skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love the lobster idea. It would be even better if the lobsters survival was based on the integrity of the data. This would provide evolutionary ECC.

You would also need some mechanism to signal people in the far future that the lobsters were data carrying devices. Otherwise they wouldn't have any reason to randomly decode sea creatures. Perhaps you could program the lobsters to develop spots on their shells every century which denote the first 10 prime numbers.
Well it's my information that they are scraping so I guess that is ok.
This discussion was, in fact, making the rounds of the standardistas a week or two ago (following the release of html5test). Not only did everybody agree with your assessment, but most of them thought it was good (only a few people such as Tantek are trying to make HTML5 refer only to the W3C HTML5 spec... they'll fail).

As Chris Wilson insightfully put it:

> HTML5 is now a brand, more than it is a specification. There are a variety of reasons for that, and a variety of persons “responsible” for that confusion, but the ship has sailed.

See also:

http://www.zeldman.com/2010/08/01/html5-test/

http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2010/aug/02/term-html5/

http://blog.codinginparadise.org/2010/06/why-im-going-to-kee...

http://www.zeldman.com/2010/08/03/html5-fuzzies/
I hear this statement frequently when P = NP is discussed, but as someone not involved in computer science I have a hard time understanding it.

Could you explain what some of those consequences be? Does P = NP really need to be proved to achieve those practical consequences? Can't it just be assumed to be true and then see what the result is?
Using OSSv4 might be a good option. Ever since I switched to it, sound has not been any problem whatsoever anymore.
NY Town may allow pinball museum to reopen
The DNA idea is great. You'd need a long "this is a message" intro, say a long ATATATATAT repeating sequence (much too long to occur by chance).

As you say, you can use forward error correction to preserve the data. The hard part is describing the data format to the reader.

From the ATATA...intro, a reader knows they have a message. But now they need to know how to interpret it. You need a way of encoding information (english text?) in DNA and you also need a way of describing that encoding mechanism in DNA too...

Basically, over 5k years you should look up all the protocols SETI people have thought up. And/or re-read Gödel, Escher Bach.
"I did go to a school with a reputation for having a hard liberal arts core education, and it turned out to be a great decision. (In retrospect, I now wish I had gone to a different school, but the one I chose wasn't bad at all.)"

I knew a fellow maroon before I clicked the profile.
Granted, but this author does not set off any crackpot flags: he's had plenty of prior publications in areas relevant to the proof and works in an industry research lab. Another poster points this out: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1585999
Well, it's certainly not because I am in middle school, I wish I started writing like this in middle school I would be much better by now, no, it's because I am a bad writer.

Thank you though, this is going to go in my list of question to ask my self while editing; does this feel like it could be in a middle school book report?
Beyond a w3c spec, HTML5 is now a brand. An umbrella term for a number of related technologies which go far beyond the W3C spec called "HTML5" and includes CSS3, microdata, geolocation, local storage, JS remote communication, SVG, Canvas, ...

We had that discussion with AJAX in the past. The one on the side of strict interpretation of the acronym failed. They'll fail again if they try to fight this one.
On the other hand, the salaries are high enough that you can work for 2 days per week and support yourself while bootstrapping.
People who argue that we need to kill infidels also are making comments consistent with their world-view, however it's hardly what most people would argue is "freedom".
It seems rather unlikely it would be a hoax. The author has published in this field before, in peer reviewed journals: http://logcom.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/15/5/5... or http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1185240

Looking at his page at HP Research, he has several other publications in legitimate areas, and seems to be a well qualified researcher.

He may be wrong in this paper, but there's no reason to suspect its a hoax or that he's some kind of kook (as many other comments have sort of implied).
Have you tried Scribd since they've transitioned to HTML 5? I now find it quite usable.
My dad doesn't think we are aliens, and he used to listen to music encoded on disks as a kid...

Humanity is changing much slower than you may think. The big leap was electricity, and that is well behind us. I doubt the next big leap (nanotech) will become widespread for a hundred or more years.
HN does not use the popularity of previous stories from that domain as a weight. It uses the number of votes, adjusted for the amount of time it's been since the link or comment was added. So if a story has 8 votes after 1 minute, it will rank much higher than a story that has 8 votes after 1 day.

details: http://blog.linkibol.com/2010/05/07/how-to-build-a-popularit...
The vim users mailing list is extremely lively and full of little tidbits like this. I highly recommend following it.
It's quite expensive to start a company in Denmark. You need ~10k eur for a limited liability company (ApS) and to be stock-based you need ~70k eur (A/S).

The startup scene is growing, there's a lot of pressure from the government to create new companies. See: http://venturecup.dk/ http://www.vf.dk/?sc_lang=en
For anyone interested in Tallinn and Tartu in Estonia, we at http://startupleadersclub.com/ are glad to help and give advice. The community is pretty strong.

There are 2 larger world-class companies (Skype and Playtech) that have 3-400 people in tech & development here in Tallinn/Tartu, which can sometimes be a problem for startups competing with hiring. At the same time, many people are also leaving those big companies for startups.

Still I believe locating sales, marketing and any customer facing operations in consumer space in SF Bay Area or NYC/Boulder etc. Having product development and anything tech related in Central and Eastern Europe makes a lot of sense on other hand.
And in other hundred and one way iPhone is more useable, powerful and useful. Which set of ways one chooses sometimes boils down to "philosophy".
Ask HN:I'm selling all my stuff and moving to SF to work on my startup. Advice?
I finished college in the Midwest this year, and I've decided San Francisco will be the best possible place for me to live as I build my business. I don't have any serious commitments, I paid off all my student loans and my company is bootstrapped and profitable, so moving to SF shouldn't be very difficult, and I'm not too scared of the cost of living increase. I plan to fly to SF in about two weeks and then look for a place to live once I get there.

That said, I still need your help if you live in SF or have gone through a move like this before.

My questions:

1. Where should I live? I would like to live somewhere close to the startup scene, with a vibrant neighborhood and safe enough that I don't have to worry about walking around alone at night.

I'm leaning heavily towards the Mission right now, maybe SOMA if I can find a nice place there. Is there a specific area of the Mission I should focus on?

2. Where should I stay as I look for a place to live? A hostel? Are those $150 a week hotel postings on Craigslist legit?

Or, if anyone is interested in letting me crash on their couch for a few days in exchange for marketing/SEO/PPC/getting traffic consulting that would be great :)

3.What events/meetups should I attend once I get there to meet like-minded people?

4. Any other advice about living in SF that would be helpful to a newcomer? What do you wish you had known when you moved to the bay area?

Thanks in advance for your comments. Hopefully this thread could become a good resource for others looking to move to the Bay Area. It would be great to get in touch with others doing something similar, please email me at ilya[at]unviral.com.
Been there once. A nice town. My first impression was: ok, how could i make a living here? I know some people who kept their clients from back home and moved there, so they make the same money but pay less for costs of living than in central europe, while enjoying the nice climate. Very clever I guess, but what keeps me from going the same route is, that you dont get far there without speaking portuguese though.
Holographic storage. Seriously. The current technology has a 50 year archive life.

http://www.inphase-tech.com/products/default.asp?tnn=3
If LLVM had no technical advantages over GCC, the only reason to contribute to it would be to deny end users the rights the GPL would guarantee them if you were redistributing GCC instead.

But I don't think that applies. I've seen some purely technical complaints about the design of GCC. If LLVM were GPL, there would still be reasons for it to exist.
Cool idea, I wish it had Ruby with the hpricot library though.
Immigration issues are probably simpler for Europeans moving throughout Europe. Putting "Hi, I want to move to the US and do nothing visible, and oh, I have no money" on your US visa application is probably not going to put it in the "instant approval" stack, but that's what a startup is.
Another problem is the set of countries you can buy programs from Android market, and even smaller set where you are able to sell your own.
That tall decaf from Starbucks is not just a placebo; it has 20mg of caffeine.

See: http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/brewed-coffee/decaf-pik...
If P = NP were proved to be true, it would tell us that there are solutions to a certain class of problems. Assuming it's true doesn't give us those solutions.

Wikipedia should answer most of your questions regarding the consequences:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_%3D_NP#Consequences_of_proof
If I remember correctly, any proof of P = NP would be have to be constructive, so it would immediately give us a fast algorithm for ALL NP-complete problems, as they can all be reduced to each other.
Utah Jazz using algorithms to price tickets, cut out scalpers
I have no idea what killing infidels has to do with whether we should promote software with GPL freedoms attached and shun alternatives that don't have those rights. That's not my worldview, but I don't see why it should be caricatured.
Thanks for spreading the word. Sure, we'll let you know the results.
If you are an autodidact, then yes.

I've been building a company for the past three years, and I have to say that it has been very educational. There are no grades per se, but whether or not you eat this month is... well, very motivating.
We've had a MythTV box running in some form or other the last 6 years, so my kids have always had access to instant recordings and movies on demand.

It took quite a while for them to realize that not all TVs work like this, it wasn't just daddy being an ass when they wanted to watch Dora on their grandparents TV.
It's probably more likely, though, that bugs are introduced by Good Old Americans that are simply incompetent. If only the government had a policy about not hiring incompetent people...
But coffee makes you regular.
I do not necessarily agree. There is a large number of open problems in computer science (especially in theory of complexity), and a correct proof of P != NP is very likely to use techniques that will help in resolving the other open problems. The techniques are also likely to change what we're learning in CS courses.
Retro Future Ads For Facebook, YouTube & Skype
John Siracusa on Papermaster's departure from Apple
> Java is popular, featureful (have fun allocating memory with objective-c while working on iOS apps!) and fast.

More importantly, it's the most popular VM to target for new language implementations. You can use Rhino, Python, Lua, Scala, Scheme, Clojure, Fantom, Frink, and others on it.
Intuitively:

NP questions take a long time to answer.

P questions take much less time.

The statement "P = NP" means that any NP question can be transformed into a P question. Answering the P question gives you an answer to the NP question.

So, if P = NP, then we can answer questions that we thought were slow, much more quickly than we would have thought possible.

Proving P = NP would (presumably) give you that method for transforming NP problems into P problems. So you would suddenly be able to figure things out easily that currently are hard and take a lot of computing power.

It's often assumed that P = NP would make cryptographic problems much easier to break, but apparently that's not really the case: http://world.std.com/~reinhold/p=np.txt
I've done so in the past and I have already remarked somewhere earlier that I feel a bit uncomfortable about mentioning this business on HN because it feels a bit like advertising (and it's owned by a former employee and a bunch of his friends of mine so I'm not exactly impartial).

If you really want to know please drop me a line (email in my profile).
LLVM provides numerous purely technical benefits to Apple, including allowing for better graphics performance (which is an area that is important to one of Apple's key customer demographics), allowing better integration with debuggers, profilers, and IDEs, and allowing easier evolution of Objective-C.

Moglen is making it sound as if these technical benefits weren't a factor--Apple is supporting LLVM just to undermine free software.

First of all, he can't give any example of them doing anything with LLVM that actually undermines free software. He's just speculating that they could do so in the future.

Second, there is no rational basis for claiming that this hypothetical future ability to undermine free software is the sole (or even a major) reason Apple supports LLVM.

Moglen is just spreading FUD, pure and simple.

Also, how would you suggest that the submission title be worded?
BSD-licensed software like LLVM gives programmers the freedom to make proprietary derivative works. GPL-licensed software like GCC gives users the freedom to use any derivative works since they must be GPLed. Or you could say the GPL gives users freedom from getting locked in to proprietary derivatives, since there aren't any.
See, all these monstrous old companies such as IBM and HP,
they hire pure scientists such as Chaitin and this guy, and every once in awhile it pays off. I have feeling, yonger companies, with their own research departments, they are still very down to earth, and look for immediate profit from R&D.
For this reason the german UG (Unternehmergesellschaft - Society of Entrepreneurs) was created. The investment can be chosen freely by the founders, the fees are very low (about 300 Euros) and the only drawback is that you have to put one quarter of the profits back into the capitalization.
Protip: put on deodorant before shirt.

(Also, get an antiperspirant/deodorant (without aluminium/titanium if possible)).
Hee is another PDF:
http://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus-NP/Deolalikar.pdf
repost: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1581965
Ask HN: Asking About Career Path
Hi,
I have been in enterprise development with Java for 5 years. I consider myself senior (in my skill that is, not just number of years I put in). I'm still very interested in writing code and designing software. I have great review from the management. But I have a feeling like if I just keep doing what I'm doing now (for a very big investment firm, non-trading activities) I could never earn the kind of money I wanted to. It seems like enterprise developer like me always seem to be a cost/expense to an organization rather than a source of revenue.

So I am thinking about what to do if I want to get a big salary jump. I can ask for a big raise (been here 5 years but the annual raise not that big) but I doubt it could help. Or I can just start over again in a new firm. I just need to make sure whatever firm I chose to work for, I want to be a source of revenue generating, not just an IT "expense". In my opinion, software companies like MS, google , Oracle always treasures their engineering staff better than the business staff. Or I can consider working for a consultant firm since I bring home the money for them as well.

I'd like to hear your opinions. Thank you
This is not the point.
Clang/LLVM is built (and financed) to be the real open-source competitor to GCC.

I don't see the problem here, not everything has to be GPL. I'm pretty sure the FreeBSD folks welcome the choice.

GCC is probably the main "monopoly" GNU has, so it must be scary to see that go away.
Twitter worked because of psychology and marketing. It is essentially a game and reputation system in which the users add content to increase their followership. People use it for other things, of course, but it's this dynamic which drove famous people to adopt the platform, which then efficiently drove masses of others to adopt it as well. Twitter harnessed the marketing power of the world's celebrities by giving them an utterly simple and focused infrastructure for developing, communicating with, and measuring their public.

Twitter is a game in which score is follower count. All the actions a user can take to boost this score work to further enhance the value of the platform. Invite your friends, add useful content, publicize your twitter feed. Twitter brilliantly incentivizes its users to market the platform as they add to its value.

Facebook's basic structure is based on an undirected social graph which mirrors relationships between ordinary people. Twitter developed the undirected social graph which mirrors hierarchical relationships. This small change in structure generates the celebrity psychology. This is why CNN anchors and other media jumped on the platform - it gave them the ability to develop their audience, in the process they mentioned twitter every 5 minutes to their audience. It is fame-seeking psychology which creates a virtuous cycle (from Twitter's perspective, that is) that draws people into the platform.

Engineers will look at Twitter and think it worked because it offered a "fundamental new protocol", but that is only a tiny necessary condition for success. The road is littered with seemingly basic new ideas that never caught on. Remember when people were saying Google Wave was "fundamental" ... How'd that work out?
Why The Verizon iPhone Rumors are True - CDMA iPhone Due in January
You are welcome. I am history addict a bit...
At my colo that is exactly the sort of strategy they use, they have bought a bunch of routers that use FPGA based filters for that.

The one scenario I can think of where that might be a problem is if they'd start flooding all the known hosts in a network for the specific purpose of overwhelming the routers. And even those hardware based filtering tools have upper limits.
I just submitted mine! It's a shortened version of this (don't click if using firefox on linux because of bug #550845): http://cs.uiowa.edu/~mltucker/js/chaos/ ... although bit simpler and without jquery of course.

I love this stuff.
NPR app was put together quite quickly and was intended by it's authors as a demo of though capabilities of www.Sproutcore.com

Let's not miss the larger point here. HTML5 have become a real option of application development. A business that relies on mobile/tablet form factor should seriously consider HTML5 as the application platform. The cost of porting iPhone/iPad apps to Android phones/tablets is much less with HTML5 than with native code.

Lack of distribution and monetization of HTML5 apps doesn't need to be an issue. A web app can be embedded into a native app to be sold on the AppStore.
Sounds like the "more accessible" version of Vim is Emacs.
Zed, you forgot kidney stones. One of the consequences of too much caffeine is it's easy to be dehydrated, which puts you at risk of kidney stones. Which essentially means you get the dubious pleasure of pissing razor sharp calcium rocks out your urethra. It hasn't happened to me, but it has happened to friends; based on their experiences, I wouldn't recommend it.
Finally, Twitter suggestions make sense
I'll second the Nexus One. It's a hell of a phone. I love it, and have recommended it to any of my friends that'll listen.

I'll touch on the things I don't like about it, though, for the sake of comparison.

- Not much internal memory. 512mb gets eaten up quickly by the OS and apps. That's alleviated somewhat by 2.2 allowing apps to be partially installed to SD card, but it's optional to the developer. It's not a huge complaint, but it is a complaint.

- Weak GPU. This isn't a gaming phone. Hardware like the Galaxy S is a lot better in this regard - if you're wanting to play non-puzzle games, look elsewhere. The N1's Snapdragon apparently doesn't perform as well as the Hummingbird found in some other newer phones as well, despite having the same clock speed. That said, it's no slouch, and CPU speed is not generally something I can complain about.

- The AMOLED screen washes out badly in sunlight. With 2.2's auto-adjust, it's usable in direct sunlight, but compared against SAMOLED or LCD screens, it comes up pretty short.

- It's not as big as some other phones. This is personal preference - I'm a big guy and would like a larger phone, so depending on your preference, another form factor might be preferable. The EVO and Droid X are both very large phones (4.3" screen), and the Galaxy S is moderately large (4" screen), while the Nexus One is "only" 3.7". (The iPhone trails the pack at 3.5").

That said, those are the only things I don't like about the phone, and they are extremely easy to live with in general.
The paper's origin was that the author mailed a copy for review to some very high-level folks in the field (Cook, Mazirani, Sipser, etc). Here's the mail:

Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 21:28:39 +0000
Subject: Proof announcement: P is not equal to NP

Dear Fellow Researchers,

I am pleased to announce a proof that P is not equal to NP, which is attached in 10pt and 12pt fonts.

The proof required the piecing together of principles from multiple areas within mathematics. The major effort in constructing this proof was uncovering a chain of conceptual links between various fields and viewing them through a common lens. Second to this were the technical hurdles faced at each stage in the proof.

This work builds upon fundamental contributions many esteemed researchers have made to their fields. In the presentation of this paper, it was my intention to provide the reader with an understanding of the global framework for this proof. Technical and computational details within chapters were minimized as much as possible.

This work was pursued independently of my duties as a HP Labs researcher, and without the knowledge of others. I made several unsuccessful attempts these past two years trying other combinations of ideas before I began this work.

Comments and suggestions for improvements to the paper are highly welcomed.

Sincerely,

Vinay Deolalikar
Principal Research Scientist
HP Labs

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/
The GPL is not concerned with programmer freedom, it is concerned with user freedom. The BSD/MIT camp favors the programmer side.
I got their flash viewer for this. I do sometimes get the html5 viewer, and I assumed the selection was based on a preference set by the uploader. Isn't it?