skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking of, there's a very good MIT OpenCourseWare course on 'Godel, Escher, Bach' which deals with that issue.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/geb/VideoLectures/index.htm
Not if your virtual instances can be replicated to another data center (an EC2 instance is location agnostic).
Spolsky once dissected a rant by Steve Gillmore only to comment that "It took me over three hours to research and explain all this, and, as you’ll see if you follow closely, Gillmor’s entire argument fell apart under scrutiny, so I don’t think I’m going to be doing in-depth explanation like this again."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/23.html
Multivariable Calc and Linear Algebra kicked my ass. I didn't really do much beyond that.
Definitely check the TOS of the sites you plan to scrape. Some data, in particular factual data, isn't copyrightable, but that doesn't necessarily give you the rights to automatically collect it from any place you can find it. Businesses spend a lot of money and time collecting and hosting data, so they can get pretty particular about how you're allowed to use their service.

Here's an excerpt from the yellowpages.com TOS. Without it, their company names, addresses, and phone numbers would be more or less fair game for any competitor:

"You are prohibited from data mining, scraping, crawling, or using any process or processes that send automated queries to the YELLOWPAGES.COM Web site. You may not use the YELLOWPAGES.COM Web sites to compile a collection of listings, including a competing listing product or service."
My first thought on reading this was "dude, you stole my answer."

After thinking about it for a while, though, I think General Topology is worse. I still don't get it. Or, what's worse, maybe I do get it, and just don't care enough about the subject to register that fact.
The piece was about as concrete as a corporate mission statement, and just as prosaic.

Someone should send him a copy of "Made To Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die" - Chip & Dan Heath.
Amazon doesn't really expect you to use SimpleDB? Where did you hear that?
Avi, you guys are seriously going to open up the stuff that's above the VM? I had been thinking about again picking up my own project to put Ruby on top of Smalltalk. I'm envious of your approach with working with the VM hackers to get custom bytecodes. This would be great for getting Ruby to run fast.

What of parallel projects on other Smalltalk VMs? It would be good for the Ruby community to have options. Gemstone might want to keep some sort of competitive advantage, however. (Email this userid at yahoo.com. Linkedin is not letting me send you a message, and so fulfilling their policy of keeping out riff-raf.)
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Totally agree. Case in point. Up until highschool I was very good at math. Mainly because I would actively seek out books and try to solve problems where ever I could find them. As soon as I started Uni, my interest dwindled (was replaced by love for all things CS). People who I had dominated back in highschool were now getting a good 10-20% higher than me. All in practise I think.
Search engines do not all scrape.

They scrape if the owners have indicated they wish their site to be scraped by not forbidding access via the robots.txt file.
I think he meant that Amazon doesn't expect people to use SimpleDB to store bulk data -- Amazon expects people to use S3 for that.
Caching MySQL queries
Hi. memcached is not really good for MySQL. Then, what is a good way or practice to cache MySQL queries? Do you recommend any reading on caching?
No, or we wouldn't suck at Bayesian statistics so much:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
I never bothered to invest much to the math classes. The benefit didn't seem so large.

Of course, now I see how completely stupid that line of thought is. The time I saved by not attending classes or demonstrations was indeed not well spent.
Set theory & mathematical logic.

Learning math is all about spending time with the material. I find that upper-level math is easier than lower-level topics. Less grunt work, more pondering.
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Ask HN: What's your desk/workstation of choice for hacking?
I'm putting in a nice chunk of my change to set up a suitable work area for my several startup projects and am stuck finding a decent desk. Office stores don't have large work-area desks and it's tough finding anything online that's not too cheap or too expensive.

What desks does HN use? Do you like it?
With one notable exception, math seems very easy to me. I open the book, write down verbatim anything labeled Definition, Theorem, or Lemma, and trace through anything labeled Proof. There's nothing particularly hard about it -- you just have to make sure you actually do every step listed inside your head.

It is a little slower than reading for pleasure, but with practice, I'd say only by about half.

I think the primary reason I do well, though, is that I take adderall for ADHD. Stimulants make it trivially easy to maintain the necessary level of focus, but whenever I forget to take them before a lecture or study session, I'm gnashing my teeth and tearing my hair out by the end.
Actually, it's a so-so example. You'd have to build just a little into the VM to get around it. (All of the classes that are in the loop and nil)

Another one is MetaClass. Class and MetaClass are both (eventual) subclasses of Behavior. But the Class of Class is an instance of MetaClass. (I'm confused as to why the Rubinius people have MetaClass as a subclass of Class.)
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About 50 IQ points on top of a monkey that passes the mirror test. Seriously, self-awareness/memory/perception of time is the big leap forward. All that makes us better than a bonobo is we are n units of measuring intelligence better.
Foundations proofs are the worst. I can still remember proving something like "For every left-paren, there is a matching right-paren." Ugh.
Graduating from College: Starting your own business or joining an established company?
What's wrong with too cheap? Generally the advice for furnishing a startup is "expensive chairs, cheap desks." If you don't want anything used Ikea is a reasonable, convenient place to look.
I did say to use SSL in practice, right?

Reading about SRP would help solve much of confusion people seem to be having in many of the discussions going on in this thread.
I got fed up with crappy desks from office stores and decided to make my own desk instead - its basically just an 8 foot long piece of wood, about 2 1/2 feet deep. Its not only really cheap, but it has room for my two monitors plus my laptop plus lamps/papers/etc.

It doesn't have the frills that seem to come with desks from stores, but I never used those anyways (I never understood building CD racks into desks). Plus since you build it yourself you can customize it - I put lots of holes in the back to run cables, with hooks underneath to organize them. For drawers, Ikea sells plastic ones that attach with a couple of screws for like $2.
I'm all for very affordable desks, but what I meant was the materials that seemingly fall apart from normal every day use. Cheap quality.
Calacanis founded Silicon Alley Reporter. Whatever your feelings about him, he's definitely got journalist cred.
Congratulation paul. Third startup from pg after viaweb and ycombinator
Geometry, Logic, Trigonometry
That's really funny... maybe even cute.

:) Congrats to pg and jl!
I'm thinking of buying a 30" wide door and attaching some metal pipes as legs and calling it a day. I you said, it can be customized later and it will be more than large enough to hold all of my papers, screens, etc.

My father also suggests buying some architecture drawing surface and laminating it on top to provide a smooth writing surface.
"pg just speaks exceptionally warmly of rtm, so I considered it a possibility"

Speaking "warmly" of someone's technical skills/intelligence is an indicator of a sexual interest? I don't get it (seriously).

I just did a site search of paulgraham.com for all mentions of rtm, and the "warmest" mention I found was at http://www.paulgraham.com/heroes.html, which does not seem to me (a heterosexual male if that is of any interest) to indicate anything remotely sexual. Positive? Sure. Exceptionally so? I guess I just don't see it.

Maybe you were referring to some verbal communication you witnessed?
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I have a "desk" which is an old dining room table (and is a few inches higher than ideal); but I do most of my coding while lying in bed. I like my laptop. :-)
What do you mean memcached is not good for MySQL?
My undergraduate degree is in Computer Science, which at the time I attended the university was (if one was doing their degree in the College of Arts and Sciences vs. School of Engineering) in the math department. In the end I ended up going further than I would have naturally (just by the nature of department requirements).

First response to this question would be "what kind of math"? In terms of continuous math, I've topped out at Differential Equations (much like any other CS Major). In terms of discrete mathematics I topped out at abstract algebra (the first class that made me sigh with relief upon seeing actual numbers) and combinatorics. I felt that I could certainly go on further in the discrete field (I particularly regret not taking number theory - other than what I've learned in cryptography courses - and graph theory).

I could have received a Math major, but that would have required taking the analysis series (real and complex), which I felt would go beyond my level of abilities (particularly since I was aiming for an early graduation and wanted to take as much of classes that I felt would interest me more).
Isn't this what Ray Ozzy is trying to do with Live Mesh?
Top Ten Reasons for Top Ten Lists - Harvard Business Online's Tom Davenport
I don't know why you took it so personally. Not to mention that pg dedicated a book to him and always speaks extremely highly of him, it is definitely possible. There's nothing wrong with homsexuality and I intended that post as a joke, so relax.
Do you find your wrists/arms starting to hurt while using the table? I've had two desks in the past I felt were too tall because the strain it put on my forearms and carpal tunnel. Lately my hands and arms have been feeling over-strained; a large motivation behind revamping my work setup.
Move content to S3 with no code changes
Adobe Launches Acrobat.com, Acrobat 9 (With Flash)
Where can I get a FriendFeed T-Shirt! Paul, can I have one for Florida!?
"I don't know why you took it so personally. "

oh I didn't "take it personally". :-)

I am just trying to follow the thought process (which you have explained above ("intended as a joke") . I was wondering whether this tapped into something culturally specific. No insult of any kind intended.
there's learning on an academic track timeframe, and there's learning. there are lots of courses i took which i did not do well gradewise, but i learned a lot, enough to go back and re-learn the material at my own pace and better.

ultimately, all learning is self-taught.
"The former Soviet educational system, OTOH, had probably some of the strongest math education, and much of it has been translated to English - pick up a book from that period and you will probably see a small and dense text that introduces high-level concepts in great, if unforgiving, detail. Very different from the thick drill+practice textbooks I'm used to."

Could you provide a url for some of these? Should I look up any specific publishers? Thanks in advance!
To me, it sounds very similar to just using some sort of revision control system.

I keep my home directory in revision control on dreamhost (svn now, but meaning to upgrade to git) to keep my three desktops and laptop in sync (plus a pretty web gui for doing stuff remotely).

And, for media, several years ago I put together 8 250G drives into a RAID5 (with 1 hot spare) giving me 1.5TB of storage. It was fairly impressive at the time ...

I think the biggest problem with the idea of a 'storage cloud' is the lack of ubiquitous bandwidth/internet access ...

It would be amazing to have network access be so pervasive that we didn't need iPods with storage - they could just access our 'cloud' of media from anywhere in the world. I don't know much about EM - would something like that even be technically possible (ignoring the feasibility issue for a moment)?

A guy can dream ...
He's probably wanting to cache entire result sets instead of individual objects so he's running into problems wanting to expire lots of duplicate data when the db gets updated. Seems to be common misuse of Memcached when people first try it.

Memcached is perfectly fine to use with MySql, just don't cache query results directly, cache the individual rows so there's only ever one copy of that row cached. You can then update the cache when you update the db. If you need to cache queries, cache just the keys for the result of the query and use them to go back and fetch the cached rows individually from Memcached. Use a multi get for faster retrieval.

Memcached is a distributed object cache, keep each object in it only once and you won't need to expire stuff. You could also use the object version as part of the cache key which will auto expire older version by making all the clients look for the newer version. Old versions will be pushed out naturally as newer version fill up the cache.
Also, my first semester I took one class of "Honors" calculus which was a proof based differential+integral Calc course. I dropped that really fast in favor of Calc II. So I also hit a wall at proof based calculus. Most of the people who actually took the class didn't get it either and resorted to memorizing all the proofs needed to derive calculus.
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No, I just adjust my chair very high -- which is fine except that it results in my feet not being flat on the floor.
I've been using a folding metal chair for the past year, which is probably the largest cause of said pains. I'm currently shopping for a much more suitable chair.
I bet Steve Gillmor can't code.
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> bank transactions in Brazil

Banks in Brazil routinely issue each customer with a duress PIN to mitigate the situation of a customer being frogmarched to an ATM at gunpoint. This is in addition to ATMs being unavailable in early hours due to the majority transactions being theft at gunpoint.

Initial implementations of the duress PIN displayed an identical withdrawal limit and led to customers being shot. Subsequent implementations provide a reduced limit.

I discovered this after lending a trifling amount to a Brazilian ex-colleague in the UK. He retained his Brazilian bank account and, to repay me, he had calculate the timezone differences for ATM use.
Of course, but we're not anywhere near the physical limits. An analogy is that it's clear that molecular nanotechnology is feasible, and consistent with known physical law, even though we don't know how to engineer MNT systems.

The "extrapolation of exponential growth = 'Singularity'" idea is a really crappy argument, and you shouldn't give much weight to it. For me it comes to two postulates: 1. AI is feasible. 2. When AI arrives on the scene, large changes are in store.
Seems to me all or most human understanding of maths is poor. Most things, even if we can prove them, we can not really understand them.

I wonder if there is a different way to understand maths out there.
For one thing: the second you have a full GC, you're going to need to swap in the entire object memory, dirty those pages, and then swap them back out. It doesn't take a very large image before this brings your machine to its knees.
They've been saying this about Google for quite some time already.
Haven't gotten to that point yet, but I can definitely attest to the significance of good materials and enthusiastic teaching. Because I started out as a engineering major, I had taken the entire Calc sequence up through Diff. Eq's, but I ended up having to take Prob/Stats and Discrete when I Switched to CS. I was sick of taking math classes at that time, but my Discrete prof was awesome and motivated me to see how far I could go with it. I went into fall semester never wanting to take another math class again; now I'm taking more so I can get a minor in it. I'll be taking combinatorics in the fall and topology(?) the following spring to close it out.
I though the lack of linkbait was refreshing.
She is not really flooding my message stream, though. And the updates are kind of cute ("eating cake") - not so much different from the average tweet? I just subscribed to Jimmy Wales' updates and he wrote "dinner with friends".
AI is, by definition, the set of problems that are not yet solvable by computers. Ergo, all AI is fantasy. Nevermind that AI has beaten the world chess champ, is used every day for pattern recognition, stock trading, and a myriad other uses.

Those who do not prepare for the coming Singularity are going to be blindsided by it when it arrives.
Yup, motivation is the blocker.

I have repeatedly gotten tired of math when it seemed like meaningless puzzle-solving. Why do I really care, for example, how many nonabelian groups of order 36 exist? When math seems to me like it's providing a vocabulary for framing and answering deep questions about the world, or making it computationally feasible to find the stamp of causal influence in data or design real things that are impossible to make without out, then the motivation is there.

This might just be an artifact of the way math is often taught. For example, real analysis is often taught as meaningless proof-finding (e.g. proving things that seem either pointless or obvious). But there's a fantastic book, _A Radical Approach to Real Analysis_ by David Bressoud, that teaches the exact same subject matter as the fruit of deep, pressing, and non-obvious questions that stirred debate among mathematicians for around 100 years.
MySQL has it's own query cache, if that is what he means he should just increase the query cache size really.
Agreed. At least buy readit.com as well.
The only area Google has really killed in is search, PPC and maybe a couple of other things. Everything else ranges from pretty good to horrible (but not killer.) Personally, I use Gmail more than any other Google service but I bet Gmail doesn't have the same dominance as their search does.

My opinion is certainly debatable, but the point is that Google does not automatically dominate every area they get into and some of their services are terrible.

Also, I am pretty sure Microsoft has tried the "whole army" thing with search and look at where that has got them.
I don't think you'd absolutely need ubiquitous internet access if the underlying "cloud" was based on a network filesystem that supported disconnected operation. So some files would be synced/cached locally. And then when you went off-network you'd still have access to (some of) them.
Object Oriented Programming has Failed Us
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If 2-drawer filing cabinets are the right height, they would make useful and stable drawers. (If you do this, I would recommend spending the money for good filing cabines with ball bearings: I started with the cheap ones and hated them).
You can weight user importance with a ranking algorithm ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank ).
I have been pondering this question myself lately...interesting thoughts.

McKinsey is a prestigious company, but I would think most people considering starting a company would be better served working at a startup, right?
This seems like a pretty strong feature set for a point release. Especially considering that it doesn't seem to change the overall API too drastically.
I second that.

This is one of the best ones:

http://books.google.com/books?id=ikMAzFXpFOsC&printsec=f...

btw if anyone wants to do a collaborative chapter by chapter self-study, just send me a private message. I have had it on my shelf for a while but haven't taken the time to do a few pages a day as intended.
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Would you happen to have any links or book references to this "recent evidence"? While most of success comes from effort and discipline, I've always been under the impression that only the naturally gifted (who also have discipline and drive) can/have achieve/achieved certain things. The dwarf down the street from me will never be a professional football player, and someone with a 100 IQ will never be an astronaut. I've always felt the you-can-always-achieve-whatever-you-want-no-matter-what-if-you-want-it-bad-enough approach to be more than a little cliched and misguided. If recent scientific evidence has disproved this stance of mine, I'm open to changing it.
http://seaside.gemstone.com/docs/GLASS-Announcement.htm

Unfortunately, it isn't FOSS.
Thats a great link. Thanks! I think GEB is still going to be a classic 100 years from now, one of those works way ahead of it's time.
I think and hope we seriously will, but it's not up to me. Certainly one side effect would be that, with a little work, you would be able to run Ruby on other Smalltalk VMs as well, and I think this would be a Good Thing. We'll see what happens.
My first math class at MIT. :-\
Thats just a convenient definition of AI because we don't really otherwise have a good one for human like consciousness. That we don't probably says a lot about the size of this uncertainty factor that singularity ignores.

Artificial human like intelligence will profoundly influence society, I don't doubt it. I just think the quality of thinking under the umbrella of 'Singularity' is very unlikely to usefully prepare anyone.

When humans first picked up a rock to use as a tool they possessed something with which to make a better tool - this tool singularity has been ongoing for thousands of years - stop talking about it like the rapture, it's embarrassing.
Vector Calc, because I stopped caring. Somehow Diff. Eq. held my interest but vector didn't. Calculating the area of partial 3D oval objects for the sake of doing it was painful.
Got my masters in math, then kinda lost interest, but I'm pretty sure that everything is understandable with a little effort. When I get genuinely interested, no effort is required at all.
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Mesh abstracts devices and operating systems into objects that can be coordinated and orchestrated to deliver the appearance of a single or composite device. That’s the guiding principle behind virtualization, which permits applications to address these virtual devices as single entities while spreading computational load across machines, domains, and business processes.

This is gibberish.