skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was browsing around the Wikipedia articles for Cellular Automata recently, and the thing that struck me about it is how easy it is to notice, if not understand, the levels of abstraction. You start with the rules of Conway's Game of Life and a few samples, easy enough. You think in terms of what a cell does. Then you learn about oscillators, periodic self-sustaining patterns, which aren't that surprising, and still on the level of individual cells.

Then you learn about Gliders, a simple pattern that in four generations gives rise to a copy of itself, but translated 1 cell away. Now we're not talking about what cells are doing anymore. We're talking about what patterns are doing, and they can move around independently from the cells used to represent them. It's a layer of abstraction.

You find out about objects like Reflectors, where when a Glider collides with it, the result is a Glider in a different direction, and things like the Glider Gun that periodically produces a new glider. You start arranging these things together to get a nice little circuit, and soon the Gliders aren't even the object of study anymore, they're just little blips that other things use to pass information. Instead of just the patterns, you now think in terms of the interactions between the patterns, which is another layer of abstraction.

And you can grok these successive layers of abstraction in 15 minutes of reading a little explanatory text and watching animated .gifs. I think the fact that Conway's Life is inherently a very visual phenomenon makes it easier to understand like that.

The article covers a lot of breadth of cellular automata. I think you get a lot more out of it if you have a tiny bit of depth in one particular automata first, so you can understand in a general sense the cool patterns and phenonema that it talks about. Quick reading on Conway's Life (selected with order in mind):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillator_(cellular_automaton)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_(Conways_Life)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_(cellular_automaton)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rake_(cellular_automaton)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_(cellular_automaton)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflector_(cellular_automaton)

Be sure to click through on the preview images to the animated version, especially rakes, breeders, and reflectors.
I often write out the pros and cons, weight them, do out the calculations, and then ignore them and go with my gut instinct.

There's some evidence that this is more effective than going strictly with the numbers. Our unconscious minds are often able to process more information than our conscious minds are: there're details that we're aware of, but don't know that we're aware of. They get missed in the calculation, but get included by a gut check.

The reason for writing out all the pros and cons, even if you throw them away later, is to force yourself to think about all the relevant facts that you can. There's a difference between issues you've never thought about and issues that you've thought about but can't hold in your head all at once. Plans are useless, but planning is essential.
I do worry about this a lot, actually. HN is a huge time sink for me, and I worry that it is for other people too. It's way worse for me of course-- moderating a forum is exactly the sort of pseudo-work I'm talking about in the essay-- but I often think about whether HN is too engaging for users too, and whether there are things I could to make it less so.
It seems a little strange, but get thee to a dictionary, and learn every word you can, the meanings, etc. Sometimes just having an excellent sense of word power can really take you far. It sure helped me growing up. :-)
They've been experimenting for years to find a way to build something lasting off TPB's audience, usually it's been turnkey scripts - pastebin, image hosting, blog hosting etc.

I think this concept is interesting but I don't think it's going to work (for them) - if you put $5 in your account and at the end of the month it's split between a couple dozen sites then each is getting pennies for sending their audiences off to give Tippr whole dollars.

If anyone can make this work it'll be Facebook with their credits system I think.
I just started eating more and more food. I usually try to go healthy, but in a pinch I'll get a Mars bar from our vending machine. (I even trained myself to drink milk and eat bananas. Things that I did not like before.)

Since I started weightlifting, I need the extra energy to keep my weight, and perhaps even gain some.
How about we say the ones not studying calculus are 85% likely to be just serving time. ;-)

How would you determine which university students are just there to get a degree, any degree?
Maybe it's just faster because none of your extensions are running? The ones you listed sound like they probably use lots of CPU time and memory, and if they are disabled I'm sure FF runs much faster / lighter.
Rate my Google App : Bookmarkvideos from YT or Hulu and share
View > Toolbars to enable Tabs on Top on the Mac. Unfortunately, the current implementation looks terrible, as they're the same "underside" tabs as before, only now they're between the window controls and the toolbar. (They note that you should wait in Known Issues, so this should get better.)

They also need to adopt something like Safari's URL-field-as-progress-indicator, or at least an animating graphic to indicate loading. Simply switching the refresh button to an 'X' is way too subtle, and at first I didn't think it was actually loading anything.

Edit: Oh, that's weird. I fired it up again and saw the stopwatch graphic and other loading indicators. Now I'm wondering if these didn't work the first time around, or if I just wasn't paying attention to them given that I'm habituated to Safari's indicators.
AP are dinosaurs, Woot are genuinely amusing and TC are trolling.

All is "right" in the world.

But why is it on hn :(
He held the keyboard upside down.
Fascinating. I can't imagine Grindr is wholly unique in its functionality, but its attaining a critical mass of users (especially among a very specific demographic) is likely its real revolution (much in the same way that Apple's FaceTime will be a game changer despite being unoriginal).

What puzzles me is that this is seen only as a system for sexual networking. Imagine all the other uses for something like this with a wide enough user base:

- Meeting interesting people while out by yourself

- Finding potential dates if you're not into hookups

- Finding ride sharing

- Getting an off-the-cuff opinion of a restaurant

- Asking someone what's clogging traffic two miles ahead
Fantastic article.

Now to just get to that "have money" stage.
Ask HN: Any startups doing anything interesting with LinkedIn API?
Don't see any startup activity even with 60M+ users on LinkedIn and an open API. Am I missing something?
Exertion Migraines &ndash; exertion short time migraines
Thanks, fixed. (Weird how it took me about 20 sec to see the difference.)
This application allows you to bookmark your videos while viewing an online video, by clicking a BMV button on the toolbar. Keep track of all the videos from youtube.com,hulu.com,dailymotion.com, metacafe.com, ehow, howcast, finance, news video etc. Share them with friends using one click email and post on facebook and twitter.
Spot on. Almost anyone who sees the site has already met me or been referred by one of my customers.

That said, clearly there's a lot of work to be done on the site.
TC is trolling for pageviews perhaps, but I did like copy-and-paste of an entire AP story at the end.
Abusive lab test: 4 padlocks take bullets, bolt cutters and other abuse
Minnesota’s Environ Labs put four padlocks through an unforgiving battery of tests with bolt cutters, gunshots, salt fog and others.
Crisis Shmisis: 40 deal, $400 million raised in Q2 2010 in Israel
See the full list in the post. A few surprising stealth companies backed by Battery Ventures and Sequoia...
Teenagers biologically programmed to wake-up later
Duplicates http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490924
Sounds like it might be a good topic for an Ask HN.
I agree definitly alot faster, but it's a shame almost no plugins work except for extensions/addons/plugins found at http://mozillalabs.com/

But just give it a little time, firefox 4 is definitly worth the wait.
Since he's not a tenured university professor, I'm not sure how I should interpret the rest of your comment.
You're talking about their readability rip off

In Safari, if you go to Help and then Acknowledgements, Apple explicitly mentions Arc90 and Readability.

Does it also display the whole article on one page?

Safari automatically loads the second page when you get to the bottom of the first one.
Not yet. Check back in 6 months!
I want to know if Taskfox makes the final cut: http://geektechnica.com/2010/06/5-exciting-changes-coming-to...
Sounds interesting.

Here's the interview, in case others are interested in reading further (purely for productive reasons, of course): http://mixergy.com/ries-lean/
Crisis In The Gulf video game: too soon?
Link to Bookmark videos app : http://bookmarkvideos.appspot.com
Step 1 : Login with you @gmail account
Step 2 : Drag and drop the BMV link to your browser toolbar
Step 3 : While watching any video on yt, hulu etc. click on BMV and it will bookmark it for you

Please rate and provide me with comments and feedback.
I'm guessing they are referring to the popular novel by James Clavell based on the same historical figure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dgun_%28novel%29
Frequently, when I'm uncertain or ambivalent about a binary decision, I'll flip a coin. When the coin lands, I feel that moment of happiness or annoyance at the result. I then use that feeling to make my decision. If I realize that I really don't care, I just go with the result of the coin flip.
It's an investment. I'm not being funny, despite the fact that's the obvious snap response. I compare where I would be in my personal development with and without HN (and programming.reddit when it was good, and some subreddits that still are good, and my RSS feeds), and net-net it's a good time investment as long as you don't go absolutely nuts.

We don't have technology that can filter news based entirely on "what is 'good' for me" for any non-trivial definition of good. "Interesting to me" we can at least pretend to have filters for, but not "good for me". The only solution is to have something a bit far-ranging like HN or a subreddit and just deal with the misses. The alternative, never get any hits, is worse.

Heck, I'm not even 100% sure which articles are good for me after I've completely read them. Often I can only make the call in retrospect, weeks later.

Your mental image of a well-rounded person probably includes a large library of books and a stack of newspapers. There are reasons for this, even though the newspapers and large libraries ultimately suffer the exact same problems for the exact same reasons, albeit being a little less addictive since the internet is interactive.
The post mentions a bunch of programs for playing with cellular automatons; You can check out GarlicSim, which is my project, and it's intended for simulations in general, including cellular automata:

http://garlicsim.org

Currently only Conway's Game of Life is implemented, and in a crude inefficient way, but the important thing for me with this project is to build the best infrastructure for simulations such as these. For example, I give something similar to source control management for organizing different states of the cellular automata.

I think that in a year from now GarlicSim will become one of the best programs for simulating cellular automata.
Plenty still goes on around Game of Life. For example this self-replicating 'creature' recently found: http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=399&...

(Was featured in New Scientist I believe)
Pseudo work is the lottery of productivity. And yet, because people spend so much time doing it, the odds eventually come up that they'll reap some sort of reward. That said, I have found a rule of thumb for myself: the more that pseudo work is done in isolation, the less likely it is to yield results. So, my alarm revolves around how long it's been since I've interacted with somebody.
No, it's a fiction by James Clavel based on Tokugawa Ieyasu's life.

http://www.amazon.com/Shogun-James-Clavell/dp/0440178002/ref...

Highly recommended.
I knew I couldn't have been the first to think about this...
Thanks. Doesn't sound too bad. Or does it?
That's only because people don't realize all the obviously unhealthful foods and mistakenly believe many healthy foods are bad for you because they contain dietary fat. A baked potato is practically as bad for you as cake, weight-wise. On the other hand, it would be extremely difficult for most people to get fat eating large portions of pure meat because any sort of meat has such a low glycemic index.

Any time my brother wants to lose weight, he goes to an all-bacon explosion diet[1] and the weight just melts off. Several people at my work went on the so-called paleo diet together and immediately started losing significant weight.

If you look at most popular diets, they generally have the core effect of deemphasizing high glycemic foods from one's diet, usually by shifting calories to meat and/or vegetables.

Personally, I prefer to shift the calories to meat because it's easier to build strength and muscle, when paired with an appropriate physical regimen. In my view, physical strength is an underappreciated and core component of modern fitness.

[1] Slight exaggeration.
Like anything, it depends on how you use it. I spend quite a bit of time here, but it's worthwhile and enjoyable investment (I hate using that term in this case). I learn a lot and have met some awesome people through here. I would not trade a single minute of it back.
I think it is dangerously engaging for me, unfortunately. The danger lies in the fact that its so easy to rationalize my time here as being good (for my career, for my brain, etc).

It's an extreme idea, and I don't know of any other website that does it, but I think HN might be addictive enough that the only surefire way you could keep me off it is by actually switching it off at certain times of day!
From the about page on the site:

"I’ve decorated this site with some of my favorite art. This includes some pieces done by my sister, Rachel Bracha, as well as some famous masterpieces."
On the first part: because unlicensed hotels are generally unsanitary and unsafe to stay at, are often run by shady operators who may rip you off or rob you, and are a nuisance to neighbors. Also, it's essentially misrepresentation, because AirBnB portrays itself as a place where you rent out someone's room from a real person, but then you're actually renting out a room in a fleabag hotel. If I was looking for low-end hotels I wouldn't be on AirBnB!
At the bottom of: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/features/ note, "The new interface described above will soon be available for Mac and Linux users."
What's not often mentioned is that it's possible to build a Turing machine emulator as a Life pattern. That means, courtesy of the Halting Problem, that in geenral there is no decision procedure for whether a given Life pattern will expand indefinitely, oscillate, reach steady state, or die (a special case of steady state)[1].

[1] It shouldn't, but it always amuses me in crime dramas and news reports when a victim's condition is reported as "stable." After all, "dead" is stable.
I'm sure they will fix the tab style issues in OS X before release:

"OSX and Linux Themes: The new interface described above will soon be available for Mac and Linux users."

from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/features/
Eleven Very Strange Festivals
Festivals celebrate everything from fertility to surviving the winter to ... well...as we’ll see here, pretty much anything.
While reading about their related packaged product I saw Azul claim that they have the only concurrent GC JVM.

It's a hard problem and especially so on stock hardware where doing the sorts of things they do is necessary, e.g. read barriers implemented with virtual memory hardware and a fast interface to that.

I've considered playing with this sort of thing (especially a Clojure tuned GC, for I suspect idiomatic Clojure behaves differently than standard imperative Java), but it's a lot of work (needs either a native Clojure implementation, which ought to wait on Clojure-in-Clojure, or working on an existing VM and the fast ones like Hotspot are messy).
Hang on: there's not much leaping of faith in believing that the universe is. That's observation: I think therefore I am.

Where we differ is that I accept that I don't know where we come from, you think you do (ie. from God). One doesn't require a leap of faith, the other does.
Not tough at all - the company I joined is another (larger) startup, so I think that if anybody understands this kind of choice, it's them. :)
Ya but at least you could ask a biologist why he was cataloging all those things and he would be able to give you a clear answer and point to possible uses of that catalog, same for the astronomer. Unfortunately, the same can not be said for some of postmodernist theories.
Right. Now imagine all the possibilities for murderers: We've had the Craigslist Killer, now we'll have the Grindr Killer, the Hitchhikr Killer, etc.

Heck, someone could write an app called Killr, take an aggregate feed for all of these and sort the results by helplessness and other desirable traits in a victim.
The lesson, of course:

Never get into email pissing matches with someone willing to be more shameless than you are.
The portion seen as potentially threatening to the Nook:

> A handheld electronic device comprising: a housing; an electronic paper display disposed in the housing and having a first surface area; and a liquid crystal display (LCD) disposed in the housing proximate the electronic paper display, the LCD having a second surface area that is smaller than the first surface area of the electronic paper display.

Except that, if that quote accurately describes the patent, the Nook has prior art given that this patent was granted June 6, 2010. If anything, this is potential trouble for Amazon, as they could stand to be sued.

That said, it's a single quote from a patent. Things are never what they seem; patent trolling wouldn't be profitable if they were.
Well then, the solution is to make it look less like work, so your brain isn't fooled.

Get rid of the tasteful orange-and-grey colour scheme, and go for a purple-and-black design inspired by videogame forums. Set the font to Comic Sans. Add user avatars, dancing hamsters, a "funny sound effect of the day" button, and rename the site from Hacker News to "Chat About Random Crap With Strangers From The Internet".
try this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/15003/
Australian Restaurant Replaces Menus With iPads
The big problem with the LinkedIn API is that the ToS are pretty harrowing.

Who knows what they'll do to you if you succeed in using their (extremely valuable) data set: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/linkedin_platform_pros_...
The bigger picture is vendors can't impose rules on what security researchers do on their free-time if they are not willing to pay for the bugs the researchers find and report. Hence the reference to the registry entry: "HKCU\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Security and
changing the "OurJob" boolean value to FALSE."

Look up "no more free bugs" for more info. (Edit: A URL http://trailofbits.com/2009/03/22/no-more-free-bugs/)
Except HN is valuable. You've obviously created something people want here, even if you're not charging for it. Now, there's certainly a way to spend too much time here, but you creating this forum pays off in a way that responding to emails doesn't. At least, I assume it does.

There's an interesting duality where it's "useful" to spend your time creating a site like this, but less useful to spend your time reading a site like this. Although the same argument could probably be made for writing/reading a book.
We'll definitely add that, thanks!
Tweetup buys Twidroid and popurls
Oracle to grow its Java developer base by investing in both Eclipse and NetBeans
These are fantastic ideas, thanks!
news.ycombinator.com spends a lot of time in my hosts file.
The other similarity between time and money is uncertainty. It is not usually apparent (especially for those self-employed) where to sink their available time so that it is most productive. Do I learn language X or Y? Project A or B? etc.
Somewhere I still have a deck of punch cards of my version of Life written in (of course) FORTRAN IV. Each generation printed out on fan-fold. Of course if it ran 'too long' I'd get kicked off of the printer, so I'd run those with different JCL during the night shift ;-)
Not only do the words sound similar and mean similar things (well, opposite- but to be opposite they must be related), but m is w upside down :)
Some lines for text but "Menu" at the top in some cursive font
Put another way;

ahh... to have rich people problems...
Do you have some more information about why they are broken? I'm not trying to call you out, I'm just curious and don't know much about these systems, or and couldn't find anything when I went looking for criticisms.
Seems like they have developed a good approach to the problem. Hopefully people can smooth their ruffled feathers enough to discuss the meat of the problem.
Hi, this is Nicole from vWorker (formerly known as Rentacoder).

You can get vWorker's latest Project information in popular RSS format, which is an 'open' newsfeed specification from this link: http://www.vWorker.com/RentACoder/misc/LinkToUs/FreeDynamicC...

Of course if you're interested in making a little cash from this feed, check out our affiliate program here: http://www.vWorker.com/RentACoder/Affiliates/Help.asp

If you have any questions, please let me know. You can also call in to talk to a facilitator 7 days a week, or email us.

Nicole
Hey thanks! It's good to hear differing opinions as well, especially since we've been reluctant to spend $ on a pro logo until we're pro ourselves :)
The fact that it wasn't always so open (especially to the developer masses) has probably steered a lot of people away from being interested. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/linkedin_hits_50_millio...
You can set `extensions.checkCompatibility.4.0b` to false in `about:config`.
FeaturedUsers.com Gets Acquired
Bandwidth providers: Follow Google’s lead in helping startups & the environment
Yes, mine too. And in my wireless router's blocked hosts list as well.
An understandable requirement, though. It costs them money to pay out, so it's in their best interests to keep as much in-system as possible.

And it should be pointed out that while there's a 2-euro/month minimum out-going payments, that money can come from people sending you money. If they get critical mass, that shouldn't be hard to achieve.

Personally, I want more precise controls over who gets what proportion of my money. Or multi-flattring, or something. Not all flattrable-content is of equal quality.
AmberShah,

vWorker hosts jobs contracted at wide price ranges. Some jobs are priced low as very small business projects under $100(USD) while others are priced at $50,000 and more (enterprise business projects are priced at $50,000(USD) and above). You can bid on jobs of your prefered price range by customizing the site to filter out Projects that you aren't interested in. Projects that don't meet your filters, will not show up on the site, nor in your daily newsletter (if you've chosen to receive it).

-Nicole
If Google has no intentions of selling airline tickets, as they claim, I wonder what their intention IS then. It would be interesting if they made said ITA data available through an open API ala GData
Really nice summary of the features in the beta, and coming soon to Firefox 4:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/technology/