skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Iceland is a net energy producer. That means they will never be broke. They just happen to owe certain countries a few billion bucks which they may or may not pay back.
With the present army of unemployed workers out there, why aren't more people getting together and investing sweat equity to create something of value? The opportunity cost is practically zero for a lot of folks.

"Q. What do your V.C.-funded friends think of what you’re doing?

Ms. Charnock: They alternate between envy, awe, disbelief, and thinking that I am totally crazy."
I just got goosebumps. This is what I've been hoping/waiting for.
I think DNA is actually best described as a 1970's era binary in a running mainframe. It rewrites its own source code depending on outside information. And in order to understand what happens you need to look at a core dump that includes all the interesting bit's floating around and attacking/enveloping the DNA.

PS: Don't forget this source code has been hot patched (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_(computing)#Hot_patching) over 3+ Billion years.

Edit: To continue the analogy the boot loader has been lost to time (or sacrificed to free up memory), so getting a working system requires copying not just source code, but also much of the current state of the system.
So, post your huge list of ideas :)
ASK:HN Business model for mobile application
What's the ideal business model for mobile application ? Shall we go with free(lite) and pro (paid)version or launch only paid version. For lite and pro model, investors says it's under offering and may not be right way?
And, there is the big, centralized, web-based, file sharing services like MegaUpload and RapidShare. Thanks to the silly asymmetry in our connections (and if you pay), they are faster than bittorrent based file sharing. Thanks to some laws (like HADOPI in France), they are legally safer than bittorent (for copyrighted work). I suspect bittorent based file sharing is losing ground to them.
That's the idea! I posted one of them here http://benbloch.posterous.com/idea-1-better-beta-testing.
The server sends a client a whole page and once that page renders in a browser then you can use Ajax to transfer arbitrary bits of data to and from the server. You typically would not send an entire page to a client via Ajax, but you would use it to tell the server that 'User A' has voted on 'Story B' without having to load an entirely new page or refresh the page you're on.
This is right up there with the similarities between Kennedy and Lincoln.
Sometimes humans too good at seeing "patterns" for our own good.
The Los Hacker News Meetup is this Saturday
Hey, but don't you know it's chic to hate google right now?

People love complaining, but not so much helping. I see a lot of people saying why it's wrong but I dont' see fewer people making proposals. And I think the general message in the article is "hey, it's not perfect but at least google is doing something".
It says the cheque was "cancelled", so no payment was transfered and so no claim of ownership. Right?

EDIT: Thanks for all the replies. I didn't know the cheque is called "cancelled" after it's paid.
well, if you're going to use that as a baseline you should also factor in that the rate of advancement is exponential. so maybe 10?
We're scheduled to have presentations on:

1. Elastic Search
2. Balsamiq Mockups
3. ZeroMQ (By me, if time allows)

Presentations will be from 3:00 - 4:15, after that, time to mingle. We'll have food and drinks available as well.

Big thanks to Border Stylo for hosting! http://www.borderstylo.com/
http://www.public.lyricsemiconductor.com/technology-gates.ht...

This sounds fairly interesting. Does anyone know more about how their chips work?
Ask HN: Startups and Hackers in China?
Where do hackers and startups in China talk? Is there a HN for china or is there an enclave of China based hackers already here? Love to learn how to find and talk to this group.
This really classifies as a Captain Obvious moment.

It looks like a katana, especially if you are at a distance. Passes a sniff test, but surprise its an umbrella.

It ranks alongside "FIRE" in a theater, "Hi, jack!" In an airport, pointing gun-shaped objects at police, or bringing big weapons in dorms at college campuses.

All I can say is kudos to the person who called it in.
Apple Testing Proximity-Powered Prototypes Today; Likely To Appear In iPhone 5
Ok, this probably is a really stupid question, but here it goes anyway: in case of an emergency, someone who plays x-plane (or flight simulator) has any chance of flying a real aircraft?
Why is this voted down?
GenerateData : generate test data
Would be fun to see a SciFi movie based on this idea :-)
In even more news, wearing underwear may lead people to believe that you are carrying an underwear bomb, which is likely to get the cops called.
Zynga buys Conduit Labs, extends social gaming footprint to Boston
The only other source of information is the non-genomic environment - extra-nucleur DNA like mitochondria, and the womb (which is arguably already specified in the genome, unless mother nature has done a Ken Thompson http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html at some point.)

That just gives you a newborn baby's brain, which is a pretty poor standard for displaying "human" intelligence. If we didn't get any smarter than that, we'd be pretty dumb by animal standards. To get to "human" intelligence, you have to be able to simulate a rich environment for the brain to learn from. You also have to model the growth of the brain and its response to stimulus -- the physics, chemistry, and biochemistry of the brain. DNA doesn't have to do that, because it runs on a platform with that functionality built-in (i.e., the real world.)
...well now I want one.
Because in other news, this is not Reddit.
That might just mean they haven't found the right algorithm yet.
Proteins have emergent behaviors not entirely predictable from the behaviors of their constituent atoms.

Define "emergent". I can believe that a protein's behavior is extremely sensitive to the initial configuration of its atoms and that as a practical matter we can't (currently?) get detailed enough measurements to predict exactly what's going to happen. But without exceptionally compelling evidence I'm not going to believe that there are different physical laws for proteins than for their atoms.
"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."
- Thomas Jefferson.

or

"Diligence is the mother of good luck." - Benjamin Franklin
That's definitely at Georgia Tech, I know that girl. Small world.

Some background might help: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/22465319/detail.html

GT had a guy slice two people Spring semester which explains why the police would be there.
No, no and no. Chronic distrust of anything and everything, bordering on paranoia, in response to one in a million events is not rational.

Having a Katana like handle sticking out of your backpack is not even in the same ballpark as malicious provocation. Yelling "fire" in a movie theater? Please.
Saints can become sinners, Sinners can become saints...
Something I wrote down a while ago and tell myself now and then, something I try to base my behavior towards others and judgment of others on:

----------

Saints can become sinners
Sinners can become saints

so don't take people for granted
yet
do care to give somebody a second chance

don't forget that sometimes it is our actions that make them change from one to the other.

So don't be ever ready to put the blame on them
yet
be ready to take the blame on your self now and then.

----------

It is so amusing when people see somebody has changed over time and exclaim "I can't believe its the same person" as if they were expecting people to remain exactly the same over time.

Though it mentions of saints/sinners connoting as if its just about good/bad, etc of people, isn't it the same about every aspect of people, whether it be their skills - technical or non-technical, personal skills, personality, attitudes, beliefs, faiths or whatever?

People can change.
SO CAN WE.

Its upto us how we want to change, because we will keep changing whether we want to or not, but if we care enough and are willing enough, we can choose how we want to change, for the better or for worse, to develop characteristics into strengths or into weaknesses.

uhoh......once again I succumb to my weakness to start with one thought and steer it into another thought, what to doooo, it is so tempting to connect things up.
It seems really tasteless to carry a Samurai Sword umbrella on such a campus. ThinkGeek? More like ThinkFreak...
OK, it's not clear how detailed you want a critique to be, so I'll throw out a few thoughts that I hope you find useful, interesting or provocative.

Firstly, let me say that I'm always humbled by someone who writes clearly in a language other than a cradle language. Having said that there are many, many small grammatical errors. Even so, the writing is pretty clear, and most of the errors do not obscure the meaning. That's impressive.

You say:

A similar approach, learning only when required, is
good for hackers. According to me, learning what's
necessary when a situation calls for it triumphs over
that of learning just because something exists or is
available. ... I advocate learning as a process that
is supposed to run in parallel with implementation.
You learn by doing it and you learn only because you
require it.

I think this is thoroughly, fundamentally wrong. Dangerously wrong. I think you should have a voracious appetite for knowledge and information that currently lies just out of reach, even if it serves no useful purpose. Time and time again I've found that things I learned simply because they were interesting have turned out to be crucial in understanding something critical later on.

You can never know in advance what you will need, and chance favors the prepared mind. The legendary golfer Gary Player said "The more I practise the luckier I get."

Learn stuff beyond what you think you need.

Several times you say "Most engineers ..." and then say something that is, in my mind, completely at odds with the majority of engineers I know. It started to annoy me, and made me start to doubt other things you were saying. Specifically, for example, I don't know any good engineers who think "writing good code means saving every possible byte of memory and computational power." You seem simply to be setting up straw men to be knocked down, and that's not a convincing style. Your points should stand on their own.

There are several other points with which I disagree, but they're your opinions, and I won't argue them here.

There are grammatical errors such as this:

"They might be simple like a software that solves ..."

The "a" is unnecessary (and incorrect).

There are many other places where you have unnecessary words and the writing could be tightened significantly.

And it feels like it rambles. It's not really clear what your main point is, or how you're getting there. You have a lot of opinions that you state, and clearly feel are self-evident, but there's not much of a logical progression.

But finally, and this is my main point, I read it to the end and was interested. If this is your first essay, it will be interesting to see your fiftieth.

Or even your tenth.
>in that I was assuming that you already know what would be useful - whereas that is often the difficult part.

Me, I focused on "what can I do" and "what would I buy" - I think a reasonable, though very limiting, starting point.

My first problem was that amazon radically changed the market for storage (I started by selling storage) - my second problem was that sharing pagecache? bad idea. My third problem was that I thought using obsolete hardware was somehow a good idea.

So, uh, yeah. of my major problems, only one, really, was external. the rest were me being stupid. I guess that could fall into the "finding something useful" category. But then, I am mostly filling unserved price niches in existing markets. When I started there were already VPS providers out there; linode was one. I do believe I was the first to switch to xen.

>I say that finding something to create that is useful enough to give a modest one-man income, is a lot easier than finding one giving a multi-billion dollar payout.

I assume it's harder to make the 'big exit' companies... not that I would know. It's certainly a very different game, one that would be /much/ harder for my particular skillset. most 'big exit' companies seem to be more focused on selling to investors than on day to day cashflow. In my industry, if I sold out tomorrow, I'd get the value of my servers, plus about a years revenue. Now, there's no way I'd sell at that price, but that's market for a ISP or hosting company. Compare that to the valuation MySpace got. They got a valuation that assumed myspace would be the dominant social networking site for a long time. The valuations for friendster and facebook both reflected that same assumption. To me, that assumption seems ridiculously irrational.

Now, if you are going for a 'big exit' usually you have more than one founder, and some startup cash from someone else. Certainly, more work is put in, but is any one person's contribution more than what they'd have to contribute to get their own lifestyle business off the ground? I don't know. Once you involve investors, though, and people depending on investor money, you are much more likely to get yourself in a situation where you have no choice but to close the company.

Of course, my negative tone is entirely sour grapes, because my skilset means that I'd be a very minor player in any "swing for the fences" venture, while I can handle my lifestyle business just fine.
The analytics might not be entirely without value, but I'm guessing people are paying the submission fee because they want you to build their product and give them an entirely reasonable 12% of the proceeds rather than for feedback (which they could solicit on web forums targeted to their intended niche without paying a dime). As far as I can see they don't learn much about the actual commercial viability of the product, simply that some unqualified people love or hate it.

Have you tested the price point? Assuming your business model is ultimately based on selling viable products rather than submission fees, removing the entry fee or lowering it to a nominal amount might actually benefit you in terms of better submissions, particularly since you already have the community to filter for crap.
If it were a katana, so what? Is it illegal to carry one around? It's probably against school rules like guns are, but I doubt the SWAT team would be called just because a guy had a gun, especially if it wasn't a college campus.
Don't even solve it. Just put it up for bid on elance, along with the P-NP problem.
My wife claims I have "value"... does that count?
Maybe, though I am concerned about processing power stagnating.

Advancement is governed by economics as well as technical capability. There must be demand for new technology, or a field stagnates. Witness aviation as an example... utterly stagnant outside of military niche applications.

People seem to no longer want faster and faster computers, and the market seems to be moving toward lighter-weight lower-power portable devices like netbooks, the iPad, etc. Those have slower CPUs than current-generation desktops. I suppose the extreme gamer and server/datacenter markets are still driving performance, but for how long?

One problem is that programmers are not using the capabilities of current-generation processors, partly because the dominant OS (cough Windows cough) makes it horrifically painful to deploy desktop apps. This drives all development to the web and turns desktops into thin clients. In the end this kills demand for performance outside the datacenter market.
BTW how do you define human intelligence ? What is it that we wouldn't be able to construct ?

Put in another way, what construct would qualify as approaching human intelligence ?
Interesting insights into evolution of resource management in .Net (from 2000)
The argument Myers is making is that while the DNA might be the input to the system, the total amount of data in the system is that input plus the rules around how that input is interpreted/works. Those rules (for example around protein folding) are currently encoded in biological systems as the laws of physics, more or less, but they're insanely complicated and currently unknown.

So the point is that perhaps if you had a system that simulated all of the laws of physics exactly correctly such that proteins folded and interacted exactly right, only then could you get away with an amount of input equivalent to the amount of information encoded in the part of our DNA related to the brain.

Actually encoding those rules is probably the harder part of the problem, and could easily take several orders of magnitude more work. (10x? 1,000,000x? Who even knows).
Yes. I used to work in the oil industry (now distribution) and continue to work on side projects. It's hard work but you have to do whatever it takes.
Doesn't it say in the article that in the past, 24% of the Hindenburg Omen were followed by a stock market crash? From the article:

Looking back at historical data, the probability of a move greater than 5% to the downside after a confirmed Hindenburg Omen was 77%, and usually takes place within the next forty-days.
The probability of a panic sellout was 41% and the probability of a major stock market crash was 24%.

While the past performance is quite compelling, the criteria seem to be extremely arbitrary.
"So basically if a good programmer is spending his time with family and kids or doing something other than programming in his non-work time, then you will not hire him?"

That person would in many cases be the better choice, too -- especially if you want your product to actually work, and not be a maintenance nightmare. People like hate getting paged at 2am due to production bugs, so they tend to have stronger motivation to write simpler, cleaner code than the passionate tinkerers tend to write and become emotionally attached to.
Not too bad, but sort of like trying to describe an elephant as a bunch of balloons and a water hose glued onto a bail of hay on a table.

I also dislike those sorts of analogies because they are loaded with aesthetic value judgements that do not apply. Programming code that looked like that would be ugly. The genetic system is beautiful and elegant.
As a basic income / expenses tracker, I've used both Less Accounting (http://lessaccounting.com) and Outright (http://outright.com). Outright flowed better for me, but YMMV. This was for a single-founder startup, with very modest requirements.

I'm about to start managing the finances on a startup I'm founding with a partner, and in order to keep the books in order, we'll be using QuickBooks. It's possible that Outright or Less could handle our needs, but I want to make sure that everything is recorded properly, including paychecks and whatnot. This is important when running a solo operation, of course, but since the income is all pass-through, it's not as big a deal. When there are multiple founders, I'd recommend something more substantial.
FCC didn't make a proposal on Wireless, at least on the document they sent on Oct 2009.

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-09-93A...
I'm a musician and I can tell you from experience that I sound a lot better on a Steinway concert grand than on a cheap Casio keyboard. So, more money? I guess the keyboard is cheaper, but when the musician is happy the music is better.
Wow, these used to be good. I guess they got a new writer, because this one seems clumsy and haphazard.

I get the sense that stuff was laundry-listed from other sources or stretched hard to fit, because many of these are just irrelevant trivia.

Like, why make an obtuse reference to the original Buffy comics as if high schoolers would read them and not watch the actual series in reruns?

And really, "Someone has always gotten married in space?!?" That barely parses, much less illustrates any difference in generational mindsets.
"we can all agree that . . . ???"

¬(¬MY_PEEPS ⇒ ¬SKILLZ) ∧ ¬(¬SKILLZ ⇒ ¬SOFTWARE) # original formula
¬(SKILLZ ⇒ MY_PEEPS ∨ SOFTWARE ⇒ SKILLZ) # De Morgan
¬(¬SKILLZ ∨ MY_PEEPS ∨ ¬SOFTWARE ∨ SKILLZ) # (a⇒b) ↔ (¬a∨b)
¬(¬SKILLZ ∨ SKILLZ ∨ MY_PEEPS ∨ ¬SOFTWARE) # re-arranging
¬(TRUE ∨ MY_PEEPS ∨ ¬SOFTWARE) # (¬a∨a) ↔ TRUE
FALSE # ¬TRUE ↔ FALSE
SearchYC has a page that shows all of the Ask HN posts: http://ask.searchyc.com/, so you wouldn't have to write a script to do this, although filtering out ones that weren't upvoted very much might have made this job a lot easier.
I'm out of my depth here, but if protein folding is intractable like the halting problem or the traveling salesman problem, as you're making it seem, I find it odd that I haven't read that elsewhere.
I don't think they mean canceled, as in "not cashed or usable". They mean canceled as in "transaction complete, this instrument is no longer valid for further transactions". When you write a check and someone uses it, it gets sent to your bank to be canceled and stored/destroyed.
THE definition of 'wage slave' (from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery) is:

> Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages, especially in a total and immediate way.

So, yes, someone who's independently wealthy is not a wage slave, but someone who is self-employed or who owns a significant stake in the business they work for is also not a wage slave. It's about the boss/worker relationship, the power an employer has over an employee.
Once a cheque is approved and all appropriate accounts involved have been credited, the cheque is stamped with some kind of cancellation mark, such as a "paid" stamp. The cheque is now a cancelled cheque. Cancelled cheques are placed in the account holder's file. The account holder can request a copy of a cancelled cheque as proof of a payment. This is known as the cheque clearing cycle.
A cancelled check is one that has been approved, cleared for payment, and processed. It is proof that there was a transfer of funds, although a check in and of itself won't help prove what the funds were for.
>CSS can handle all on its own

CSS can't handle it all on its own is the point. And yes I'd rather incur the extra bandwidth of a 1px wide crushed PNG in order to have simpler code and have my site support all-browsers, including ones whose team made good CSS a priority before other browsers did. Rewarding the large monoliths by coding specifically for them simply because of their popularity while punishing teams that actually prioritized CSS is what got us into this mess in the first place. Would you encourage this behavior pre-CSS4? pre-CSS5?
Programmers are not people. They are robots without friends or families and they really hate being paid overtime.
Hmmm, early in _The Charterhouse of Parma_ one Count Prina is murdered by thugs armed with umbrellas. Perhaps the Atlanta area cops read Stendhal?
Yes, but it gives you the newborn baby's brain in toto, including its ability to grow up into a normal adult human. If you get to newborn's brain you are 99.9% of the way there from the AI side. By the time we get there, feeding it stimulus will be a relatively simple problem by comparison.
right ego (humble) and personality (outgoing).

I guess it sort of depends on how you define humble, but I find that most good programmers have at least a touch of arrogance. They must approach some of the most complicated machines developped in all of history and say, "I will make this do my will." They must approach problems that have not been solved before and say, "I can solve this." If you decide to change languages or even just frameworks or a new API, they must think, "I can and will learn this."

I can see a desire for a certain degree of humility, but it must be of a specific kind, not what most people think of as humility. It should be of the "I know there are people better than me, but I will find them and learn from them. I will always strive to be the best, while acknowledging there will be others better."