skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hard to tell from the article which kind of skimmed over stuff, from what I can tell, the theory posits we live in a large, isotropic, semi-classical world following a long (more than Plankian scale) epoch of inflation, because a large sub-set of vacuum states in the landscape of vacuum states in string theory are such that they will lead to long periods of inflation, thereby producing large, isotropic, semi-classical post-inflationary regions such as the one we observe. I suppose if one can demonstrate a large subset of the possible histories in string theory lead to alot of inflation, one can say it is "most probably" to find oneself in a history that has had a lot of inflation. I suppose earlier versions of the Hartle-Hawking "sum over histories" approach didn't take the string theory "landscape" into account, and this theory in the article is "new" in the sense that it is the same "sum over histories" approach, but attacked from the viewpoint of the string theory landscape, attempting to demonstrate how one can get inflation from some non-vanishing subset of histories associated with the string theory landscape. But I haven't seen the actual paper, so not quite sure if this is exactly what it is doing. Be interesting to see what if any refinements of current predictions this model could lead to. Specifically if any insights are given for say the cosmological constant driving the current cosmic acceleration.
Who says the sharded webheads and databases have to be on different boxes?

As for the linking problem: I had assumed (wrongly, perhaps) that the application in question is one that is friendly to sharding- an application where little or nothing is shared amongst discrete groups of users (companies, teams, etc) and things are sharded at the group level and not the user level. If the application can't handle that, then sharding is probably not the best database scaling option.
Well, you can call me an elitist (though I've never been a member of or interested in Mensa), but I don't think this is crap. Happiest times of my life were when I was among high concentrations of intelligent people on a daily basis.

The very existence of this community is evidence against your point. Or are all the truly intelligent people out there happily communicating with YouTube commenters?
The meaning of Bill Gates
Agreed. Communications devices can't be distributed without also sharing their method of communication. This is why we all know the number 0x09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 as the key to decrypting HD-DVD movies.
i will concede that my assumption about plain text storage in a database may have been a poor assumption, but it has happened before, and popular sites have been guilty. Reversibly encrypting your passwords isn't best practice, either.
This looks like a cool op. 99.9% of people can't afford to do a startup unless it has near-zero costs.

Of course, a lot of what makes startups succeed is scarcity of resources and fear of imminent and public failure. You're taking that away and functionally creating an incubator, which have long histories of producing mediocre startups/products.

If I were you, I'd adjust it to:
1) Pay bread/water wages.
2) Give them skin in the game (equity). As much as you can stand.
3) Tell them they have 6 months to build something people want/like or their salary goes to zero and they can continue on like any other entrepreneur (for the love/belief in the project and the hope that they can make it go big).
4) Hire 2 people, not one.
Broadband caps are a drag, but I would enjoy thinking of ways to deliver cool web-apps that are light on bandwidth usage.
it's a better idea to use it to fight aliens than to shoot pigeons with it http://xkcd.com/401/
20 million Firefox 3 downloads in a week, ~4% market share
Are there any studies showing that basketball performance, French fluency, bin packing, and physics knowledge, all taken together, will produce a meaningfully large general factor? Intuitively it seems unlikely, and it doesn't jibe with what I understand g's definition to be based on the comments of people like Eysenck and Jensen, who justified g on the basis of intelligence test correlations, and only later tried to tie it to biological functions (evoked brain signal potential in Eysenck's case, reaction time in Jensen's) and metrics of social, sports, and job performance.

Regardless, I agree that g exists in at least a limited sense, but I maintain that there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate that it emerges from innate, immutable physical properties of the brain, and you still can't attribute life success to it.
Are you sure that you were happy because the people around you were intelligent? Or was it because you were in an intellectual environment where people discussed interesting topics?*

*free of inane comments
Nozick's 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia' and Hofstadter's 'Godel, Escher, and Bach' probably changed the way I think more than anything else. Nozick is like a less insane version of ayn rand ;-) I loved 'atlas shrugged' when I discovered it in high school though ....

Miller's 'Sexus' changed the way I see the world.

and Mencken's 'Chrestomathy' changed the way I comment on the world.

Hmm, actually, all three are just about due for a good re-read
insightful? yes. surprising that he's insightful? no.
This is awesome. Since I don't have a CS degree, this will put me on equal terms with people that have worthless ones. We'll be judged on experience and knowledge instead.
Love it. The precautionary principle is 100% anti-science
Interesting. I am willing to do exactly this if more feedback comes in supporting it vs what I'm currently proposing. Thanks Tony.
I loved The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. He is the one who threw me into the world of intellectual non-fiction.
You can do better than that.

Two things:

Erin's been working on a Campfire bot for us; one of our major problems is getting everyone on the team to use Campfire consistently, so her bot notices when people are absent and then tracks them down on AIM and yells at them with a link. The AIM part was pretty trivial; she's using the (horrible) TOC libraries that come with Ruby.

Also, Rails interfaces best by way of the database. You can write Rails apps without ActiveRecord, but you lose a lot of the integration that makes Rails nice to use. Scaling database writes from an IM bot can get tricky. On a dare a few weeks ago, I wrote an async MySQL driver for EventMachine --- you can drive an arbitrary number of queries to an arbitrary number of MySQL servers from a single thread. EventMachine + Async MySQL + Async AIM/TOC = arbitrarily scalable IM driven Rails app.

http://github.com/tqbf/asymy/tree/master

It needs some love.
If I make enough money now, I can quit and do what I really love later.
The system is broken

Agree. In this time of easy access to information these institutes need to find other ways which are more effective in todays world rather than track these websites.
Yes, if everyone imposes them.

If one or only a few companies impose caps, look for rising market share of those companies that don't, probably about 1-2 billing cycles after the other companies cap downloads.
Is it OK to admit I don't get it?
I'm surprised that so few Basecamp users would recommend it. 94% is not a good number, you have to take into account survivorship bias. The people who would not recommend your service have already stopped being your customers. 94% says that your churn rate is 6%.
xobni seems to have plans for something akin to this:

"Notably, Xobni is also working with third party developers to let them build applications with Xobni. By allowing third party integration for its APIs, Xobni becomes a trojan horse for those third parties to access Outlook integration through a plugin. Microsoft Outlook doesn’t offer a friendly set of APIs for people to plug into Outlook, and so Xobni hopes to become the place developers come to for such access"

Doesn't seem like a large stretch of the imagination to think they will do this for webmail as well, especially with the "leak" of their Yahoo mail integration.
In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone.
- Bill Gates
Well, you'll be much less likely to loose a remore control.
For a bit, sure, but I'd imagine sooner or later, most people get tired of doing math 16-20 hours a day and want to start a family or something.
"A new engineer that comes in gets a new MacPro with dual quad-core CPUs and 12GB of ram and a MacBook Pro."

That's my kind of company. I'd do the same if I was in their position.
Whats the deal? Are you looking for an engineer or a partner for your firm
If you look at the source, that comment has no text, just about a zillion <p> tags. There are more comments below it.
SDForum always has excellent technical events :

http://www.sdforum.com/

Maybe $15 at the door or so. For random fun things, this is a good choice
http://sf.funcheap.com/
WordPress Exploit Scanner
"We have no intention of shipping another bloated OS and shoving it down the throats of our users."
-- Paul Maritz, Microsoft group vice president
It's all in your definitions. I define "friend" to be someone you know properly. You can't know 1,000 people. Sorry, but that just doesn't happen. Apart from on social networks of course, where 1,000 friends is nothing.
Also, don't mention that interview at SXSW.
I'm looking for someone who creates cool apps to develop them in my company. If they're a hit we spin them out.
Hopefully this is less sensationalist.
Good to see someone else with an interest in Miller. I just started reading Plexus the other day. Did you read the Tropic books as well?
I once had a girlfriend who had joined Mensa to meet "smart guys". She said all she ever met were geeks and ADD freaks. Then she ended up with me. </irony>
No. People will change providers if they start capping.
Facebook suspends app that permitted peephole
Over time I will offer an analysis of why software doesn’t work very well. I am an insider...

So am I, but I don't write ranting blog posts about it. But if you'll allow me to beat you to the punch:

Money is king. As a recent and much better written article on chip programming pointed out, electrical (hardware) engineering is both smaller in problem scope and much, much, much more thoroughly tested. That is because hardware recalls are FAR more expensive then releasing a software patch. Management knows this.

Money is king.
The latter really doesn't happen without the former, in my opinion.
I really feel like a newb, only using 450MB RAM max...

How do you fill up any significant portion of 12GB RAM on a workstation without doing intensive video editing?
I get the feeling this rash of Bill Gates memos allows Gates to place all blame for MSFT failings on others; meanwhile Gates takes his money and goes to work on charitable projects.
Network Workbench: A Workbench for Network Scientists
Cooperation Commons: Interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action
Or Microsoft itself. It's probably a collection of small mistakes and bigger ones that agglutinate together in a couple HUGE ones.

How very convenient it would be if all huge failures could be attributed to a single person!
Albert Jay Nock - Isaiah's Job (essay rather than book, I suppose.)
It wouldn't surprise me if the costs for the first few thousand .tld's were outrageous, but ICANN is clever enough to realise the revenue maximization benefits of an auction model.

I'm sure there are right now a dozen people who are scheming up ways to get as many airport codes nailed down (.lax .sfo .sea .jfk .dfw .etc) as possible and that if there is any prospect of a bidding war prices for 2-4 letter combinations will be high.

The thing is that these are namespaces, not domains, purchasers are going to have to declare trademark interests, and declare whether domains are being offered for public sale or are being reserved for private registration. And really there are only going to be a few winners in this game because not every word makes for a good namespace .motor isn't going to be too useful immediately .city could do really well with the right management.

For all you entrepreneurs out there here's a free idea for you; buy the .friends namespace and back it up with an app that can eat the ground out from under myspace and facebook.
Sending passwords via plain text forms and plain text emails are both bad practices. However, plain text email is distinctly worse because the data can linger for months or years in less secure systems.

A credit card number sent over unencrypted HTTP may only be vulnerable for a brief period. However, a credit card number sent over SSL and forwarded as a plain text email may be vulnerable until the credit card expires.
There's a veritable wealth of info over at http://developer.yahoo.com/

The Web Developers Handbook is also pretty useful http://www.alvit.de/handbook/index.php
I agree. I really appreciate the about section. It makes me pay attention to the site for some reason.
> There are a few differences between a grad student and a sufficiently dedicated hobbyist, and none of them are genetic, nor are any of them necessarily bound by a particular age bracket.

This raises an interesting empirical question: is there a significant deterioration in brain performance after about 40 years of age or so? Anecdotally it would seem to be the case. The Fields Medal is the highest award in Mathematics and it has an age cap of 40, but the rule hasn't raised controversy because almost all the worthy contenders have been under 40 anyway. However, some people have hypothesized that the dominance of the young is the result of other career and family concerns distracting people in middle age. That could well be the truth, and I hope it is. It would be interesting to know the answer.
Posterous = tumblr + email attachments ?
Wow... too many to list :)

The Hyperion novels, by Dan Simmons

Retire Young, Retire Rich by Kiyosaki and Letcher (and other books of theirs as well)

Principles of Effortless Power by Peter Ralston (martial artist)

A lot of stuff by John-Roger (spiritual author) - helped me decide that I'm here to serve the people around me, as best I can

Intro to the Theory of Computation, by Mike Sipser

Many of the physics books I've read over the years (though now a hacker I be, I started as a scientist... still am at heart). Not one in particular, except maybe Modern Quantum Mechanics by Sakurai, and Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics by Sussman & Wisdom

The Lord of the Rings trilogy

Role-playing game manuals, especially D&D 2nd edition (just the current edition at the time, when I was a kid)

You know, just making this list reminds me of how grateful I am to be here in this time and place. My life has been so uplifted by reading. I cannot imagine what it would be like without.
Yeah, people on social networks have an interesting definition of "friend". To me, a friend is someone who I interact with regularly. To users of social networks, it's anyone that you have perhaps maybe heard of or seen in the hallway. I used to use Facebook, and people I didn't know added me as a friend. I reciprocated ("yay, I have a new friend") but still never interacted with that person.

Now I don't bother with social networks. I have contacts that I keep in touch with regularly (mostly on IRC), and if I need a drinking buddy or a job I have no trouble finding it.
Why are you not performing a one way hash on passwords?
Hey man, if people are doing it, it does make it right. My definition of fraud is gaming the system as they did, and using it in a way that was not meant to be used to get $$. It happens in all industries and it can drive a company into the ground(close up shop)
A way to find all your comments that are above or below (> >= < <=) a certain karma value. Or at least, a way to see all your posts that have less than 0 karma.
it was the introduction of a flat rate unlimited mobile data plan by AT&T that caused iPhone usage to soar

Didn't the same the happen with cell phone calls?

When is the last time you worried about "minutes"?
Parsers and Combinators
FYI I don't recommend it. I think it's awful.
That's fine for you, and I tend to agree with you and refuse requests from people I don't really know, but it strikes me as the height of arrogance to define how others should use a social network based on your own preferences and preconceptions.
Only if they have an uncapped alternative available. Personally my choice is between the local cable monopoly and the local telephone monopoly.
In general, I would agree but it seems like the broadband provider space is a bit different. Those of us in larger metropolitan areas can freely switch between several providers but customers in more rural areas have very few providers to choose from (if any). Many of the companies that DO serve up broadband in these areas enjoy a kind of local-monopoly. They can do pretty much anything they want because there are no other competitors around. Consumers in these areas are pretty much screwed if their provider decides to cap.
I am wondering what you found life changing?
As for me, it was the Consul: the exquisite diplomat and adventurer, but also a Renaissance Man that can play excellent Bach on his organ. I long to be like him.
NetApp believes ZFS could put them out of business [pdf]
Polar Rose goes Public Beta
Doing 2 startups
i am working on my own startup fulltime now and have been meeting people in the startup scene here.

after a few social/startup things, a startup approached me and asked me to join their startup as a founding partner.

now they definitely have interesting technology and the problem space is super cool, however, my own startup is finally starting to get some momentum in its sails coding wise.

i am really torn. i love my startup, and they have interesting problems to solve.

(funny how i used to worry that nobody would offer me a job after i left my fulltime job for a startup, and now somebody has during it)
The Itch: reverse-engineering of human perception
"""most of our core business logic is written in Java on a Spring/Jetty/Tomcat stack"""

Which is an AWESOME stack. We use it too :-)
Virtual machines.
Is that supposed to be

"Posterous = Tumblr + email attachments"?
TLDs are there because at one point they made sense. First it was locations... and, if there is anyone here who recalls before the dot-com boom it was actually pretty damn difficult to book a .org if you weren't an organization or .com if you weren't a company. But then with the huge surge of websites and startups back in the 90s these rules were highly relaxed and a TLD became meaningless and without value.
Dang, you can't change urls after submission. Here's the one-page version, which I prefer:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/30/080630fa_fact_...
I'm getting .google
This is useless, all this will do is line ICANN's pockets with money.

The .com will always be king, so it'll remain THE name for people to get. Look at the current domains, how many do you see going for the .us? .biz? domain extensions?

The whole "Big businesses will use it to make it easier for consumer is pretty dumb too", you can go to toys.ebay.com now, and get where you want to be, all this'll do is make you go to toys.ebay.

Third try typing that out...you'll be halfway to typing out .com before you realize you don't need it.

Its just a way for ICANN to make money. Nothing more, this will do nothing to help the consumer, and is only there so that Google will spend another 5 mil a year Google.paris, Google.France, google.uk, google.hackernews

We might as well go back to AOL Keywords
Does Open Sourcing Niche Web Apps Work?
iMac is the middle ground: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore....
Easy: run several VMware instances on parallel desktops ("spaces" they call it). We do that for:

a) Testing cross-browser compatibility, each version of IE needs its own VM, plus Opera/FF on Linux

b) Have a copy of deployment environment running, i.e. VM for an appserver and the mailserver running separately, etc.

Moreover, I like to have instances of PhotoShop and Fireworks running in their own "spaces", and both of them love RAM.

Basically each programmer gets his own farm of machines he can do anything with. The key is to never reboot. We don't have 12GB machines, but 4GB get eaten pretty quick.
Traditional Development is a Chinese Finger Trap
To use or not to use?
My start-up will be similar to Doostang and LinkedIn and will have some elements similar to those of Facebook. To design such a site, I am debating whether or not to use a CMS. I have checked out Drupal and Typo3 and they seem like they would work for what I'm going for. I would like to get the HN community's opinion on whether using a CMS for such a project is smart or not. If not, why? If so, which CMS would serve my needs?
I think the market will adjust though. If enough people get bad enough service, someone will come in and give a better service.

Assuming there aren't regulatory or other barriers to entry.

The US does seem pretty bad where these things are concerned though.

In the UK we have literally hundreds of broadband suppliers to choose from. Yes the majority go through BT, but the terms etc are decided by the broadband suppliers, so you have loads of plans to choose from - capped, uncapped, cheap, expensive, etc etc
Gates Among The Titans
We got a tone of The Economist's idea of business (at the end):

"Whatever the corporate-social-responsibility gurus say, business is a force for good in itself: its most useful contribution to society is making profits and products."

I think it's sad and even provocative. The most useful contribution of business to society is most probably to make life easier for its people, or to fulfill people's needs (hopefully developing their awareness and understanding of this very society).

Making profits is only a necessity in order to be successful, not a contribution. Making products is only a (partial) description of what business does, not a contribution.
I wouldn't. When you are using a CMS, generally speaking you will be limited in functionality due to the CMS being your framework. When you code from scratch or with an established framework (Symfony, CodeIgniter/Kohana, for PHP) you'll have a lot more freedom. People have had great success using Drupal as a backbone for an application, but I can't suggest it, since you're building upon a CMS, and things can get tricky that way.

With that said, you mentioned TYPO3 which has its own PHP Application Framework, FLOW3: http://flow3.typo3.org/
I think it's the cappers that will get strangled...
THanks for this and thanks to everyone who commented - I really appreciate it. I'll check out some of the others too. If anyone is interested, I'm starting this with one client already on board, so would be using them to fund it initially. Appreciate that this is a dangerous route, however we don't need to look at loans or other types of funding initially. Thanks again. Ade
I'll bet most really don't ever push 12GB in practice. The thing is that these days memory is ridiculously cheap (especially if you don't buy it from Apple), so going to 12GB is really just a choice to never worry about running out of memory ever again.
- For companies trying to protect their trademark, the job just got [infinitely] harder.

- It will be harder to tell you're being phished (apple.computer is a fake?)

- Companies with half a million dollars to burn will now own TLDs and have an advantage over smaller companies

- It means you now have to remember two pieces of information, the domain and the TLD

- It's simply a money grab by ICANN

- etc

My guess is most traffic will stay at the current TLDs just like the recent ones haven't done much (.biz, .info, .mobi, etc).
How to avoid being "fan boy" or "fan girl" when building relationships with people you admire
Agreed. I am sticking to my car forever: just because it never locks my doors when it wants and doesn't bitch when I need to cover a distance of 10 yards without seatbelts.

Amazing, but it's a 2006 model, one of the last non-moronic vehicles.