skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Informational entropy causes a snag.

It is impossible for any information system to express all the information about a more complicated system than itself. Ie, the computer capable of simulating the entire universe, down to the smallest of the small would have to be bigger than the universe. (Because, whatever the smallest piece is that it tracks, it'll have to express that in something bigger, that smallest thing being the smallest thing that exists.)

The other alternative, is for the simulation to drop a lot of detail about the thing being simulated. But then we'd see compression errors. (Or, maybe that explains why QM sometimes seems like God just said, "F--- it, whatever, just flip a coin or something, I don't care"? ;)
>Can you give some examples of those certain types of problems?

Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, Wordpress... ;)

Seriously though - in the real world, language strengths and weaknesses are very different from CS theory or discussion such as this one.

PHP's popularity in itself has serious benefits:

- You can pretty much install PHP anywhere because no host can afford not to support it well.

- It will usually scale pretty decently and work reasonably well with your DB, OS and web server out of the box, because it has enough users that it got tested in many edge case installations.

- Finding code is easy, and usually a new API provider will have a PHP library soon enough, if they want to get their API widely used.

- Last but certainly not least - it's easier to find competent PHP coders than almost any language. There are a lot of incompetent ones and, as in any language, few excellent ones, but there's a larger base of competent-enough coders than Python or Ruby (or Lisp ;))

In my opinion most criticism of PHP misses the point. No question PHP is not an elegant language. By the same token, you could say Esperanto is far more clean than English, French more elegant and Italian more beautiful. But in the end, English is the one that's used.
" That's all there is to deploying Perl, Ruby, and Python these days."

And scaling with those languages is a solved problem.
Absolutely. Fancy chairs are the solution to the wrong problem. The problem is that sitting is just plain bad for you, and the solution is to stand up and walk around.
Geeks do not conform as much to the norms of society at large, but they do conform within their own groups. Conformity is a universal human trait.

Also, I don't see what your ad hominems contribute to this discussion.
IMHO the main reason we're usually getting RSS wrong is that we even mention the word RSS.

We need people to be unaware of RSS in the same way they are unaware of HTML. People don't use "HTML Readers", they just browse stuff online. An RSS based app should simply do something useful. The fact RSS is involved should be completely irrelevant to users.
What is wrong with a clan? Do you oppose political parties as well?
A hen is a machine which can turn food (including omelets) into eggs. It doesn't matter where the hen came from. The point is one can build a machine to do this.
"nothing ever moves" does not mean that no blocks in the block universe are related in such a way that we can reasonably say the same object is in both. and if the same object is in two or more blocks of the universe, which are different times, then it exists at different times, or in other words travels through time. this doesn't prove traveling back in time, or skipping forward in time is possible, but the concept does make sense in a block universe, and the standard time travel via time passing still works fine.

But +1 for quoting Popper.
I meant to link here: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080627_0051...
Micro Bikini Pleasure: Bikini Celebrity Cruise : Yurizan Beltran
Our service (frucall.com) heavily relies on SMS, and I had very bad experience with ClickATell. While their web site looks pretty legit, their service is very unreliable (and by the way they never sent us the refund after we canceled with them).

It is important to notice that 2-Way SMS in the US has strict regulations - you have to use a short code, otherwise your service is considered illegal and the carriers can shut you down. ClickATel does not operate based on shortcodes, they use SMS modems which is basically a way to hook up a cellular line to a computer and intercept SMS messages.

There's quite a bit of details that one should be aware of if one wants to run a business grade SMS service in the US due to the way carriers control the SMS traffic. If there's interest from the readers I'll be more than glad to write down some of the details.
how many more "white people are stupid" scientific studies will we be subjected to?
you are allowed to assign probabilities to non-repeatable events, i.e. what's the probability there is life on mars

I get the impression that believers in the Bayesian Revolution often also subscribe to the many worlds quantum interpretation, which would make P(life on Mars) a repeatable event.
Friendfeed v. Twitter: Half The Followers In Five Months
focus on providing raw public data such as regulatory decisions, campaign finance data etc. in open, structured formats such as RSS and XML

I see "XML" ending up being SOAP, OOXML, or an even worse "in-house" format.

It would be nice to have all government data easily available, but I just can't imagine the government hiring someone competent to do it. Lowest bidder and all that.
Once again... Perfect opportunity for TIPJOY!
what?! no great, green occal seizure?! thats just offensive.
RMS on Java bytecodes and GCC
I grew up in daycare, and I am not sure why anyone would call taking a kid to play with other kids all day "dumping children with strangers". It's plain fun, and obviously after day one, the strangers are longer strangers.

Implying that only insane (read: ignorant and uncaring) parents would choose to work and leave their kids to play with other kids during the day is just typical conservative scaremongering. I am sure there are bad daycare centers out there, but then there are bad stay-at-home mothers out there also. One is not good and the other is not evil, both are choices made by equally intelligent and caring people.
"Like papers, programs can be over-polished. Rewriting code till it's perfect, making everything maximally abstract, writing macros and libraries, and playing with operating system internals has sucked many people out their theses and out of the field. (On the other hand, maybe that's what you really wanted to be doing for a living anyway.)"

Sounds like how I get "sucked out" of so many of my projects!
Added, it'll appear soon.
Nice app dude, I just sent it to some of the social media powerusers I know, so lets see if we can get you some users :)

EDIT - I dont know if this is a bug or not, but under the "generate html" part, you dont have the <IMG> tags?

One person I sent it too messed it up as a result :)
I think the fallacy here is the definition of "ancestor simulations". What does that really mean? I think it's more likely that posthumans will run simulations of whatever interests them at the time, which will probably not be the past. What they will want to know is what lies ahead.

Therefore, my scifi mythology is that we are in a simulation created by some other culture (ie not human).
Having DD again is one of the few things that has made moving from SF to Cambridge more palatable for me.
http://192.20.225.55/tts/speech/e98cdb8c68fd3486cc37364222ad...
I agree with you here; I have a $75 IKEA chair that I've used for years. I have never sit "correctly" in a chair in my life, so I just don't see why I would bother with an "ergonomic" chair. Their definition of ergonomic is not the same as my body's.

The good thing is that I can't sit still for more than an hour, so I'm always getting up to go to the bathroom, get more caffeine, eat food, etc. That is probably why my "improper chair use" hasn't caused me any trouble.
It's expensive to raise a family in the United States. The economics and the culture are against it. Add to that the cost of raising a family with someone who turns out to be the wrong person: your expected income after marriage must be reduced by the probability of divorce times the cost of divorce. Children necessarily complicate matters.

The problem would be alleviated somewhat if more and more people owned their own businesses, instead of the situation we currently have, of numerous workers employed by a wealthy class. At some point, these workers should simply refuse to work for anyone substantially more wealthy than they are. The value to an employer of having a large pool of interchangeable labor is calculable. Who created that value? Not the employer: the people. And it is the people who should and who must demand that value they created for themselves.
The Post-Scientific Society
This is a civil case though. If my doctor was accused by a patient of overbilling him, would it be acceptable for that patient to peruse (and perhaps leak) my medical records during discovery? No.

But for some reason it's OK for Viacom to see my name on every YouTube link I've ever clicked. Why are some things private and other things not?
I've been hearing alot about this patch as of late. How did you guys manage to install it? Can you refer me to some documentation?
The Times is usually scrupulous about fact checking--except when it comes to supporting Imperial adventures and warmongering.
because we can do math.
Then hire a nanny?

People get too used to what they have. Try leaving and seeing how much better plan B is.
Humidors Cigar Humidor Accessories StogiesHumidors.com
I have a 7-month-old, and I believe that my wife has found the ideal care situation. She works, from home, part time. Hours are flexible, she can stay home with our daughter, and get most of her work done during naps or after I get home.

I believe as time goes on, this is going to become more and more common as there are more women in the workforce who are uninterested in waiting until their late 30s to have children and telecommuting gets to be more common.

It's constant hard work for her, but she would never trade her time with our daughter for the extra money from being full-time, even if that extra pay covered the child-care (which it wouldn't).
Most carriers have integrated SMS-to-email. If you can bother your users to send their SMS messages to an email address instead of a shortcode or NPA-NXX style number, you'll be way better off in terms of integration and cost.

This only works if you know the carrier that your user uses, because presumably you have to route a reply back to them through an email-to-SMS gateway.

I don't personally know of any frameworks in PHP that will help you, but for Rails there are SMSFu and MMS2R, both of which are good at handling gateway SMS traffic.

You might peek at their code to see how they did it. Both are MIT Licensed.
We don't have them near me, so I have to ask - is there anything particularly good about them other than their donuts? Do they have WiFi? Are they open 24/7?

I find myself at Starbucks more than I'd like to for the WiFi and they close too early.
"In The God Delusion, he outlines many of the factors of the human animal that make us particularly susceptible to religion."

And yet none are testable hypotheses. In other words, he's no longer doing science unless he can propose some experiments with predictions. They're just so stories that give the illusion of understanding without verification. Hmmm, seems an awful lot like faith creeping in...

Now, that's not to knock evolutionary theory. It's just a massive reach, without an empirical net, to try to apply it toward explaining away religion.
Many-worlds QM isn't a necessary assumption for subjective Bayesian probability, nor is "repeatability".
Yikes, thanks. All fixed now.
Think about Galileo. For every stereotype you cite, I can quote exceptions and make it a circular argument. You did lump every "smart person" in your argument and I wanted to call you out on that. No ad hominems there, just a progression of my counter-argument.
- one true K&R brace style

- 4 space indentation, no tabs
You tell me. I got varicose veins for spending to much time sitting in front of my computer. It's mostly linked with heredity, but the lack of activity in your legs is one of the main responsibles. So be careful guys, if you're gonna spend all day in your chair, make sure you stand up and exercise your legs periodically. Your back and your legs are gonna thank you.
My wife and I came from completely different traditions and yet we could see the similarities in our understanding of both "prayer" and "god". Pointedly, I haven't tried to explain my views on either much here - this isn't a good forum for it. My main point has been an epistemological one rather than an ontological one. Why choose nihilism?

The inflexibility of thought is what doesn't work for us. But that wasn't a reason to stop learning. We just searched a bit harder for folks to learn from. Now we're satisfied by the result even as the learning is incomplete.
I'd love to see that patch merged into PHP, but even then, it will take some time to change the habits of people using this in libraries, frameworks, etc.
You're assuming that we'll be using the same approaches (e.g. molecular dynamics on classical computers) to do the simulation. We don't know what methods and techniques will be available in the future, so we can't confidently claim that it'll forever be out of reach. I bet there's some room for improvement over the current crude techniques.
No, it isn't. Most of the labor performed in the name of research is tedious, and the vast majority of published research results are trivial extensions to previous work.

It's like geology: everyone focuses on the earthquakes and the volcanoes, but 99% of everything we see on the surface of the earth was created through a gradual process of accumulation and decay. Research is the same -- on a day-to-day level, it's labor-intensive and tedious. Only from the thousand-foot view does it become sexy and revolutionary.
Joining the luck parade
I am not sure exactly what you explained. First off, relativity, like Newtonian mechanics, is a classical physics theory. I am not aware of any such thing as non-classical relativity. So why even say classical relativity? At the very least, it is redundant.

Second, of course the universe is probabilistic, a fact that falsifies both relativity and Newtonian physics.

Third, the universe is probabilistic precisely because time cannot change. Why? Because, since time is not a variable and is thus non-existent, the universe cannot calculate precise temporal durations. Thus, in order to properly conserve energy, it is forced to use the next best thing: probability.

Fourth, this has everything to do with article since entropy, as explained in the text books, assumes the passage of time and thus a time direction or arrow. Since time is abstract, it follows that an arrow of time is imaginary. As a result, it makes perfect sense that one cannot reverse entropy. Or anything else, for that matter.

The purpose of my comment was to get people to think and to stop accepting everything they hear on face value. If time cannot change, which is trivially shown to be true (changing time is an oxymoron because it is circular), then all the so-called time-travel conjectures by famous physicists like Kip Thorne, Stephen Hawking, David Deutsch, and many others, are pure crackpottery.
The debate is very broad in scope because many things are interconnected.

My umbrage was anything but false: the idea that we had taken the arrival of a child so lightly as to not consider and plan for the future most certainly implies negative things about me and my wife, especially considering that people here really don't have that much knowledge of our situation.

pg's response was quite astute: we thought and planned beforehand, but things change rapidly, and in ways that are unpredictable. One small, simple example is that I thought at this stage, since our daughter is basically in the eating/pooping/sleeping phase, it would be easy to get back to work, and leave most of it to my wife, since she has to feed her in any case. However, it's quite difficult to concentrate on work, and I really enjoy helping out and spending time with the baby, even if she doesn't do much. There are plenty of other things that aren't like we'd imagined them either.

Basically, unless you have experience with kids yourself, I think that it's not so easy to understand what it's like.
"Nature = what is."

By this definition, you could just as easily be a pantheist (or panentheist). But that's up to you to decide.
The worst part is that I see their commercials on TV all the time (in SF)...Why do they lead me on like this??!
The Aeron is an amazing chair. There's a reason offices that were buying new equipment (i.e. dotcoms) bought the Aeron. I love mine, and I love that it's comfortable.

Also, the same thoughts that justify a great chair (time spent using, durability, etc.) justify finding a -good pen-. I recently got a rotring rapidograph .25mm pen, and it's the pen I've been looking for my whole life. For those of you that think the .5mm is too think and 'gunky', I highly suggest this pen (http://www.rotring.com/en/produkte/tuschefueller/rapidograph...).
A hen interpreter?
Something he may be aiming to point out is that a lot of what I'll call "pure" hackers just want someone to foot the bill for them to go on hacking on what they love. I'm thinking of guys like Linus Torvalds, Andrew Tridgell and the like: technically brilliant guys who want to focus exclusively on tech, and are famous and good enough to more or less get what they want, and get paid well for it.
really cool... what is your definition of a minimalist mysql db?

oh yeah any memory problems with the rmagick? just curious.
I haven't said anything outside of "If you had no plans for post-baby career changes, then you were being irresponsible." If the debate is any broader than that, it's only because you are taking that simple, focused statement and falsely taking it to mean something else. And I don't need (or want) any more information about your oh-so-unique situation, or kids of my own, in order for my simple statement to be true.

If you and your partner didn't make plans for your careers before having a child, then suck it up and accept that you were irresponsible. If you did make those plans, then put your reading comprehension hat on and stop with the broken-heart act. Christ.
Nearly every scientist I know is doing "a bunch of incremental improvements based on a 4-6 month release cycle".

They just call the results of the releases "publications".
The general vibe I've always gotten is that it roughly breaks even, so far. Jessica and pg have both asserted this in the past, in articles or in conversation.

But, that was a year ago...and with Loopt still iterating and signing on new providers and creating new services, Xobni still growing and getting pretty monstrous press, and at least two or three other potential IPOs (or at least >$50 million acquisitions) in the making, it's definitely too early to say what kind of money YC will make. If I were an investor, there are several former YC companies that I would like a stake in, even at a valuation much higher than what YC bought in at. The average exit in the valley, according to one of the speakers at Startup School this year, happens seven years after founding. On that timescale, all of the YC companies are still very young.
Nice widget! You're featured on Tipjoy :) http://tipjoy.com/featured

Make a slightly narrower version, and I'll put tweetsnap in my sidebar here: http://tipjoys2cents.blogspot.com/
I'm not sure what your point is, but I think you're attacking a straw man. I didn't say that all people conform to the expectations of their peer group in all ways at all times. That statement is trivial to disprove.
I've got a list of features I'm toying with. You'll likely see this in the next week.
The link you generate shoots back tweetsnap. People might want it to point to their twitter stream. This is an interesting tradeoff between what people would want and what will make this spread.

I think the solution is to make the tweetsnap link have a link to the user's twitter stream. For example:

<a href="http://tweetsnap/twitter/tipjoy">
<img alt="Tipjoy" src="http://tweetsnap.com/twitter/show/tipjoy.png" />
</a>

The href leads to a page that shows the same form to make your own tweetsnap widget, but the page could have a side bar that grabs the last few tweets from @tipjoy and a link to http://twitter.com/tipjoy
My limited personal experience confirms this too: smart people I know work at IBM, Motorola, Google and Microsoft and they're HAPPY.

Selection bias is funny that way.

But, I do know several famously good hackers (four, to be precise), and while three of them work with no equity for a mid-stage startup and the fourth works for Canonical, which seems sort of startup-y, none have ever started startups independently.
Simple. One table simple :)

I have no idea. It's all on shared hosting atm. More of an experiment than anything else. If it needs more grunt, I'll get some proper hosting.
Linkedin.com Security Cert just Expired
Interesting observation, and I agree with much of what you say, except that there are few places where someone smart enough to get through the Google Gauntlet has to settle with renting an apartment for their growing family. And indeed, making ends meet is exactly what happens if they ever try to buy a house (forget about owning > 1400 sq. ft. in a good school district with even double that income).
Voting rings definitely exist in on news recommendation sites.

For example, take Digg (I'm expecting to get downmodded for even mentioning this name btw) - you get people shouting within their circle of friends to get stories voted up, so that functionality is essentially built into the system.
You also have the opposite true aswell, people banding together to downvote stories too and it happens often enough that theres a term for it "bury brigades"

offtopic:
I think I might need to get glasses, I originally thought the title was "Clams in news recommendation site?"
You might be surprised at how good www.live.com actually is...
By the way, if anyone's curious, my Twitter name is Aupajo.
More nonsense about PHP.

Hey go get sexy and python yourself.
That's a drafting pen? Are you suggesting that for regular daily usage?

You would have to pry my 0.5mm Pilot G-2 from my cold, dead hand.
How much skin is too much at the office?
Here's a scenario very likely to happen at a small business this summer: The owner arrives in the morning, and is greeted not only by the company's receptionist, but her exposed navel. And maybe her nose ring too.
it would have been better if you had never implemented the feature. And now it would be better now if you take these changes off your web site, and don't mention that they exist

This is from 2001 - Java is Open Source now... I'd be interested to know how this story ended, since AFAIK this feature is missing in present-day GCC.
I spend about 2500/month for two children. I call it the macbook pro a month program :) So, about 30k/year, and about 5k of that is tax deductible (iirc). Misplaced parental guilt? Not really - it's just tough to find good care in the bay area for a low price without enduring a huge waiting list.
"Organic" can also mean "does not require external assistance".

For example, the Marines describe a unit as "organic" if it can operate without assistance from the other services (e.g. this is why the Marines have their own aviation and don't rely on the Air Force the way the Army do)
So true, I worked in telecom industry on the voice mail servers and the irony was that I never used the services that developed. From my point of view the biggest problem with voice interface - it's too heavy, it takes too much time to navigate all these voice menu's listen to the message from start and the inability to filter and manipulate the information. Voicemail is dead. At least in the form that we have now.