skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am following Dubai closely. If rents fall more, it might be a good place to settle down and work on my projects.
Unfortunately this is not a "proper operator". For example, both sides need to be evaluated, so it cannot control the program flow.

Still, I really like the inrex module in the last comment. Great extension to the very clumsy re.
I'm sorry but I don't understand what you're getting at. Could you please elaborate on your point?
Sounds like all of the author's technical co-founders were getting sick of being exploited by a partner with nothing to offer but an idea
I think software geeks can over estimate the ability of others to learn to program well. In my opinion it's better for people to stick at what they're good at.
It was my comment that inspired this; and I wasn't trolling anyone.
Many google mobile apps are not available or come out late.
It's just that it happened on a metropolis sized scale. A skyline had never before risen so quickly. It's now falling down at nearly the same pace. Interesting to watch and at least in my opinion, unique.
If P=NP, then conventional cryptography would be impossible. In particular you would have no public key cryptography so it would not be possible to transmit information securely over an unsecure channel without sharing a some sort of key beforehand. Think of what this will do to online transactions which rely on information like credit card numbers being transmitted securely. I'm sure other areas of the economy would be vastly affected too.

The one form of cryptography that would still be possible is quantum cryptography. But if I recall correctly, that requires that two parties already hold some shared secret before communicating.

Edit: In addition although it would be possible to detect if someone is eavesdropping over your communication, you still wouldn't have the privilege of being able to communicate securely regardless of whether your message is being recorded.
This of course presumes that not only P=NP, but an efficient polynomial time algorithm exists for NP problems i.e. one which is say linear or quadratic or even cubic time.
Which is easier: moving one programmer from Nigeria to Silicon Valley, or moving the Valley to Nigeria?
It would have to be pretty damn buggy and underdeveloped to lose to Flash in that department. Until just now I wasn't aware there even was a Linux plugin.
Note: I'm an Aussie, and the Aussie HECS (now HELP) system is a little different. The government loans you the money; interest is charged at CPI (so usually half that of commercial rates; my debt actually decreased at one point when Australia measured negative CPI growth!). To ensure their debt, it is compulsarily repaid as a percentage of taxable income - the higher your income, the higher the percentage goes (and yes, this does create situations where a payrise leads to a negative cash-in-hand outcome).

My debt topped out just over $20K. I graudated at the end of 2002, started paying it off in 2003 (ie, my first salary was high enough for the threshold) and it was paid off in mid-2009. I could have paid it off sooner, but the system means there are usually better uses for my disposable cash (mortgage, even cash deposit!). Still, it's good that it's gone. Good luck with yours.
"I began the hunt to find a technical co-founder - a software engineer who works for no cash - to help me build MY dream website."

Shouldn't that be "OUR dream website"?

"You're more likely to bump into a piece of talking bacon riding a unicorn on their way to a leprechaun's pool party than finding a software engineer who will work for FREE."

Shouldn't that be "for 50% ownership"?

Sounds like he was looking for free labor, not a co-founder.
depends on the company. since the songkicks were working on live music, it made sense for them to be somewhere with an active live music scene e.g. london.

if you're working on something completely location agnostic and you're getting a lot of valley investor interest around demo day, it probably makes more sense to stay in the US than return to the UK (that's what we did).
Fallacies of Distributed Computing Explained [pdf]
The ads on the left side had me laughing. They are Google ads--and every one of them when I visited the page was for attorneys and services offering to help people get patents.
Obama is a government official increasing govt power.

Government power in the U.S. is limited by the Separation of Powers as well as the Constitution.

Edit: Someone downvoted me? Why not post an argument with your position?
It seems easier said than done, unless you think Hadoop's architecture and fault tolerance logic is over-engineered.
"software engineers don't work for free"

Well there is this strange thing called open source software where I believe people work for free.

Jokes aside, I can understand why this guy has trouble finding a technical cofounder. It's all in his attitude. A partnership needs to be on an equal footing with a large degree of mutual respect. Of course it's hard to tell from just one blogpost, but it might be the problem.
There is a discussion to be had about whether or not the students should receive their test results. However, the author does not seem to fully understand what he's discussing.

First, there is the issue of our limited genetic knowledge. Genetic tests are currently based on a sample of 1 out of every ~3000 nucleotides in your genome. Therefore, although they do cover the vast majority of common variants, they cannot tell the full story. You may have a detected SNP that predisposes you to some risk of disease, but at the same time you may have a rare variant - not picked up by the tests - that is virtually guaranteed to protect you from the same disease. This is not trivial, as rare variants are common (everyone has lots of rare variants; however, few people share the same rare variants).

Furthermore, most SNPs that are associated with disease have not been demonstrated to be causal for disease. In fact, I'm aware of only a small number of SNPs that are not in exons (coding regions of genes) that are nevertheless known to be causal: one is rs12740374, which causes a decrease in LDL production via a novel pathway.

I suppose my point is that there is a large ethical debate that hinges on our scientific knowledge of the limitations of genetic testing. This author seems not to know about this, or not to care, and instead has chosen to write a polemic. I find this unfortunate.
I've been thinking the same thing. It's why I don't expect to be able to find my first job any time soon--I'm 26 with an AAS degree and no work experience in a terrible economy.

I've got an advantage since I have parents with a big house that's above water. My brother and his fiance are going to ride out some portion of it here with us (they both have good, stable jobs). I'm going to take this opportunity to explore the area around Atlanta (where I live) hoping to run in to some kind of opportunity.

I've also got the plan B of using this stable spot to consider cheap to create startups that don't make a lot of money, but do provide a small profit. With minimal (or no) expenses, a tiny profit can go a long way.

I think anyone who is in a relatively stable position needs to do what I'm doing and consider small entrepreneurial steps. It may put them in a better place, and it has the potential to take off and create economic activity, which could end the recession sooner.

Even if all you do is start a blog in your field of knowledge, you keep your skills sharp, improve them through interaction, and possibly give someone else the spark they needed to do something that will create jobs.
If P = NP then factoring numbers may be easy in such fashion that factoring numbers is not really that easy. N^749 is still polynomial time.
A lack of objective rule of law defending property rights.
Is there a good network of startups and mentors near you to get support from? I live in Chicago, and I'd probably ask myself that same question before deciding to leave Mountain View. There's a lot of things you can do remotely, but support is one that I just can't do. Not sure about you or others. Regardless, if I got accepted to YC, I'd consider this a good problem to have.

I just spammed Ian Hogarth from SongKick on Twitter, asking him to weigh in. I'm curious to hear his thoughts on it.
Agreed. The other challenge is getting the software engineer to buy into the plan. Even if they're on equal footing, they may not feel like it because they ultimately believe it's viable. It's also harder to feel good about writing software without cash in the customer validation phase. If you have to pivot and walk away from code already written, it's hard to feel good about that.
He sounds like every other jackass on craigslist who wants to find someone he can tell what to do but not have to pay. It's no surprise that he didn't have luck, it's an incredibly unfair proposition. A partnership requires both parties to have skin in the game, you telling someone what to build doesn't qualify as skin.
I have a lot of respect for James Gosling but claiming that J2ME is more developer friendly than developing for Android is kind of ridiculous. IMO Anyone who has tried to write apps for pre-Android phones using J2ME and tried Android development would prefer Android any day for both business and ease-of-development reasons.
J. Gosling: Oracle is right. Google is wrong. Google screwed with Java big time.
While Dubai is held out by many as an example of capitalism at work, I actually see it as another case of socialism gone wrong. While you might scoff at the suggestion of linking socialism and Dubai together, what you effectively had with Dubai world was a government entity making investment decisions seemingly with no regard to price signals as more land sat unsold, and more buildings sat unrented, as more hotels sat unoccupied, but still the construction went forwards. It's this central government command of the economy that has arguably caused the problems with overinvestment and overbuilding, and a tightly controlled workforce (no freedom to associate, no rights) that supplied the labour to do it.

If there had been proper price signalling (insistence, for example, that the existing hotels turned a profit before new ones were built) and a properly free labour force, which would have seen rising wages during contruction booms, then the growth would have slowed somewhat. Instead, because of these artificial market conditions, overinvestment continued and tripped off a speculative frenzy, which has caused the grief.

I'm not pretending this is the only cause, but when you have a central authority blazing away wasting money, it's only a matter of time before the economy as a whole suffers from overinvestment in unproductive assets.
I've actually been down that very same road - looking for a technical cofounder but finding it hard. There simply aren't that many people that are both smart, get things done and want to do a startup. At least not where I'm located.

As a business geek I took another route after thinking about how to remedy the situation: Learn to program. Best decision I've ever made.
No. It's only asymptotically equivalent. If the constant is enormous relative to some absolute measure (say, the number of transistors on earth) then O-notation doesn't meaningfully help you.
In case you're curious, this term is used in the YC "How To Apply" post found at: http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html
To steal and abuse a quote from Arrested Development,

The mere fact that you call your product a website tells me you're not ready [for a technical co-founder]
BackType is hiring a product lead
> What if someone proved that all NP problems could be solved in O(n) time?

You’re quite confused. NP is (at least) a superset of P, and not all problems in P can be solved in linear time (for example, sorting an arbitrarily long list of random numbers). I think you meant something like O(n^(1000^1000))?
US here. BS from large state technical university. I had about 18K in loan debt upon graduation. Paid it off in 2 years. I could have drug it out for 30 years, but wanted to pay it off. I am glad I did.
In the first paragraph alone there are two huge, billowing red flags.

1. The author thinks that a technical co-founder is "a software engineer who works for no cash."

2. The author went through four "technical co-founders" inside a year.

My guess is the author was looking for freelance-type work, paying out equity "as if" it were cash (i.e., as a function of deliverables vs. a vesting schedule), and in general was micromanaging the engineers he found.

A co-founder is a business partner, not "your" employee.
to you and others that have commented on the running costs are low...

The example I'm thinking of is a friend who sold his plane for more than he paid for it (I don't know exactly what type but it was more executive jet than single prop - it had a pressurized cabin etc).

Anyway, he sold the plane for more than he paid for it and so after accounting for maintenance and hanger fees he basically only had to pay fuel as his costs (and probably even had some of that off-set by the profit on the sale).

In the same manner I know people who run cars like this - buy sports cars at the top of the list when they come out, receive the vehicle and then drive it for 12 months at which point they can sell it at cost price to someone who would otherwise have to get on at the back of the waiting list. They zero out in terms of loss, and so repeat the cycle having already jumped on the list for the next years model.

You have to have the float for the cost of 1-2 cars but you never loose money net.

It's how the rich stay rich, I guess.
I guess I could have emphasized the "problems like this" and the "at least provide insight that helps solve" parts, as I wasn't suggesting that some amatuer will necessarily come along and completely solve this problem. And sure, I agree that in specific instances in which the problem is purely mathematical, outsiders probably rarely have much impact.

That being said, it was my understanding that even the most recent paper posted here causing all this stir over the P/NP problem, was using statistical physics, which does indeed make it a somewhat "out of left-field" approach not used by the domain experts that have been traditionally studying this problem.
I was lucky enough to go to a public school (UCLA), which cost less than $5000/year at the time. I was able to come out debt-free, which is huge, considering some of my high school friends have over $100k in debt.
Facebook and Divorce Court.
See my comment above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1606321) as it also answers your comment.
Not confused, though you are correct that we already know that at least some NP cannot be solved in linear time given that NP is a superset of P. I should have phrased things more narrowly.

My point is simply to show that even linear-time problems may be computationally intractable.
Reclaiming the Imagination
...and lose, even if your property is being taken to benefit someone building a shopping mall. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London)

Offers of compensation are small comfort to people that are being forced out of a home they care about, especially when they have no choice, recourse, or influence in the matter.
I agree and I was pissed off at his tone: here's my rebuttal

http://joshuavolz.com/2010/08/16/business-cofounders-are-a-d...
Ask HN: please give feedback on Fashionista Pals
Please let us know what you thin of this fashion-sharing site.
There's room for you both to be right. People tend not to have problems with a government or laws until they find themselves on the wrong end of them.
Use brute force to find an available domain name for Web 2.0 projects
I'm a fairly technical person (i.e. I can code), and I've gotten other technical people to totally buy into my idea, contribute to it, and "own" it in that sense. But I find that his thesis is still correct, most people need validation of the idea before they will jump into it.

In that, he doesn't need to qualify "people" with the adjective "software engineer". The same principle applies to design folks as well. The bottom line is, if you want to make it happen, you better pony up or do the work yourself. If such skills and effort came for free, don't you think someone else would have done it already?
Sounds to me like the author originally went in looking for technical chops, not friendship/compatibility. A cofounder isn't someone you throw a project at and expect results, it's a relationship. Compatibility means so much more when you're founding a company together (not just having the other person work on your idea), than technical ability.
There are very many people in the U.S. that would say it's only a handful of decades behind this view of Russia.
http://www.charlierose.com/

Intelligent one hour long interviews with interesting people. Charlie Rose is a great interviewer, and actually lets people express their full opinion on a subject without cutting them off.

I don't know how he does it but he gets to interview all sorts of famous intellectuals, artists and business leaders. From Paul Krugman and Jeff Bezos to Michael Caine and Dennis hopper.

There are several new interviews every week and the back catalog will keep you entertained for months.
Academic Bankruptcy
Missing Spoiler Alert: should you be inclined to read the book (this is a book review, not a full-fledged article) rather than a trivial summary, do not read past the first paragraphs.

I am disinclined to agree with the assertion and certainly not to the exclusion of other factors - though I suspect and hope the article glosses over the relative importances thereof whereas the book may treat them a bit more sanely. It is an interesting hypothesis, nonetheless, and certainly makes me want to read the book for the full analysis.
Wrong. O(n * c) = O(n).

The definition of O(n) is: f is in O(n) so long as |f(n)| <= M * |n| for some constant M.

Likewise, the definition of O(n * c) would be: f is in O(n * c) so long as |f(n)| <= M' * |n * c| for some constant M'.

As you can see, any function f which is in O(n * c) is also in O(n), and vice versa.

The entire point of complexity classes is to describe asymptotic behavior. If you want to describe something other than asymptotic behavior, find a different tool.
Giving in to feel good: Why self-regulation fails
I am not in school. I have mouths to feed.
Everything is possible in this world...
Everything is possible in this world, its just a matter of figuring out how, and having the will and wherewithal to implement that how.

This is my belief and has made many things possible for me, so just wanted to share it. If you want to follow the same, a practical advice in finding that big "how", get into the habit of asking yourself, "what", "why" and "how" and keep asking and attempting to answer those questions till you get all the answers of the puzzle. And you will. Just don't limit the answers to your own knowledge, in fact use those questions to broaden your knowledge and that's where many answers to that big "how" lie.

To give credit where it is due, the thought/belief, was inspired by the 5whys of Toyota/TPS, which I discovered when I fell in love with lean manufacturing or rather with the philosophy behind it.
Right!

Given that the Internet is about 2 billion people large I'm banking on the idea that we can find a few thousand people that Atombox will be very useful for and that they will pay for it straight-up.

Sounds good to us too! ;)
We definitely should emphasise that. Also, the way the service works now, each user's cached page might be different (e.g. if you historified it a month ago and I yesterday, the caches will be different if the page changed). Example:

http://stavros.historio.us/cached/354988/

Unfortunately, we just lost a day of A/B testing due to an erroneous setting, but we'll start testing this addition to the homepage first thing tomorrow. Thanks again!
Exactly! I think that there is a rather substantial silver lining to major change, in that it forces people that would otherwise not have to/not have the guts to, go out and do what they want, like start a company or follow a passion (hopefully not mutually exclusive). That is ultimately where growth is going to come from. Assuming relative stability, the cost of trying something new falls dramatically in bad times.
Apple hire hints at iPhones with near-field wireless payment
I paid mine off within about two years after graduating, but later learned that doing so wrecked my credit. (The credit score people want to see a long record of payments, not someone who quickly pays off debts in full.) I felt that it was better to pay them off NOW, rather than pay 10x as much over the course of decades.

I'm sure if you have a credit card or something, you wouldn't have to worry about that.
Nepal.
Ad systems currently fair very poorly on content which contains a negative commentary about a topic.
But it's fragmented, and there are is no TRC (Technical Requirment Certification).

For example how the application should deal with built-in keyboard, or without. What should it do when rotated. How different resolution would work.

There is also no formal requirments specification - e.g. this app requires builtin keyboard, et.c
My favorite picture of the Dubai skyline.

Skyscrapers in the clouds back when property values were reaching towards the sky...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/playing-with-light/2399114248/s...

Also: http://secretdubai.blogspot.com/
Cryptography is a perverse example where you want to create very hard problems (if not impossible) for others to solve while having some means of keeping the problem easy for yourself and individuals you trust.

If we had some easy way to solve problems in NP though, I bet there would be tons of productive applications. I'll quote a friend of mine:

"That would transform life on earth, and multiply our technological development rate by a factor unimaginable.

There's no way of even estimating what could happen if that problem were solved, unless the polynomial conversion made the problem impossible.

....It would also solve the protein-folding problem and all of the quantum state problems. Money is nifty; immortality and a possible stardrive don't suck. The NP problem is the current barrier to human science. 'There's no way to simulate that' is a constant refrain around here."

An interesting way of looking at it is that a valid proof that P != NP would be a kick in humanity's balls comparable to Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
If not Java, why not then go with Lisp?
Given that the current Oracle lawsuit is seriously denting Jave's image, and given that one of the early intention for Java was to drag C++ developers half way to Lisp, do you think now would be a good time to consider Lisp on earnest?
BTW, how does the lawsuit affect Clojure?
http://www.kottke.org/
Despite being correct in the narrow sense, you nevertheless end up being wrong in a broader, more useful sense.

I do not disagree with the definition. But you shouldn't rigidly focus on the definition without considering the utility of the notation, and the purpose of the discussion.

Big O notation describes the asymptotic behavior of a function when the argument N being passed to it approaches infinity. This is why it is also known as asymptotic notation.

Now, since this thread is about practical consequence, there is a severe problem with glibly saying that n * 999^999^999^999^999 will ever remotely resemble n from a practical standpoint. You'll never be able to compute f(1), much less a value of n large enough to be limiting.

At any rate, it looks like we both agree that O notation doesn't help you here. My fault for bringing it up.