like apple TV and Boxee box?
very informative video on guardian from Craig Venter: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-s...
no don't do that. if you are solo, you need to be focussed on what you are building. Creating something of HN scale would consume you and if you just want a community for few people, just add them to a mailing list or something.
Nobody's suggesting we personally thrust picutures of Mohammed in the faces of muslims.

Posting something on the internet (or broadcasting a TV show) that no-one has to see if they don't want to is something entirely different.
The Shameless Art of Self Promotion
The timeless and everlasting art of self promotion is something that’s pushed onto each and every one of us day in and day out. Even more imperative, as many of us here are offering something to others, is that we must find the often hazy line of the shameless and stay as far away from it as possible.
Didn't the author totally miss out on the most important consequence of a "level playing field"? That is, anyone can feel like they can safely invest. A level playing field opens the stock market to people in rural areas, rather than limiting it to well-connected upper-crust insiders. A lot more money can end up capitalizing innovators and entrepreneurs.
What is meant by burn-out here? The article doesn't define it.
I'm using an alix 2d3 as well, very impressed with it so far.
So does dressing up in white robes and goofy hats and marching with racial epithets on signs. The ACLU --- one of the few causes I actually donate too, despite them being unbelieveably annoying once you do --- made quite a bit deal of that. But the people doing the marching? Total counterproductive douchebags. We tolerated them. We didn't encourage them.
Lars Rasmussen, Using Google Wave for Collaborative Software Development
> Can Muslims tolerate other's rights to express themselves?

I don't think it's about that. One Muslim living in an Arab state (who I discuss these issues with) said the following:

People here won't be too bothered about Americans drawing Mohammed in itself. What they will roll their eyes at is the fact that those people think they are making some big statement when, actually, it is the reaction expected of them by extremists. It's getting predictable - and it is the ignorance that is getting tedious

Personally I have no belief (as you put it). I do think this is silly and misses the point though :)
How do you find running snapshots? I always figured just from the name you could expect them to have problems.
I understand the reason that this strategy works and why moderates don't actively distance themselves from it. By keeping silent and vague they will benefit from the power that the threat of violence gives. In Denmark there are quite a few places where the police can't operate on normal terms due to the mentality exhibited in the video above.

What I mean by double standard and excuses is the tendency to always add 'reasons' when it comes to islam.

Why do this behavior need to be taken on other terms than personal responsibility and the norms of civil conduct? It's not like the attackers - due to their religious affiliation and reasons derived from this - lack choice.
Sorry, but I disagree.

It is interesting.

It is interesting because it is a new product category and it is selling like crazy. Truly new categories of personal computing devices don't happen very often at all. Desktop, laptop, mobile phone, netbook, touch screen mobile phone . . . now this. There's the history of product categories for 30 years. Chrome OS may change that again.

It is also interesting because when a consumer has only so much budget for new computing devices. Their choices matter, not only to Apple but to competitors.
ODE TO OAF (Open Angel Forum - LA)
Drawing Muhammed isn't taboo to Westerners, but denying the Holocaust is. So I don't think we should expect an "Everybody Deny the Holocaust Day", or even an "Everybody Wear A Swastika Armband Day" (though if gangs of anti-fascists started killing people for denying the Holocaust...).

Europe has worrying levels of political censorship, of course, but they always have and always will. The difference is that no one actually killed anyone for saying "David Cameron Is A Wanker". "John Terry Is A Wanker" might get you bludgeoned to death with a wadded up newspaper, of course, but then football hooliganism is not nearly as tolerated as Islamic hooliganism. That's really the root of the problem here, isn't it?
Ask HN: When to pivot/optimize and when to abandon ship?
I recently finished the beta version of my website (soundkey.com) and started attracting visitors using Google AdWords, just to see how "sticky" the website is and to get some data on users' behavior (using Google Analytics to track usage patterns).

The results, while prelimnary, have been quite dissapointing, and I wanted to know from the collective experience of HN readers, if this is something I should just learn from and soldier on, or take as a sign that I'm not offering a useful service and abandon or at least scale down this effort.

Stats: There were about 2,000 visitors over several days, with about 1 min avg time on the site and 2.3 pages/visit, which may or may not be decent, but only had a handful of submissions (less than 10).

It's likely that AdWords is not the best way to attract my initial user base, but even so, I expected at least some non-negligible user involvement.

Have any of you had experience with web apps that you put up, and initially got negligible traction from visitors, and then, after the right steps had that increase significantly?

I could hire a professional designer to improve the look, do customer development, find and target early adopters, pivot & adapt the product, do marketing, PR, SEO, etc, but I'm concerned that if out of a couple of thousand users only a handful found it useful enough to use (for free and without the need for registration) maybe I shouldn't be trying to "put lipstick on a pig".

What do you guys think? Am I being too pessimistic, or realistic?

How do you know when it's time to pivot & optimize versus abandon an effort?
It's not even that hard:

while [ true ]; do
curl www.google.com
done
A Tesla-Toyota electric dream machine?
I'm going to advocate that the USA try to meta-win this meta-competition: C'mon, USA, start competing again! Scrap with me!
Ummm... it would be nicer to have something where my domain can simply assert that me@mydomain is equivalent for the moment to me2@otherdomain and the otherdomain has to do nothing extra. If the otherdomain has to assert mydomain then I no longer have total control and it all is suddenly a lot less transparent.
Thank you. I think this is the finest example of an anti-Draw Mohammed Day comment on Hacker News.

You didn't react emotionally, didn't appeal to "can't we all just get along", and provided plenty of analogous cases for comparison.

You've given me a lot to think about. This is one of the reasons why Hacker News is great!

For what it's worth: I disagree with your argument and think it is rebuttable, but it was measured and considered and I'll learn a lot thinking about why I disagree with you.
> What is understandable about being offended when someone draws a picture of a person?

It's a culture thing. Like.. why do some innocent (to us) gestures in Japan cause offence? It appears inexplicable.

> What if I'm offended when you wear your hat backwards and threaten to kill you?

What if your whole street is made uncomfortable by me wearing my hat backwards - but don't want to kill me for it. Is me walking up and down the street for a day with my hat on backwards a particularly good way to denounce you?

I'd argue there are better ways; like exposing you to the wider world (obviously, the solution to extremism is a harder problem)
When will Rails 3 be formally released (as the stable, recommended version)?
This may be good for feedback/discussion: http://answers.onstartups.com/
To save some googling: http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle

Great find, by the way.
No. Muslims who are offended do not need to "get over it". They can be as offended and alienated as they want. The only thing they need to do is uphold our social contracts, none of which require them to be OK with people intentionally offending their religion.

That's the problem with this plan. It doesn't recognize the degrees of antagonism involved. It posits that there is "being OK with cartoons of Mohammad" and "being so not ok with those cartoons as to be incompatible with civilization", and excludes the vast middle ground.

Or, to the extent that it acknowledges that there is a middle, it posits that any social or cultural price is worth paying to demonstrate that we can't be pushed around by a tiny, virtually powerless minority whose actions aren't in any way influenced by these cartoons anyways.
The Price of Music is Based Largely on Ideology
Again, you're missing the point. It's not an attempt at communication. It's a defence of free speech.
Well tablets aren't 'truly new.' (Neither were netbooks for that matter.) The iPad just happens to be the first one with wide appeal.
This particular line of discussion prompted me to create a subreddit for us solo founders. Check it out at http://www.reddit.com/r/solostartups/ if you'd like to join in. I may be the only person posting there, but maybe others in the same boat I'm in will join in as well and we can all support each other through running a startup (or side project) all alone.
Smart grid privacy rules may be blown opportunity for science
I see what you mean (and I do agree; Islam possibly gets the most "free handouts" of all the religions). But..

Why do this behavior need to be taken on other terms than personal responsibility and the norms of civil conduct?

Clearly on a personal level their actions are their own responsibility and decisions - and are wrong.

But on a macro level there is just a reason why Muslims react this way and others don't. I think it's important to actually set out those reasons because somewhere in there we may begin to find a solution.
Google hit by class action suit over wi-fi privacy breach (court filings)
I also have a Mac Mini with Plex - it's an awesome arrangement, and I also have the Mini repurposed as a NAS of sorts.
International iPad App Stores start to go live
I prefer the subreddit approach, mostly because I subscribe to the subreddit and see new stuff there in addition to all my other reddits, without having to hit an extra site. Mixergy's community (FoundersMix) is great, but I don't care so much for the StackOverflow engine for general discussion.
You should know that information control, it's one of the fundamental weapons and control powers a government administration has. Every government knows this, and every government uses it (even though some use it less than others).

That's something you should think about. At least the Chinese government stated it publicly, while others mask it as democracy freedom.

I talk about governments and politics, but you should count religion in it. Do you think the Catholic Church (eg. the Vatican) doesn't influence decisions of governments? (I know something about this)
I actually really kind of like this idea (which has been around forever). In particular, it turns a CS problem that has worked to the advantage of criminals against them: there is a practically unbounded number of variations on this scheme, some of which can survive reimaging.
Ask HN: Lets talk about Etsy
I feel a business that doesn't get mentioned that often around here is Etsy. While the money raises and investors behind it can be read about on Tech Crunch, not much is mentioned about the business.

Thought I would get some discussion going on it:
-How do you feel Etsy was able to overcome the Chicken and the egg problem?
-Were they able to just find a great market that was being underserved by eBay?
-Do you see other markets that could flourish by being "spun" out of eBay?
-How were they able to market themselves to not only shopkeepers but consumers as well?

I am sure there are other good questions as well..
This is worthy of a news paper article and not just of a comment on HN.
Lean Startup Circle
I just started a subreddit for solo founders:

http://www.reddit.com/r/solostartups/

I'm going to start posting my "Not quite formal enough for HN" stuff there, since I tend to be self conscious when posting stupid questions related to working on my startup alone to the general HN audience. It's not Hacker News' fault, I'm just to shy to put myself out in front of such a large audience most of the time.
I'm not sure I can give much advice, but it might help for people to know what you think your target audience is and also what keywords you were using and what your ad text was.

To me it seems like you just aren't reaching the people who have a use for your site. I think you need to reach people who have a need that is met by your site and will instantly realize the value. For instance, just an idea, but maybe you can find hard to pronounce names and use those as a keyword and have the ad be something like 'tired of people mispronouncing your name?'
Hmm, I don't see this as an attempt to expose muslim extremists to muslim moderates.

I see it as an attempt for us as a liberal society to join in an affirmation of our principles.

Perhaps others will be offended, but uniting as a society around our treasured values is more important. Bringing the moderate muslims into the fold can happen later, once we're sure that our fold actually exists and is what we think it is (tolerant and liberal).
So what would an appropriate apology look like?
I agree with you.

However, I don't want to stay solo. I have been solo for two years. It's too much work and not as fun as a partnership.

Building a community is a long-term investment. It will give me a wider range of resources and opportunities.

Plus, I have often found that I become more creative, focused, and generally better at things when I interact with other people periodically, even with regular non-hacker-founders (alone time is important too of course). I imagine having a social circle of smart entrepreneurs will be exponentially more beneficial to each individual. Y-Combinator is so sought after because of that social aspect.

Great products are nice, but great friends are even better.