skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I concede that by this definition of locality, a simulator doesn't quite count. But it is a physical model both consistent with our quantum experiments and special relativity, and it's local in something. And if it's local physics in something we're talking about, why is it 3-space that we're treating as the real embedding.

> Decoherence makes sense on the macroscale (1000+ particles), although it's true that 40 particles is iffy. Different classical states (i.e., experimental apparatus has light on vs light off) are separated by a distance sqrt(number of particles) in configuration space, and don't interact.

> As for explaining measurement with Born probabilities, that's reasonable. My co-conspirators and I currently have a physical, macroscale model where we show this to be true (no citation yet, but I'd be happy to explain more via email). But you still need some ontology.

Please do. I looked for a while at decoherence and others, and the mechanism behind the processes kept fading from view. It's was like thermodynamics, where we can say something about the equilibrium states eventually reached, but we're having a hard time explaining the processes by which it reaches one state or another, and by those processes, the reasoning in other parts of physics break down. Like microscopic <-> macroscopic reversibility.

But the people in nonequilbrium statistical mechanics have made a lot of progress in reconciling microscopic reversibility and macroscopic apparent irreversibility. Is such a thing possible for quantum measurement, or more generally, the quantum classical transition, as well? Might there be a reversible description -- Schrodinger's all the way down, so to speak?

Finally, I'm not so sure that MW, decoherence, Bohmian mechanics, etc. are truly equivalent. In other words, I expect that one might start getting different answers.

And there's reason to believe that they're incomplete descriptions. If you take one measurement, you'll notice it takes time. And the microphysics of QM says that it's time evolution should be unitary. So, halfway done, if we stop the clock, when we're doing a measurement, what do we find? Or rather, what would our laws tell us we'd find?

The more popular interpretation seem to tell me 'don't ask this question.' But it seems there's something important hidden here.
Poll: Which Blog Search Engine Do You Use? - ReadWriteWeb
Don't skimp on the database design. It can make your life a lot easier if you're model is tight.

Learn how to think about your data model as Entities and Attributes and the relationships between them.

Then find a tutorial on database normalization and learn it. It's not hard, but it might take 2 or 3 run throughs before it clicks.

Learn to be comfortable at the *nix command line if you plan to be hosting your app on a shared host or Virtual Private Server.

Most of all; don't get caught up in fads. It's easy to get the impression that you need to learn AJAX, Rails (no wait, Merb!), S3 and EC2, distributed programming, jQuery, ad infinitum, all at once. You don't.

Here's some Google terms:

"Database normalization"

"entity relationship diagram"

"Unix shell commands"
You're not supposed to worry about whether your posts are good. That's why we have the little arrow thingies we click on to score the articles. Stop worrying and keep posting. =)
In other words, you need to understand the problem before you can make sense of the solution.
NASA's new spacesuit designs
Take it easy on Jigglypuff.
Well, there actually is a WP guideline about this phenomenon: WP:LOCALFAME. The long/short of it is: you're notable if a reliable source (not a blog) has written about you. It's pretty much exactly that simple.
A Lie Told To Children
This is relevant to PG's essay about lies told to children. It's an example.

http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html
New in Mac OS X Snow Leopard
I tried tryruby, and I have to admit it was pretty goddamn neat.

Of course creating something goddamn neat still doesn't mean that you deserve a wikipedia article, but ultimately making previously-skeptical people say "Wow, that was pretty goddamn neat" is a more worthwhile achievement than being listed in wikipedia.
Top 10 Reasons Why There’s No TWiT Live Today
Great for a Friday giggle if you're bored at work.
There are also some file compression/installer utilities (Stuffit, Innosetup) that split their contents to file extensions like .0 (.1, .2, etc.). If Google avoids indexing things like .tgz and .zip, it would make sense to avoid these binary files as well.
These visualizations are beautiful. What would make it considerably more interesting would be access to the code so we could run it against our own projects, or perhaps integration into something like http://www.ohloh.net/
Beautifully Engineered.
Automatic Software Updates (Microsoft Edition)
In Everett's approach, I think it is the macroscopic state which splits. But the macroscopic state is a volume of worlds. So I guess think of the interval [0,1] as consisting of a single (macroscopic) world. But [0,1] has infinitely many numbers in it; each one comprises a different "world".

Under evolution, [0,1] splits into [-0.5,0] U (0.5,1], two macroscopic states but still infinitely many microscopic ones. Every state in [0,0.5] was turned into a state in [-0.5, 0] and similarly (0.5,1] -> [0.5,1]. (Each real number corresponds to a world configuration.)

(note: there are quite a few variants of many worlds, and not everyone realizes they are talking about different theories. I don't know if I'm describing the most common view. )

My (non-mainstream) mental picture of MW is bohmian mechanics, with each possible bohmian trajectory corresponding to a different world history.
i have some pretty crazy theories that neutrinos cause all Universal beings to expand

No you don't. That's not coherent enough to be a theory, not even a crazy one. It's just some big words you managed to put together, one after the other, without any apparent understanding of what any of them means.
online social alarm clock startup? already done:

http://www.chumby.com/
If you're looking for a more valid reason than one of _why's toys try http://poignantguide.net/ or http://hacketyhack.net/ the book/comic he wrote or his full featured attempt to make it easier for kids to learn to code. Both projects are fairly significant.
Upvote everything else?
"This article is being considered for deletion" seems like a strong indicator that it might be deleted to me.
The programming language Ruby is notable enough to have a Wikipedia article about it. The two most important people in the Ruby community also have Wikipedia articles. So why not _why? He's contributed just as much to the community as the two other guys.
It really should be "Scientists confirm that simple molecules identical to those which were part of the earliest genetic material can be found on space rocks". Which is only slightly interesting.

It's well known that these sorts of simple hydrocarbons aren't that hard to form -- they would have been forming very frequently on primordial Earth. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that the fact that the occasional uracil molecule also fell out of the sky on a rock would have any effect on the development of life.
If that project is building something useful for the sake of learning and having fun, do it. Getting rich and/or famous should be seen as bonuses.
From the submission just 3 or 4 entries above yours, entered a few hours earlier:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216700
The possibility of it being accepted depends on the nature of the improvement. If your improvement, for example, takes it from 100n^3 to30 n^3 operations, your odds of being accepted are very low. If you go from 100n^3 to 100n^2 (or even 10000n^2), and that has never been discovered before, it is definitely publishable. However, even so, it is important that you write in the correct style, because (unfortunately) there are certain conventions, and many journals aren't that friendly to "outsiders". So the advice of getting someone who has published to look at it is very good.

Nevertheless, it depends on the nature of the improvement, as I said above. If you have that, you can be sure that it can eventually be published.
I'd say it's a distillation, rather then a rehash, but I see what you mean.
The text on that page is way too small, especially the source code :/
Canada Passes Their Own DMCA
"We don't know anything to give us a good reason to think we could put consciousness in computers."

Except that it seems likely that our brains simply follow the laws of physics, like everything else.

"You can verify this experientially."

How?

"the awareness they all rise in (which, being aware of space, time, and identity, is outside of time, space, and identity) is immortal."

I didn't understand that sentence.
Yeah, I was disappointed that he didn't have any code up for download.

I would have loved to have run that on corporate SCMs.
Just a note to save a moment for folks like me who were using the 9.5 beta on osx and were a little suprised to see their old bookmarks didn't get automatically imported after installing the new version, your old bookmarks are probably in "~/Library/Preferences/Opera Preferences Beta/Bookmarks"
Roller Blinds | curtains  soft and home furninshings from Dunelm
Hi. Not a bot; just a busy guy.
Small comment about the software business
Chumby is much more than an alarm clock; it's a cool extendable toy that people would buy. I was referring to: http://sleep.fm/
Nice marketing trick. Could do the same thing to make a iphone dice and other amusing things.
That sounds like a pretty loose criterion. I know plenty of non-notable people who have had, say, articles written about them in the newspaper.

In any case, looking at the sources at the bottom of this page, this guy doesn't even seem to satisfy this criterion.
What's more likely: that you could have a startup generating revenue of $60K a month in 3 years or spend that time building traffic to some website for adsense and affiliate sales for the same?

Every time I put down my coding manuals to read some guide to Making Money Online™ I feel a little dirty, but damn it seems tempting and more achievable than building and selling a tech startup.
I just think about how much different my experience of playing Craps in grade school days could have been. :)
What about running the .NET app on Amazon EC2 with a mysql backend?

I am thinking of using SQL Server Express as my database for now - to take advantage of its visual tools, and later I could port the db over to MySQL.. If I keep all the business logic in the app and limit my database code to CRUD, trying not to use anything Transact-SQL specific, it shouldn't be too difficult to port the db to MySQL, what do you think?
>Might there be a reversible description -- Schrodinger's all the way down, so to speak?

Basically, what I've got is a model of a particle interacting with a measurement apparatus (a BEC, to make the calculations simple). You can reduce the many body schrodinger equation to a mean field model on reduced configuration space: (particle coordinate X BEC coordinate). So yes, it is schrodinger (actually madelung) all the way down.

Measurements (of position) correspond to the particle making a splash in the BEC (1). Splashes at different locations correspond to different measured outcomes. Once the difference between splash sizes is macroscopic ( (number of particles) * splash profile =O(1) ), the measurement is complete.

By "complete', I mean that if you pick a random BEC configuration (N BEC particle locations), and you can determine with statistical significance (i.e. 99.9999% sure) where the splash is.

Before this occurs, you've just got two overlapping probability distributions in configuration space. Picking random BEC configurations won't tell you (statistically significantly) the particle location.

The process is continuous, but it doesn't look that way to us since it is also very fast, i.e. t = O(1/number of particles in observation apparatus).
Gem of an insight from the author in the comments:

"I totally agree and I expect very few clicks from regular readers. I expect what happens is that less techy people are searching for gifts at this time of year, they find the site and then there is a fair chance of the click. I also find Adsense on CG is especially well targeted (as it should be really)."

Lesson: Maybe technology-oriented sites can make money (but off of non-technology oriented people)
Would it be easy to upgrade and scale the Express database later to a full-blown version of SQL Server using replication if I see that my app makes money and is worth the investment paying for a commercial SQL Server version? I think I could probably even find a hosted SQL Server, so I wouldn't have to pay full license fee. But I guess that prevents me from running on a dedicated server...Thats why I am hoping I can move it over later to some scalable solution like Mosso, and not worry about paying for the full license, only for as much as I need depending on the traffic.
I can't get into too many details, but in the past 5 years, I did some consulting for a small company that did nothing but affiliate sales.

I don't know what their total revenue was, but I know that they were paying for 3 full-time consultants billing on the high-end, 1 graphic designer, a full-time accountant, a business manager, 3 SEO people (full time as well) and the owner.

So, there is definitely some money to be made there, I just don't know the actual ratios of blood, sweat and tears vs. sheer luck.
I don't think you have to limit yourself to journals--conference papers are another alternative. At least in Computer Science, a good conference is a totally respectable way to go. (It's been awhile since I've been in grad school, so my info may be stale.) STOC and FOCS come to mind. SODA, as I recall, has some sort of "short paper" conference which might be good.
I can never tell the appropriate way to say thank you to a poster here. Should I upvote? Should I leave a comment? In this case, I'll do both.

Thanks for the recommendation, most of the maths work I do these days is financial, so geometry is a nice diversion. I hadn't seen this text before so I've got it bookmarked for some reading now.

As an aside, is this something I would have gotten some exposure to if I'd been a college grad? Any time I see things like this, I worry there are large swaths of text I've missed in self-study.
The way I understand MWI it basically is a Schroedinger-all-the-way-down approach, and measurement just becomes the act of getting your measurement apparatus (and hence your own brain and mind) entangled with the system. Decoherence, likewise, is just a matter of getting your system entangled with its environment.

One of my lecturers used to say that the main problem with MWI is that it looked like all the maths was done on the back of a napkin. I'm inclined to agree. It's very easy to explain Many Worlds with the example of a single particle and a single observer, but once you start throwing in a large number of mutually interacting particles, several observers, and take note of the fact that the observer him/herself is made up of multiple interacting particles, it suddenly becomes horribly complicated. As far as I know, nobody has ever done a many-worlds treatment beyond the simplest possible examples.
I upvoted you, tried the link, and found out it doesn't resolve?
Yes. It is loose. It does get annoying. I've put many articles up for deletion and failed because of scraps of evidence --- press releases reprinted in news feeds, for instance.

So, if you want to take your issue with _why and litigate it in the AfD, go ahead and do it. You'll lose, though.
right, i was looking for something actually cool and useful :)

i guess my unspoken point was to try and note that even if an idea kind of sounds stupid, there might be a good way to implement it to achieve success.
Very cool! One thing I didn't like was that the more important collaborators were impossible to read by the end, while the peripheral ones were easier to read, because they weren't jumbled up in the middle.
try http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/

works for me.
Totally amazed. I would love to get this and import our SVN data for the last few years. Would be a great internal present to send to the engineering team.
A nice recap, I doubt anyone can just pick up calculus from this.

Plus, calc 1 was a breeze, calc 2 is where the brain-pain started.
True. And they went further:

"They were traumatized, but we wanted them to be traumatized," said guidance counselor.

Because if people really had died they'd all be, erm, traumatized?

This seems a clear declaration of intent to hurt people for their own good. School is not your friend.
Actually you are supposed to worry about whether your posts are good... the little arrows just give you feedback about whether they are or not, and discourage you from posting things which aren't.
I did not notice anything on Safari.
WP has a "special" definition of "consensus". It isn't a vote. The way it's supposed to work is, the closing admin reads every bulleted "keep" or "delete" argument, makes a spot decision about whether the arguments are valid, and then keeps unless there's an overwhelming number of "deletes".

WP has a "special" definition of "valid", which is codified in the 8043734897 pages in the WP: namespace that document the valid and invalid arguments. If you care --- and as your attorney in this matter I'm obligated to advise you not to --- you could start by reading WP:ATA.

This is frustrating because if you're not an AfD lawyer, you're left wondering why the closing admin ignored you but paid attention to the "WP:NN"! "WP:RS!" "WP:V!" codes other people used. But that's how the system worked.

In this case, there are keep votes pointing to reliable sourcing in the article. O'Reilly definitely counts. Nobody is going to delete it; it'd wind up in WP:DRV, wasting everyone's time some more.

Isn't Wikipedia fun?
And it breaks the split-view Greasemonkey script, too. Alas, plunged into the dark ages of two days ago.

It took me some time to stop feeling shame for hitting Ctrl-+ on pages with tiny text, but I've come to terms with it. I'm also a fan of View->Page Style->No Style, which I discovered only after writing a Greasemonkey script to do the same thing.
100n^3 and 30n^3 are both O(n^3)...no improvement, hence it won't be published. Depending on the problem the algorithm is solving O(n^3) to O(n^2) can be a massive improvement.
I really think that this "mid-size" mobile platform (Dell places these between the iPhone and the XPS-M laptops), needs a capable tablet computer.

Something real sleek and thin -- picture the iPhone but blown up to 8-9" would be excellent for the "30 minute web experience" as Dell calls it in their slides.
its not working for me either right now... you'd figure that someone making that kind of money would arrange for reliable web hosting.
Yes, this is exactly the sort of example I was looking for! Do you have any further details? Maybe I should work it out myself, to see if our results match up.

I suspect that there are all sorts of examples like this, accessible in theory and models of measurement in experiment, where things basically match up with with Born probabilities. Though I expect in some degenerate case they won't, just as, as the fluctuation theorem in nonequilibrium shows us, sometimes the second law is inaccurate, because whatever we call 'entropy' decreases.
Tell me if this answers your question: if I were you, I would form an LLC ("Smith Software"), but push your personal name ("John Smith") as you network, look for jobs, introduce yourself, etc. So Smith Software goes on your contracts, and (maybe?) is your domain name, but you want people to get to know _you_, not Smith Software. Especially if you're good. "John Smith the ruby/python/design expert" is a perfectly legitimate way to be known. It's easier than "Smith Software, the small expert ruby/python/design house", IMO.

I know 10-20 independent programmers and designers in my area, and in every single case, I think of them by their personal names. I'm sure they all have some LLC name, but in most cases, I don't know what it is. Even if they put it on their business card, I'm more likely to refer them to someone as an individual ("I know this good designer - Mick Jones - you should talk to him") rather than by a company name ("I know this good design shop - Compelling Solutions - you should check them out.")

I think this changes when you grow beyond 2 full-time folks. At 2, people can remember both of your names. But beyond there, they're likely to remember the company name, plus one of the principles. ("You should check out Compelling Solutions - talk to Mick Jones.")

At least that's my experience. :)
No one can stop us now, because we are all made of stars. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdb4NyHdFfE
lol :)

In addition, they seemed to have decided that any reason given by a recently-created account could be ignored, without caring if it's valid.

Oh and the real reason it was deleted is that it's a right-wing humor blog and some of the wikipedia people were offended by it's content.
My experience with MySql and .NET (and this has been a while - years) has been poor simply because the ADO.NET stuff for MySql was poor (and I have no idea if it's changed).

I was under the impression that Amazon's cloud required the client image to be linux?

Frankly, for smaller sites, you can get shared hosting for $10 a month that might be sufficient (and you can grow to a $50/month slice and then a $300 a month dedicated then to $$k for many dedicated). All prices are from Webhost4Life.

Since running a single EC2 instance = $70 a month if left up full time, I think there are vastly cheaper options out there.
Ask YC: Seeking some language enthusiasts for a new podcast
I've decided it's time to have a podcast about programming languages, and am looking for some enthusiastic users that might consider themselves an expert in a particular language.

I envision the interviews taking place over Skype, and lasting no more than an hour. We'll cover the basics about the history of the language, what it does well, and what it doesn't do quite so well. We'll then go into a more personal look as how the language has helped you in your current projects.

I'm really open to languages: Python, Ruby, Lisp flavors, Objective-C, C#, F#, Haskell, Erlang, etc. If you have used it for a project in the past year or two, and thought it was great, let's share it with this podcast.

If you're interested in being one of the first people I interview for the show, please email me at jon@ (my username) .com. Include what language(s) you would like to talk about, and what projects you've worked on using the language.

Future episodes will focus more on the use cases of a language, and try to showcase a new idea from the language or a library that hasn't been previously covered.

Additionally, since this is an Ask thread, if you have any suggestions or ideas please let me know. :)
I am indeed real, but if you want my full analysis, I hate to say it, but you should really consider buying the book. One of the reasons I wrote it was to offer that analysis in detail.

The short version of my answer to your question is that you really already answered it--you have to define success first. Mark has succeeded at things I've failed at, and I've succeeded at things that Mark has failed at. Does that make one of us "better" than the other? In monetary terms, maybe eventually, but even those terms haven't been strictly defined yet for the time being. In moral terms, I think there's a clear answer to that question, but it's not going to yield a number for you.

Besides, who says that everything has to be quantifiable? Some things in life just aren't.
If you go to a hosted solution (virtuals/rackspace/shared/whatever), the license cost of SQL is usually included.

Honestly, MSFTs licensing schemes give me a huge headache.
Fixed by doing a sudo dpkg -r opera then dpkg -i with a freshly downloaded .deb.

DragonFly not finished yet but worth a look ;)
What was the blog?