skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This whole issue is like Aztecs worrying that Quetyzcoatl is going to burn their villages if he sees their smoke signals, in between the human sacrifices and general non-white-Christianness which got them into trouble when an advanced civilization they couldn't have predicted but which actually existed knocked on the door.

I do not want to insult Quetyzcoatl by comparing likelihood of his existence to that of space aliens. Evidence of winged serpent gods is lacking, but since the Drake Equation means that anything which makes for a good sci-fi novel is good enough to write a grant proposal for, I suppose I should cover my bases.
I really like Chris's blog. You didn't really point to a flaw in the core argument. It is normal to pursue ventures that you think are both good and leveraged.
No, I think mostly he's talking about something unrelated and very important. However, his last sentence is exactly as you say: "...In the end, however, an algorithm expressed in prolog can be translated into any of the other languages, demonstrating the eventual equivalence."

And in fact he's totally wrong about logic programming. It is a completely different way to think about things, just like what he's looking for, it just doesn't happen to make for shorter programs. A very good try though.
It's possible that he's not taking that money out of the company right now, so he's not thinking of the money the company is making as current income, which would mean that the company makes him half as much as his job does.

Which is still pretty good. I'm not saying that that amount of profits doesn't mean he should quit, just that it seems more likely that he's making half what his job is.
Yeah, that was a bad exaggeration. Nobody is comparable to Glen Beck. My bad.
Apple's forced upgrade culture is getting increasingly offensive as each generation has less and less to differentiate it from the previous one.

I have to say, after having my Droid for six months, it does everything I need it to do adequately. When I change it for a new one, I will not be looking for more speed, nor more features, or even a better interface. I just want one that is designed to last more than 18 months.

And a service plan that isn't designed to keep me buying new phones at that interval.
How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer
There is a presentation around here by pg about bloatedness of Java's syntax and clarity of the Arc. Find it. ^_^
Your license to vote on budgetary matters is hereby revoked.
Routine business cycle downswings don't require over a trillion dollars to prevent the economy from tailspinning into another Great Depression.

If you add up the TARP and all the alphabet soup lending support programs, the stimulus package/s, and Fed's quantitative easing intervention, you're talking well over a trillion dollars, and we're still not out of it yet.

This was a speculative debt bubble followed by the inevitable financial crisis. See Rogoff & Reinhardt. Definitely not part of the business cycle.
The "hacked" dock looks disgusting.
If you thought that was a joke, you're still missing the point.

I suffer no illusion that their sales numbers have any correlation to the popularity or efficacy of a technology. Their Ruby book sales crashed in 2007, for example.

Who is writing new projects in Perl 5?

I know of many, many new projects written in Perl 5. So far this year I've worked on three and have another later in the year.
If I built this, I'd be sure to allow ratings without a corresponding rentals, for DVDs, DVRs, etc.

Even without achievements, I've played with Greasemonkey scripts to sort by predicted rating & made an effort to turn around the DVDs quickly. It did start feeling like work instead of play, so I cut back a bit.
On the other hand, Russell came badly unstuck when he attempted to extrapolate all math from first principles with Principia Mathematica. Soon after, Kurt Godel demonstrated that in any given formal system, consistency and completeness were mutually exclusive.

It seems to me that this had the same devastating impact on philosophy as Einstein's relativistic theorems did on classical mechanics and the popular acceptance of scientific determinism (please note I am not positing any scientific relationship between Godel's theorem and Einstein's work on relativity). Einstein apparently found quantum mechanics an equally alarming intellectual innovation.

So between incompleteness, relativity and QM, 20th century intellectuals were hit with a kind of triple whammy showing that our beliefs about logic, observation and causality were all inherently limited and that in many respects The Truth is fundamentally unknowable. Prior to this one could argue that philosophy as an intellectual pursuit was the foundation which underpinned all other kinds of academic endeavor, even if one felt privately disappointed about the prospects of finding any sort of ultimate truth or philosophical 'theory of everything'.

For every philosopher who could accept this with a shrug and move on to examining the limitations of critical thinking itself, there are probably 9 others that can't bring themselves to stand up and say plainly that there's not really anywhere else to go from here, and that their legacy is likely to be no more than another footnote to Plato.
The Power of “In Person” – Why Distributed Teams are Less Effective
I tried the easy way out and wasted $9 on a “universal dock adapter kit”, which didn’t work at all with my Apple iPhone 3GS dock. I assumed it was meant for the dock that I owned, but this adapter was meant for some device which clearly didn’t match anything that Apple has ever produced.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB125G/C
That's the best approach for most companies. User feedback and usage stats will then determine the next step.
You forget about the intervening time between "install sl" and "accidentally type `sl`" where you forget about having installed sl.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1467067
Exactly, I use homebrew occasionally, but its really a pain because it doesn't keep its python libs in its prefix fr example. If you use non-system stuff it's a real pain in the ass.
Do you have to pay for WHS, or is it only available through various companies when buying a server?
Someone should make an alien invasion movie where all the aliens are disguised as characters from "I Love Lucy." A serious one.
Interesting story. Website design would make baby jesus weep tears of blood.
Smartguys should write a lisp dialect for erlang VM. ^_^
You should also use Promethease which automatically links your raw data to the snpedia data to product a really long report of various traits and research results.

http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Promethease

It's a bit messy and hard to interpret but you get a lot more the info that 23andme provides.
I'm guessing it's a way to decouple the electrical connection between the audio system and the phone, to prevent the propagation of GSM/cellular radio noise.
But... but...!

Awww :'(
Yeh I am generally more interested in the gallery on 960.gs, I think I use the css framework once but wasnt all that keen, the examples and http://960.gs/demo.html I do find very useful though.
Well yeah, he just dremeled away at the plastic until the iPhone 4 would fit. But I bet it looks decent with the iPhone in it covering most of the imperfections up.
Forgive my naivety, but why didn't he just return the dock adapter kit?

The goods were purported to achieve a certain functionality. They did not. Money returned.
That it clearly does match something Apple has produced -- the linked product.

$29 for a dock that only works with the i4; $49 for a dock that works with anything + $9 for the plastic to make the i4 fit.
I'm extremely skeptical that this mic/amp/audio thing is actually the case. First and foremost, Apple's iPods have (for quite a while) reserved a few pins on their dock connector for audio out, so I'd be surprised if the iPhone did not do the same. Second, this would make absolutely no sense. It would, in fact, make so little sense that I have to, sight-unseen, call bullshit on this.
I don't think the last part is hard in the sense that there's a lot of work to be done. You've stated so yourself, "what's left is to polish it all and release".

I think there's a subconscious fear of something else that you need to get over. My guess is it's possibly a fear of rejection and/or failure once you do release it.

My only suggestion is to get over that fear and like the Nike commercials say, "JUST DO IT!"

Good luck!
Haven't you heard of nuclear fish'n? That's where you detonate a nuke under the ocean and then gather up the dead fish that float to the top.
Great username. Did you get that from a book?
Reminds me of the story Feynman tells about Wheeler, who calls him up one day and tries to convince him that there is only one electron in the entire universe.

This single electron is bouncing forward and background through time endlessly, creating the illusion of a multitude of particles (electrons when going forward in time, and positrons when traveling back):

"I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, 'Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass' 'Why?' 'Because, they are all the same electron!'"

[From http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/fe...]
I agree; this seems highly suspect. For example, how would "a" mic handle stereo audio? And why would Apple do this when pins for stereo audio already exist on the dock connector?
> "Did you know the audio out is provided by a microphone in the base of the dock, which connects to an amplifier and then the audio out jack? It does."

Repeating "it does" doesn't make it so. Here's how the audio gets from the iphone to the audio out jack:

http://pinouts.ru/PortableDevices/ipod_pinout.shtml

If you're wondering what the iPhone speaker port appears to mate with in Apple docks, it's a special vent that permits you to dock the phone and still use it in speakerphone or iPod audio playback modes without significant muffling or additional distortion.
Ask HN: Should I try to get squatted domain or use domain hack?
I've got a name for a project I'm working on; projectna.me is available (and inexpensive), but projectname.com is just a parked page, and there's a hotmail address in the WHOIS. All the other gTLDs are available (.net, .org, etc). The name is two generic words strung together (11 chars), and is not in use by anyone.

The project is a SaaS product for customer service and technical support departments of SMBs (not to mention a few other segments that I haven't anticipated).

Should I:

a) Stick with the domain hack, and worry about the .com if/when my site gets big?

b) Contact the .com owner and try to buy it before launching. (If so, how should I approach him? In my previous dealings with squatters I've been asked for a "4-figure offer", which is out of my bootstrapped budget.)

c) Ignore the hack and .com, and go with a .net?
But guess what? Hacking the dock to fit the iPhone4 doesn’t work, because Apple’s modified the dock to only recognize the 3GS. If you connect an iPhone 4 to that very same connector, the phone and iTunes will not recognize the phone.

...or he messed it up when hacking it. My iPhone 4 works perfectly fine in my iPhone 2G dock.
My favorite part - I couldn't agree more.

"The best companies are built on common beliefs and culture – a common sense of purpose. Those cultural normals are established through human connections: the night we all stayed late to get that release out the door, the day we celebrated our funding round or the day we landed our first big account. The culture is forged through office parties, poker, paintball or film nights. And slowly, over the years, those crazy stories about Danny passed out in the company bathroom after the Summer party get replaced by weddings, births and family picnics. We become more than dispassionate colleagues – we’ve been in the trenches together and survived."
If it is user oriented, I would release the project and make sure you have a feedback loop to see how the project is being used by the end users. You are finished when they are happily using your project, you usually don't get to decide for them.
If the project is presentation oriented, or if you only think you get one shot, then I usually step away, come back, make a punch list, and complete the project by completing the punch list.
That Apple's iPhone 4 universal dock adapter is made for Apple's universal dock.
For myself, absolutely not. I've never regretted quitting a job, or making almost any life change. Not that things have always gone well, but looking back and second-guessing yourself is just totally a recipe for misery and the worst kind of depressive introspection.

I suspect that if you need to ask this question on HN, then you are not ready to quit.

However, you have a valuable side-business, have you thought about trying to staff trusted people in or have your partner run it, with you as part-time consultant?

If your relationship with people at your day job is as solid as you imply, you might want to take an unpaid leave of absence, and spend 6 months trying to drive your side-business to the point where you don't have any further doubts.

Don't underestimate the importance of a near-passive income that you control. For most of us, starting your own business is the only viable way to attain this, and ensure continued income when you decide to retire.
Despite the coincidental naming, no. That's "just another formal modeling tool" and isn't particularly likely to lead to a revolution in programming of any sort anymore than any other formal modeling tool that formally models the "same old" programming techniques the author decries.

I was tempted to link http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Zippers , and now I guess I have, as another sort of "thing that happens to share terminology with calculus", but it is equally offtopic. Calculus here is metaphorically the same calculus that you looked ahead to when you were in middle school; a mysterious land where the impossible is trivial and full of strange concepts and funny squiggles. We are that middle schooler.

Really, though, it's fair to read this essay as "Gosh, I sure wish a silver bullet existed" and stretching only a bit further "If only there were some way to get around the fact it takes great programmers to make great programs". The silver bullet is that metaphorical calculus here, but it's a call for a silver bullet all the same. We can all nod in recognition of the desire, even as we are fairly sure nothing more will come of this than any other desire for the silver bullet.
Didn't spell it out I guess, but "good enough for the mainstream" is here meant to imply "... according to the criteria the mainstream actually cares about".
Still would have had to shell out 'big' (unecessary?) money for one that did work.
Being "clever or kind" isn't mutually exclusive, but being "clever at the expense of others, or kind" is.

Hmm, yes, that's the point of my comment.
That is what optoisolators are for, but they wouldn't help with GSM noise.

(GSM noise is related to the fact that GSM divides the radio spectrum into time slices for devices to use to talk to the tower. When a phone gets its time slice, it turns the radio on. When the timeslice is over, the radio is turned off. The time slices come in intervals that are in the audio range, and thus its energy output is measurable in the audible range. Since the radio signals will induce a current in random wires, including wires in your audio amplifier, you can hear the GSM noise in your speakers. It is not related in any way to an unclean audio signal coming out of your phone; that signal has no GSM noise. It's the radio communication that induces noise in your audio equipment. So a speaker + microphone is not going to do anything except make your already-clean audio sound like shit.)
This exists. It's how I bought Mass Effect for the 360.
"Heck, screw oxygen. Rationally, defense-oriented civilizations should smash all habitable-zone planets just to be on the safe side."

Yeah, good point. If nothing else you reset the clock to zero, and that buys you an awful lot of time even under the worst case scenario.

"instead of a relativistic projectile, they sent a starship,"

A starship is a relativistic projectile that bothers to slow down. If you're going to smash a planet that acts up, you might as well just cut to the chase. All even-remotely-physically-plausible forms of interstellar travel are also intrinsically planet-busters, including the various exotic FTL drives that hover on the edge of plausibility.
I don't think the concern is about other societies wanting our tricycles, it's about them wanting our water.
that or the Apple Hi-fi boombox thing
John Wooden On True Success
Ceasing to include a dock with the phone is fine. Not everyone wants it, and saving on manufacturing, packaging, and shipping is a win.

Charging $30 to get it back is silly.
Thanks for that info & anecdote.

I haven't experienced much data corruption but it has bitten me here and there. With terabytes on each disk these days I really wish more systems verified our data, even if they can't repair it I want to know when my disks are no longer reliable. Ah well, can't have it all. We'll get there eventually.

edit: at least we have SMART
Another good interview from Andrew at Mixergy. What is interesting here is how Andrew Mason, founder of Groupon, describes the idea of collective action and then applying that to commerce, what he calls social commerce. A good takeaway at that point is that the concept of collective action is far from exploited in the market place. Groupon exploits this concept in the commerce space but you could see that the idea has legs.

I like how Andrew Mason owns up to a mistake, around ~47min in, regarding a company they bought in Brazil that was creating discounts just to test the market without actually landing those deals. Good on him. Looks like they are going through some growing pains.
What's not to take seriously?
I know it occurs in German between southern and northern accents where the r at the end of words is silenced in the north. I'm sure it occurs in other languages too.

I think you're confusing vowel shifts with rhotacism. A non-rhotic speaker will not pronounce the r in either "her" or "father". It's quite possible the vowel shift at the end of father happened in response to the disappearance of the rhotic r, but it is a separate effect.
> A non-rhotic speaker will say, frinstance "her father" with an "err" sound on "her" and an "a" sound on "father".

Perhaps there's a continuum of rhoticity, but there are definitely dialects that would not pronounce the R in "her".
Email lists are undervalued. You can get some unbelievable % responses in the Retail business. I would think a startup company that you can create a web blog from an email would be the perfect candidate for this type of marketing.
How often do you update the software? What changes when you update the software? How many hardware platform updates have there been for Android so far? How interoperable are the various docks?

The iPhone 4 is essentially the same phone as the original iPhone. So little has changed, many of my colleagues are still happily using their summer 2007 Jesus phones, which they say do everything they need to do, adequately.

Notice how Apple doesn't tell you how much RAM, or what the CPU clock speed is. Apple doesn't want consumers worrying about the hardware race. They'll sell you a major new feature: 3G support, a GPS chip and video encoder, a 4x resolution screen. But the core platform remains viable three and half years later, running the same apps.

If your goal is a platform that's stable, seems you are contradicting yourself. On the one hand, you say Apple's each generation is insufficiently differentiated, yet on the other, you say you're forced to upgrade. With so little differentiation, why do you find yourself forced?
I took the leap a couple years ago, started a startup, ran out of cash, and got a day job again.

Incinerating your savings at a startup only to end up back as a cube warrior is pretty sobering. Even so, I never looked back on the (great) job I had with regret. Aside from not seeing some good friends every day, I didn't miss it at all, and now I'm at a far better gig than I was at the last time I was a happy wage slave. And I'm lucky to have gained some amazing experiences and a big network for the next time around.

I'm sticking to the HN party line on this one and saying that good things will come from taking a risk on what you really want to do.
The author has a mental model of innovation which I don't think is accurate.

The patent system helps people look for "open spaces": new ideas, and work in them. He goes on to say that this eventually fills the space of ideas, pushing to a "paradigm shifting innovation" that "causes the hunt for open space to reset".

The problem with this idea of innovation is that it portrays it as a 2D space where no idea can stand on top of any other. His idea of innovation only includes new ideas that forever extend outwards at the same level. There is a third dimension this model does not capture: innovation that builds on top of other ideas. This third-dimension innovation is what is damaged by the current patent system, and why so many software developers feel so strongly against patents.

To the author's 2D innovation mental model, open source appears to be retreading the same ground over and over. To software developers, innovation can be seen in the third dimension.
The Prime Directive is a way of writing exciting television shows that allows you to put characters that ought to be far too powerful to actually be in a dramatic bind into a dramatic bind, not a model for actual interstellar behavior. For that to actually "exist" would require that every species in the galaxy not only has a "human-like" mind, but one of a very particular and unusual bent, most of which probably comes from watching a particular show. This seems unlikely.

(Far, far more likely in my mind would be the uplift scenario, that helping these civilizations would be seen as a moral duty once that was actually a real possibility. And it also sort of requires Star-Trek-like limits on technology as well; the Federation lacks the capability to rewrite a primitive civilization from the gene level up, but that seems an unrealistic limitation in real life. And that's not even what I consider the "most likely" scenario; I'm just saying that anyone who tried to instantiate the Prime Directive would probably break down into this moral duty idea pretty quickly. Why sit and wait for them to develop when you can just make it happen? Artificiality of development is a small concern next to potentially billions of unnecessary deaths. Whoever is out there, watching us war and burn and die and doing nothing, is not being an upstanding moral citizen.)
Humans can't live without the sun. In some way, the sun is an integral part of what all life is. If you take away the sun, you take away the life of the individual human. All humans share this one body part (the sun) so in some way all humans share their existence. Kind of like sharing a kidney.

What happens when humans start fooling around melding minds, utilizing software to augment our minds and building strong AI that is a vast improvement over our minds and bodies? I suppose that is where the entity is investigating different ways to exist.
> While isolation had a great deal to do with this initially, nowadays it's mostly because of the work of the Icelandic Language Institute, which religiously updates the language to add new words for concepts that didn't previously exist.

That sounds a lot like the French Academy; but so far as I know, French has precipitously changed quite as incomprehensibly as English, and has not remained stable (save for an expanded vocabulary) as you say Icelandic has. Why do you think the Institute succeeded and the Academy failed?