skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(2.) I just moved to SF ~4 weeks ago. I lived in one of those antique hotels while looking for a place the first week I was here. I probably should have gone the AirBnB route instead, but it was still cheap and not all that bad.

(1.) I kind of lucked out by finding a good roommate situation through college friends. We ended up getting a really good deal in the Nob Hill area, which I like a lot so far. If it weren't for my roommate who is more into the "Marina bro" scene, I probably would be living in Cole Valley, Hayes Valley, Duboce Triangle, or the Mission with a rando off CL (which I hear isn't weird like it is elsewhere - I'm from Dallas).

(3.) I have no idea... When you find something cool, let me know. I actually met the guys/startup I work with/for at a YC event. Twitter, HN, and even blogs are always good places to meet new people, though.

(4.) I never realized how urban/densely populated SF was. Parking, grocery shopping, doing laundry, and receiving packages are all huge hassles (for me at least).

I walk to get around way more than I ever have. Invest in comfy socks and walking shoes and adjust your diet accordingly?

I also never expected it to be so cool out here. I wear a jacket every morning on my walk to work and a fleece or sweater for the rest of the day.

The food out here is really good. Every restaurant seems to take their food/service extremely seriously, which is cool.

There are tons of tourists everywhere - many from Europe.

I'm still a noob to SF, but it's pretty cool so far. I kind of just jumped in and am figuring everything out as I go...

Good luck! :)
This is actually not a bad idea, and some scientific groups are pressuring to move to this model. See Yann LeCun's proposal ( http://www.lecun.com/ex/pamphlets/publishing-models.html ) for an example. ICML almost does this. The review is done privately (due to some well-discussed elsewhere issues with double anonymity), but there's a public discussion site for all papers http://mldiscuss.appspot.com/ . And people do use it, and for some papers you will find important information there.
The newest submission (before this one) was from over a year ago. I think you're okay–HN lets links be resubmitted after n days, I do believe.

I think it's fine to have resubmissions from time to time, though I can't say I personally like seeing the same links, there are new users to HN, and good articles resurfacing are an okay thing.

That being said, I'm not sure this is something that necessarily appeals to the kind of people who frequent this site, but I don't particularly care.

That being said, to answer your questions: http://searchyc.com/submissions/like+a+computer+scientist
Heh, just what I need, a new toy to play with!

I spent a few hours looking into Ragel over the weekend, and, honestly, I can't envisage how a html5 parser mostly written in Ragel would look. But I'm going to give it a crack.
Statistical mechanics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics
It does feel a little intentional on the part of the author to give off a "all in a days work" type attitude.
SOMA is either very expensive or very sketchy. Mission is a better place to live IMO.

Look up Craigslist and get a sublet.

Get a friend who's pretty active in the startup scene and friend that person. You will discover all kinds of interesting events that person's attending.
His personal home page http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/ seems to have been updated.

"Manuscript sent on 6th August to several leading researchers in various areas. Confirmations began arriving 8th August early morning. Final version of the paper to be posted here shortly. Stay tuned. "
Unrelated question: if we only consider tax laws, what's the best place in the world for startups to be? (The answer might be useful for startups that plan to bootstrap and don't mind hiring employees who telecommute.)
I've heard recommendations of the Samsung Galaxy S, as well as Nexus One (I only know the N1 and love it).
"... Ultimately, rather than hoping for a YC-copy in your local area, your best bet is to develop yourself to a point where you can get funded by the real YC ..."

I agree there really is only 1 YC. Having to travel 23hrs by Jet to get there redefines determination.

The Hive ~ http://thehive.org.au/ & (podcasts) http://thehive.org.au/?feed=podcast you can hear Tom & Finn back in '09 at the Hive where I saw them present this talk ~ http://thehive.org.au/tom-howard-and-fenn-bailey-from-adioso... & http://thehive.org.au/podpress_trac/feed/68/0/tom-howard-fen...
Programmer embeds Easter Egg in Wordpress
CouchDB Notice for 1.0.1 - Potential Data Loss
All you need is a chair that you can lean back in. Preferably one with a high back.
How about if I make a blog somewhere, write a short blog entry calling attention to the part I'm interested in discussing, and submit that blog entry to HN? Would that be acceptable?
Ways to modularize your Ruby code
Looks cool. I concur with everyone else... how do we decide which web framework to rally behind a build a strong community?
"... There's the government neis program ..."

Aus Government anything (insert current gov inititive) is the "kiss of Startup death".
* Except RIM
Ask HN- Best place to hire quality English speaking programmers and designers?
I am looking to hire a designer and a coder for a project and I am wondering where the best place would be for my rfp, if I want to attract high quality and Anglo Saxon or flawless English speakers?

Odesk, Freelancer.com, Guru.com, Elance.com or elsewhere?

Do any of you guys bid on projects at some of these places?

What do I need to include in my rfp so that a kick ass programmer or designer will bbid on it and not just keep scrolling?

Thanks
Paul Carr Should Die
"Because we were unable to verify the deal from both ends, we have to inform our readers that TorrentReactor is known to carry out pranks and ludicrous actions."
We live in a time where the workforce is going to have to be retrained 3 or 4 times in their lifetimes. That means that 4-year universities wouldn't work even if they were functioning correctly, which they aren't.

There's a larger question of whether this workforce can be trained that many times or not. I don't think we have a choice, so I'd rather just go out and fix the problem instead of ruminating over it. We have a very nasty tendency to ruminate and self-flagellate over structural problems instead of just going out and fixing them.

I do know that we can't use the same institutions, programs, and policies that got us into this to get us out, and I know that there is a huge population that is going to resist the necessary change.

(and btw, "fixing the problem" may not involve retraining. Hell, we might end up personally outsourcing each of our lives to several generations of folks in developing countries and picking up a profit on the difference in standards of living over the next 50 years while the average skill level in the world equalizes. Lots of possible solutions, and I'm not sure I would define the problem as simply as an obsolete workforce)
Not true. A polynomial time algorithm for NP complete programs is known (if P=NP that is). You just need to prove P=NP to prove that it is polynomial time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem#Polynomial-...
drink more fuckin' coffee instead of masturbating with twitter
Many of the sentences in this paragraph suffer from one of the following defects: poor grammar, redundancy, excessive jargon, excessive use of metaphor ("as a toy ... dodo's game ... chips on the table", "gearing up to bet big"), and spelling mistakes. This greatly reduces the credibility of the author. The use of comma to connect sentence fragments improperly is really painful: "Web developers are happy, but all the other platform hackers are sad, flash, silverlight, ...". The literal meaning of this sentence is that "other platform hackers" are, among other things, "flash".

The paragraph's construction makes it hard for the reader to know what the main point is. At the beginning of the paragraph, I was lead to believe that the topic of the paragraph was the lineage and evolution of HTML5 and its emergence from a previous failure. Halfway through, the topic shifts ("Implicitly,") to discuss the implications of the technology. In the third half, it seeks to get to a "bottom line," which seems to be "you should care about HTML5."

The lack of hyperlinks and references has several knock-on effects. The first is that claims made ("Some dismiss") smell like straw man arguments or like hyperbolic statements ("there will be no more versions of html"). Another effect is that the reader is left with no way to learn more, making this a pretty shocking example of the failure to use hypertext (ironically, to discuss hypertext markup technology).

Some recommendations: (1) Print out the paragraph, take a pen, and start crossing things out. Seek to reduce the number of words. (2) Read your work out loud, as you would read a book to a child. Not as you would talk to a buddy over a beer. (3) Review some books on clear writing.
It's not flash video, it's h264. GIF's are far larger and lower resolution for the same videos.

If you turn off javascript or flash when visit the page, you will actually see a gif version.
Coz 1. It's traffic, which is good for Google (they pay others for traffic too)

2. It's supporting a browser that's non-IE, which is also good for them, strategically.
A proof that P != NP also represents the death of an era in which CS could look upon a single problem as motivation in hundreds of different directions.
My solution is to run a linux media server that broadcasts over UPnP to a PS3 using MediaTomb. Streaming is top notch, it even transcodes filetypes that the PS3 can't handle natively.

Anyway, it's way less complicated than a MythTV setup.
Time to embrace genetic engineering in humans.
>Unfortunately for both of us, we missed the bottom of the rental price market. They have definitely been trending up over the past few months as the tech scene is starting to get frothy again.

I don't think that has to do with the tech scene, Bay Area rents are higher for summer move-ins and that cycle happens every year.
I've heard several reports of the benefits of giving up coffee from people who were drinking several cups a day. What about moderate consumption? I usually start the day with one double-shot latte, and that's it.
The major film studios, faced with a related problem a long time ago, opted for a method called YCM separation, where they separate the image into yellow, cyan and magenta and record it onto very stable black and white polyester film stock. Properly stored, this supposedly has a lifetime of 500 years or more.

A modern laser film recorder is capable of a resolution of 4096x3112 and 10 bits per pixel, so that's about 16MB of data per 35mm frame with black and white film.
I should make clear that the notice is titled "Notice for 1.0.1" because the 1.0.1 release (due this week) will contain the fix. The bug is confined to 1.0.0.
Let us assume, for a moment, that Ray Kurzweil's thesis of accelerating returns is correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change#Kurzweil_an...

It therefore follows that as the pace of change increases, the length of time before an education becomes out of date or stale decreases. There is some percentage of the population today who would rather be poor than retrain. It stands to reason that as the rate of change increases, that percentage of the population will also increase.

Therefore, we as a society have two choices. 1) Let people be poor. 2) Pay for them to live like human beings not because they deserve it, but because they are alive. This is the crux of the choice. Will the haves (people with relevant education, who are disproportionately represented here of HN) give some of what they have to the have-nots just because they are human?
It very much ok to have a company registered in one country and work for it in another . This is the whole idea of the Treaty of Rome, which is the treaty that forms the EU. Some famous examples are like Air Berlin which is a UK PLC. Where things can get a bit complex is the tax situation. You need to pay tax where the business is, which can be different from where it is registered.
What's the project? I'm sure there are some people you're describing here on Hacker News.
I do. The only time I set a .vimrc is on Debian-derived distros where they don't set nocompatible or syntax on.

vi has good defaults. If I used emacs, I'd have to drag around my config everywhere to set usable keybindings. With vi and vim I can just use the defaults everywhere.
CS departments should make all students attend a short course covering all of Zed's topics and the personal hygiene and mental health issues mentioned in this thread.
What Games, Places, Music And News Could Mean For Google Checkout
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem#Consequence...
Human See Human Do. Monkey hacks.
I think you meant connection, not link.
I never see people posting real rfp's here, so I figured it was considered uncouth or in bad taste.
I disagree. Me and friend started a moderately successful web publishing business years ago while on NEIS. Of course our plans did diverge significantly from the plan we submitted to them to get approved. Obviously you shouldn't expect a lot of useful advice them but 6-12 months to work on something is still quite good deal.

If you actually have any evidence of this "kiss of Startup death" you should post it.
I like the punchline. It seems it needs a fair amount of lead-up:

But when we looked into messaging trends by sexuality, we were very surprised at what we found. People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect. <snip>

This suggests that bisexuality is often either a hedge for gay people or a label adopted by straights to appear more sexually adventurous to their (straight) matches.<snip>

12% of women under 35 on OkCupid (and the internet in general, I'd wager) self-identify as bi. However, as you can see above, only about 1 in 4 of those women is actually into both guys and girls at the same time. I know this will come as a big letdown to the straight male browsing population: three-fourths of your fantasies are, in fact, fantasies of a fantasy. Like bi men, most bi women are, for whatever reason, not observably bi. The primacy of America's most popular threesome, two dudes and an Xbox, is safe.
Are we edging toward Net neutrality detente?
> Weak GPU.

Quake 3 runs fine at the highest settings on my Nexus One, and is very playable. The GPU is fine.
I agree. It's always seemed obvious to me that the SDK was planned from the start, not knocked together in a few months as a response to developer rejection of web apps.
Happy to see it in my collegiate font of choice, Book Antiqua.
Once I've determined, qualitatively, which markets might be most appropriate for my web application I try to calculate the maximum possible size using data from the U.S. Census Bureau (for US markets obviously.)

The 2007 Economic Census gives a pretty strong industry by industry breakdown and it's good for coming up with a "maximum possible market size by industry / sectory / region" estimate.

http://www.census.gov/econ/census07/

The Economic Census is astonishingly comprehensive, and it's freely available - well worth the look.
Clever app. I've played this game before.
Too bad I don't have an iPhone :P
Why Facebook can't copy my idea
>Pay for them to live like human beings

How much exactly is that? I would like to know before I commit myself either way.
Very interesting approach! How cool if this is the real deal. The last 30 years has seen a lot of theoretical work on computation as a physical process. If the greatest conjecture in CS is proved using tools from physics it really brings together math, physics, and CS.

Edit: As someone else pointed out a few minutes ago http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/ confirmations began arriving today. How soon before Vinay has a Wikipedia entry? For those who are qualified to evaluate this, I suspect a consensus as to validity will develop within weeks if not days. If thumbs up, he must be worthy of one of the outstanding large-cash-value math prizes. Perhaps even the Nobel?
> For example, at that time only about two hundred PowerPC chips existed in the world. Most of those at Apple were being used by the hardware design engineers. Only a few dozen coveted PowerPC machines were even available in System Software for people working on the operating system. We had two.

Sounds like skunkworks was the only way to go.
+1. A few months ago I transitioned from OS X to Linux at home, without expecting that it would make my iPhone 3GS so much less nice to own.

It's being replaced with an Android phone as soon as it comes out of contract. There's nothing wrong with it as a phone, but it's at its best only when it's integrated with iTunes on the desktop.
True, but if the history of mathematics is a good guide CS will find other Big Problems in the future.
Fructose and pancreatic cancer
http://www.hnhackers.com/ <-- list of hackers news reader who freelance.
It seems to me that this would actually be easier for software to bypass than a regular image based CAPTCHA, it just consumes a bit more bandwidth. Pulling individual frames out of a video is simple, so you just pull a few frames out of the video and run your regular image CAPTCHA breaking algorithm on them. Since you've got multiple frames, your software has multiple attempts to compare which makes it even more robust.

Meanwhile it doesn't solve any of the actual problems with CAPTCHAs that others mentioned.
Funny timing, I just started my annual "gonna try to switch from TextMate to vim" last night.

It seems like every time I do this the amount of time I use vim gets longer and longer (went from a few days to a week to a few weeks to a month). Every time I learn more and more things that make me edge toward switching to vim full-time. I've got pretty much all the basics down, and I think I might stick to it this time.

The things that are helping me out the most this time are: increasing my system key repeat rate, lowering the repeat delay, and buying PeepOpen http://peepcode.com/products/peepopen
Yeah - you're right... I hadn't expected this little experiment to hit Hacker News in quite the way it did, so the proxy is getting locked down.
Earth Eternal: A Massive RPG in Your Browser
I will put a manifest on it, for sure... and the AJAX-stuff is cached via localStorage, so that already gets offline-ness
How To Migrate Linux Servers Across Cloud Providers
Have you used BugMeNot?

http://www.bugmenot.com/view/scribd.com
Animated map of nuclear explosions, 1945-1998
It might just be one of my personal pet peeves, but when I read "The incorporation of GPS transmitters into cellphones" I automatically switched to the assumption that the author is an idiot. (or at the very least, so careless with his writing that he's unlikely to be saying anything worth spending the time to read)
I think you've misread my post, which is probably my fault. I don't see "what it needs" I tried to state "what made my life hard when I started using it, and what it seems would make that curve easier". I think they are different statements, and I hope that comes out of the text.

I am absolutely not saying that Vim is broken or that Vim is bad for the people that love Vim, I'm saying that Vim doesn't seem to meet expectations of people coming to it fresh. I think the idea of having different distros would help alleviate some of the pain. It looks like Cream has made a good go of it, but sadly no Mac version :(
While we're on the topic of computer use issues, thought I'd share something I discovered for mouse use. I realize lots of us like to go solo keyboard, but for when you have to use a mouse, try this:

Put the mouse (m] sideways pointed left at the bottom left side of your keyboard:

[Keyboard]
(m]

Rest your elbow on the desk, so your arm is parallel to the keyboard.

I've been doing this for a few months now, and it's been a huge improvement. It might take a while to get used to the mouse being perpendicular to the pointer orientation on screen, but maybe not (didn't for me). The position is somewhat adapted from the tai chi standing practice posture.
Wow, you'd love Houston Texas!

It seems a bit daft to be choosing a location based on the convenience of the hypothetical middle managers and mailroom employees you'll have in a successful future. Sure it's professional, but it isn't startup. Burn your business plan, remember?
You don't have to be a bad writer. Good writer, that's a different story - 'not terrible' is fairly straightforward.

1. Keep it simple
2. Avoid howlers

Give 'Politics and the English Language' another read and scan the style guide of your favourite major newspaper or periodical. Check spelling. Check basic style (look up 'run on sentence' in a style guide and see what it says about what you wrote in your comment). Check if you're making sense (ask yourself, what sort of games do dodos play? does text 'feel' or 'read' or 'sound'? etc). If you want a use a metaphor, simile, idiom or common expression, triple check, look it up, verify it means what you think it means and consider 1. again. And that's it - simple, makes sense and has no howlers takes you into the stratosphere of online writing. You can decide whether you're interested in getting to orbit from there.
How to Use Forums To Attract More Business
It could mean that certain problems which are known to be "difficult" (cryptography, factoring multiples of primes, traveling salesman, bin-packing, etc.) may not be inherently "difficult" and may have solutions (yet to be found) which can solve the problem in polynomial time.

There are many things built on top of the fact that certain types of problems are not easily solvable - cryptography being the most obvious - so if it could be proved that algorithms that make these problems easily-solvable could exist, it would shatter the line of thinking about these types of problems.

The way I like to think about NP is: are there certain types of problems which we, as smart as we might be, cannot easily solve, not because we aren't smart enough but because of the nature of the problem itself?

(I have no formal education in this area so this is just my layman's attempt at an answer)
He has published in the area of complexity theory: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1185240
"Suppose that a company hires a low-skill not-very-alert office worker for $10/hour. This person accepts an email invitation to follow a hyperlink. One click later and the company’s network is infected with a virus. Best case: IT department spends $50,000 cleaning up; worst case: customer lists, customer credit cards, and other private data are compromised, costing millions of dollars."

Yep, and the dumb idiot running the Company (CEO) will still insist on paying 10usd/hr. Who is here to blame? Being cheap just means that you will pay twice as much in the long run (at least twice that is...)
Speaking of which ... does anyone know of a good way to tell from inside an iframe if it's visible on screen? I want to sync some javascript to the point in time in which it becomes visible.

(I can sort-of-estimate that on Firefox 3.6 with mozInnerScreenY, but I found no way to do it on other browsers or older Firefox)