skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are prosaic (by which I mean classical, non-quantum) means of accomplishing the same thing, e.g. encrypt a classical message using a one-time pad and send the resulting ciphertext and keystreams in opposite directions at the speed of light. The original data can be recovered if and only iff both data streams are reflected back to some common point in space and recombined. If the initial transmission is at time T0, and the first reflection happens at time T1, then the recombination cannot happen until T1+(T1-T0). I'm not sure if this is 100% analogous to what is being done in this paper (the math is kinda furry) but I'm pretty sure it's close.
Sure, if I sell you a copy of my novel or of a photograph that doesn't necessarily mean, of itself, that I've transferred ownership of the copyright to that work. Even if I've sold you the original handwritten manuscript or the original photographic slide. Even in the absence of any explicit agreement on my part in regards to the disposition of the copyright. However, if I sell every known copy of the work to you while intentionally depriving myself of any copy and the ability to reproduce copies, then there is a very much stronger case that through that action I've transfered the rights to the work.

As far as I know that seems to be the case here.
You need to spend a lot of time understanding your customers. Who are they? What problem do they want solved? And, what gets them to part with their money? I would start with "Four Steps to the Epiphany" and read up about lean-startups. But, the most important thing to know is that you will have to be a salesman. You'll need to sell your idea to partners, your company to investors, and your product to clients. If you're not a salesman, hook up with a partner who is.

All that being said, your perspective on execution (i.e. complete your product) is exactly right. There are a lot of good ideas and great salesmen in the world. The secret to building a company is to have that and execute on your designs.
Damn you, sir! You sent me on an awesome trip looking around for the oldest companies.

Few are older than a few centuries, most are Japanese (others are European), small and restaurants, hotels or breweries. All are fascinating.
True, but if they did ship something tainted, then that could be a very large count.
I've been studying this for a while, and the topic is personally very important to me, so I'm going to plug three books (affiliate links ahead, just google the titles if you want)

The first is the "E-Myth" -- great book on the difference between a manager, technician, and entrepreneur. Start here for the vocabulary and basic concepts you'll need: http://amzn.to/cn4BHT

The second is a little-known personal favorite, "A Good Hard Kick in the Ass". It's a little dated, but it's a great book about generally separating what's important from what isn't. I found it was a good book to learn attitude. http://amzn.to/hLi5xc

The last book is the book I'm currently reading: "Start Small, Stay Small" http://amzn.to/ictZdR I haven't finished it all yet, but the entire premise of the book is the move between coder and entrepreneur. It exactly answers your question.

From there, you can move on to blogs (which are great, but I find them a little too much in bulleted format for my tastes) or books about the nuts and bolts of what makes a great startup, like customer-driven development, or lean startups, or how best to handle yourself during the development process, like that stoicism book I read last year. Another awesome book. Lots of other great material out there. Too much, in fact.

Hope that helps you get started. I've got an entire site dedicated to answering the question of how hackers become entrepreneurs, http://hn-books.com Might want to check that out too. The initial book list was generated by a google search on Hacker News (hence the "hn" in the title) for books that we consistently recommend to each other here. Your question, or variations on it, is one of HN's recurring themes.
What's up with popup ads?
Ask HN: Good sources for reading on the latest in networking/storage
I can easily find lots of blogs wrt to web 2.0, social networking, mobile development. I am however also looking to read the latest in the networking world, like ipv6, routing, LAN/Wan, storage, virtualization. Could you guys list some resources/blogs that you read ?

Much appreciated :)
Do you think Cyberpunk came true?
There's SEO benefits to having your content up for a length of time.
Forgive my ignorance of quantum physics, but would it be possible to use entanglement to send messages back in time? If not, why would entanglement work in only one direction (forwards)?

There is a causality argument, but I don't why it would be impossible that reading a message from the future cannot alter that future. Just because a future universe occurred once doesn't mean that it has to occur again once particles have been entangled, does it? Aside from being very strange, would such a scenario violate any known laws of physics?

There is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem, which, unfortunately, is beyond me.
Who said anything about your karma? I never look at anyone's karma before judging. What you wrote was crap and go downvoted. Thats all there is to it.
Ok, my last post on this.

As much as I'd like to claim authorship, I didn't write the dictionary. If you'd like to argue about whether the terms mean what you want them to mean, or if they lead you into a logical endless loop, you're wasting your energy.

There is no effective procedure for determining whether individual X is hardworking by the dictionary definition, and thus we cannot count the number of hardworking people.

So we agree.

I constructed a definition which ... which roughly agrees with my intuitive notion of what "hardworking" means.

Ok. so who is reinforcing their preconceived notions again?

Believing in something doesn't make it true.

Reusing global variable names in your local scope can cause really insidious errors. Just sayin.
Personally, I'd do exactly what Hipster has done:

http://sanfrancisco.usehipster.com/

Many other companies have done this too. Collect some emails, see how many people actually bite on your idea, even if they don't know what it is.
In spite of the gospel around here that everyone needs co-founders, if you look at the monumentally successful people in this business, they were all doing both the business and the hacking at the same time until they were well past making FU cash. You just learn more that way. And I have an argument for why:

To be a good hacker, you have to be a jack of all trades and a renaissance person by definition. You're faced constantly with figuring out what logic drives real-world problems and then reversing it into a piece of code that gets the right answer every time. So much of hacking itself happens without a roadmap, that there's a lot of debate about whether coding can even be successfully taught in college. Certainly the self-taught seem to excel at it.

Suppose a defense lawyer came to you, a hacker, with a question like: I'd like a program that determines the probability of this or that criminal getting this or that amount of jail time, based on these parameters. Tough thing to figure out how to code, but it's not impossible. To do it, you'd sit down and learn everything you could about what makes which decisions more likely under which circumstances; and then you'd build a machine that could learn from its mistakes and pare down the possibilities within the boundaries you'd given it.

So your job as a hacker is already to learn the boundaries of problems and then fill in as much information as possible, which means learning it, to create a system of logic that then runs by itself. Business is just another system full of complex and sometimes contradictory arguments; the good news is, it's already bounded within a certain set of well-defined functions, and you just need to figure out the proper inputs. Trial and error is as good as anything when learning a new language.

The point is, you learn more by doing it yourself, and I think that idea is given extremely short shrift around here, possibly because they'd have it that no hacker can do it alone. Nonsense. The rolls of Fortune 500 Founder/CEOs clearly proves otherwise.
Your point is well-taken, but I think that Symbolics is now defunct? Granted, the copyrights don't vanish, but who knows where they transferred to, if anywhere.
This was covered years ago in an episode of CSI: Miami, believe it or not (I don't remember too much else of the plot, though - something about an exploding manila envelope, IIRC).
Interestingly, this is the same thing needed to become a JEDI, were there is no 'try', only 'do'.
You've just got another sale thanks to Kindle ;)
Facebook-style web page scraping
Someone else already reported this. There's been some weird stuff going on with AWS-type pages, e.g. see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2103401 for example. I don't know the exact cause, but I know the indexing team is aware of this issue and working on it.
Interesting in light of the (relatively) new penchant for pop up ads that don't create a new window. Can we expect those to go away, too?
I'm pretty sure the ancient Greek's had some pretty good colour sense. Beyond the whole painting all their temples in garish colours, they knew of (and loved) Phoenician purple. If you can love a certain dye, then you can probably tell it apart from say... plain old red or blue.
Every time I see something like this, I'm left wondering why somebody would want to do something like that in Java. If you want the benefits of a dynamic language, just use a dynamic language: Groovy, Jython, and JRuby all have great support on the JVM.
Duke Nukem Forever is coming in May
Thanks, hope you find it useful!
Because the people producing the materials are being heavily supported by external grants that more-than cover the costs of producing the materials and putting them online.

Many government grants in the education field are targeted at institutions of higher education and it is very difficult if not impossible to get one if you are not at least affiliated with a university. This is the major reason the only meaningful innovation in education is happening in the adult-education market.
The question is, once you get in, how do you get out?
By following Step 3, you will lose much more than whatever the amount was in Step 2.
Is it bad that I first tried to interpret it as Perl, even though it was clearly labeled as JavaScript?
I believe Koza has several patents for things he has discovered using Genetic Programming / Algorithm techniques.
Dictnotes.txt - how Python's dictionary data structures are optimized
cx_Oracle is py3k compatible. I'm really confident we'll have Django running on py3k by the end of the summer, hopefully I'll have something exciting to announce about this coming up, but if not I'll just dedicate my summer to it.
We have had answers for the past two years: Python 3 adoption will be measured in terms of years and will only come as third party modules (such as Numpy, Scipy, and many others) slowly make the port.

No one has ever claimed it to be publicly ready for product, but more and more libraries are porting every single day - forward progress is being made, but like all change in the community, it takes time.

I'm a core developer: and even I stick to python 2 right now because of my dependencies. I know full well that me being able to run Python 3 in production is at least another year, to two years off.
> any answer other than "Zero" or "wtf-look", do not hire.

What if you're hiring someone to test for XSS exploits?
Wow! Has anyone else achieved this level of efficiency in their reading?

-- 10-20 minutes per book?
-- 20 to 30 books in a few hours.

I am a bit skeptical, but maybe it is doable. I am curios to know if anyone else on HN can read/comprehend a non-fiction business book in less than 30 mins.

I went ahead and ordered '10 days to faster reading'.
The cynic in me says that elite colleges understand that the largest value they add is the prestige you obtain from having one on your CV.

That is what they are selling, not education - so there's really no contradiction in giving the education away for free.
Unfortunately it doesn't allow me to enter the regular expression found here: http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html. It's horrendous I but would love to see it visualized.
Poll: Have you/Would you pay for Android apps?
I'm curious about the current state of mind for the HN crowd regarding paying for apps on android.

Have you, or would you, pay for Android apps?

Please vote for all that apply.
No, not ever.
Not yet, but I would pay for a worthy app.
I would rather have a free version with ads.
I would pay, but payment is not available in my market yet.
Other (please explain below).
Does anyone have any idea what the piratebay guys are up to with the latest announcement of "themusicbay.org"?
Details ? What they're doing ? What's this new thing they're launching ? when ? where ? is it just a hoax ? who's bankrolling this ?

I need some insider information. I've seen all the stuff you can easily find on google.
Shards of Lost Technology, and the Need for High-Level Architectures.
E-Dealz
try out our head massager a great valentines gift
From the headline, I thought this might be a snail mail version of Growl.

"Dear @tim, We are please to inform you that @whoever is following you. Yours sincerely, Twitter"
Actress Yamuna and Venu Gopal prostitution racket; a flame story
The instruction set of a properly designed computer must be isomorphic to a minimal, elegant high-level programming language.

I've been a bit confused about the details of the loper-os project. For some reason, this sentence sparked a micro-epiphany and the whole thing came into focus. So, I thought the article, and the project at large, was worth sharing with HN.
AppSumo: $165 Mac Entertainment Apps for $19
"A constant headache that lasted a few years and then promptly ended when I stopped meditating."

Might have something to do with unconscious straining of the eyes. Diagnosis based on hearsay - my friend had this problem and it vanished after he switched from a closed-eyed to open-eyed technique.
The Marriage Killer: One in five American divorces now involve Facebook
I'll be sure to review it on Amazon afterwards.
That's what I've been told for the last two years -- it'll come, give it time, etc. Then the developer of a library I use announces that a port to Python 3 is unlikely two years after Python 3 is released, and I'm left with even more questions.

I'm curious since you continue to advise patience how you'd react in my position. I've been patient, and now my library of choice for WSGI coming to Python 3 is, quote, "unlikely". What now? Why should I bother caring about 3, if an influential voice in the Python community doesn't? Armin makes excellent points in his post, to be frank.

The fault line is widening, honestly, because of the lack of forward momentum. Your estimate of Python 3 in production being a year to two years off sounds like it come completely out of thin air, as I'm starting to wonder if it will ever happen.
The Alternative History of Public-Key Cryptography (1999)
It can. But you have the lower space quotas, limited (more limited?) support, and a cap of 50 user accounts. After that, you have to go "Premier" (or whatever it's named, now), and then its $50/year/seat for all seats, as I understand it.

For a small business with limited resources, the free "Standard" version may be fine. Especially if you're backing up and it's not a critical failure point. Of course, for most businesses, this would likely not be the case and it would become so.

But if you are small and only have a seat or three, $50 - $150 / year is pretty cheap for what they offer (including however many 9's of availability).

You can even get a public web site out of it (the property formerly known as Jotspot), as long as you can live with their templates and/or restrictions. And with that, a WYSIWYG editor that a normal mortal might actually manage to use mostly effectively -- especially for smaller changes to text after the site is established.

(And you know a random herd of traffic isn't going to take the host down.)

EDIT: But I would definitely register the domain name somewhere else. Google will sell you a registration during set up, but IMHO that may be asking for trouble if you ever want to move it, particularly at the free/Standard level.
I don't own a smart phone, but I intend on getting one eventually. If it's Android I'd buy apps from the market, so I voted Yes (hopefully I was supposed to do that, because I would)
Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us [video]
"If you never venture outside the box, you will probably not be creative. But if you never get inside the box, you will certainly be stupid."

I think I will use this in the future.
There has been a significant amount of recent scholarship on this topic since this Straight Dope article was published (in 1986):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_c...
I've bought many android apps. There are some really good ones out there.
This kind of question is made absurd by our current understanding of evolution and eye physiology. The ability to see a spectrum of colors was developed millions of years ago. Ancient Greeks being able to only see 3 colors would require a sudden and complete change in eye physiology, followed by its miraculous recovery a few centuries later.
python-bitstring - Create, manipulate, and analyse binary data
Yes. Recently there have been articles about "genetic" evolution of cars, "genetic" evolution of robots, optimisation with intelligent water, and more. People seem interested in the subject, so I thought I'd put in a link to an article summarising some of the more interesting techniques, especially since it, in turn, has links to other items on optimization.

In addition, I'm still making observations about what people on HN now want to see. Although this item may yet be flagged to death, it's also getting a lot of up-votes, showing that there's a segment of the current population that finds this sort of thing useful or interesting. I find it rather depressing that stuff I've written and recently submitted [1] has sunk entirely without trace, and yet a hackneyed link like this is doing so well. Clearly I don't know what HN wants. I continue to make observations to try to make more useful contributions.

[1]
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2123469
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2126890
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2127187
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130519
There is and it's called The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Gary Blank.

http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...
I'm curious which ones. I have not bought any yet.
This is what I thought as well. Fortunately, the author’s intention is more practical (though perhaps slightly less cool!)
That's my favorite Calvin and Hobbes

http://brake-down.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/I...
I spend $15-20 bucks a month on promising android apps. I should start writing reviews of them. I've come across some real gems.

I absolutely hate ads, so ad-supported stuff is rarely an option for me, Google and Facebook being notable exceptions. If I could pay a fee and get ad-free StackOverflow, I'd be so happy.
Very similar to an item from nearly two months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1949947
I remember a lecture where my prof said the multiply by 2 never works out for project management, because studies have shown that workers find ways to prolong the project twice as long.

For instance if you knew your homework was due 2 weeks from now, instead of a week, you find a way to procrastinate for the extra week.

Instead try PERT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_Evaluation_and_Review_T...

And try this formula:

* Optimistic time (O): the minimum possible time required to accomplish a task, assuming everything proceeds better than is normally expected
* Pessimistic time (P): the maximum possible time required to accomplish a task, assuming everything goes wrong (but excluding major catastrophes).
* Most likely time (M): the best estimate of the time required to accomplish a task, assuming everything proceeds as normal.
* Expected time (TE): the best estimate of the time required to accomplish a task, assuming everything proceeds as normal (the implication being that the expected time is the average time the task would require if the task were repeated on a number of occasions over an extended period of time).

TE = (O + 4M + P) ÷ 6
I think what we need is some stylish safety glasses for every day use.

Yesterday some workers were grinding some metal in a busy street. I was just waiting for the shrapnel.

And the ever lasting threat of old ladies with umbrellas with steel rods just in eyes range, got one on my nose some time ago and keeping waaay clear after that.
Ruby and Python: pivot points
What Larry Page should do as the new CEO of Google
I went specifically looking for this information a week ago when I was learning Python. It wasn't clear to me how a list was implemented, and in particular if random access and deletes were constant or linear time
My favorite paid app at the moment is Locale
Check out my book - it's designed to be a comprehensive introduction to business, particularly for hackers: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591843529/
Can you share some of the gems? I'm in Greece so I can't buy (I rooted my phone and changed the market area until an update locked that down as well) but I'm always looking for good apps.
You surely mean this ?

Calvin: Dad, how come old photographs are always black
and white? Didn't they have color film back then?
Dad: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs
are in color. It's just the world was black and white then.
Calvin: Really?
Dad: Yep. The world didn't turn color until sometime
in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
Calvin: That's really weird.
Dad: Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
Calvin: But then why are old paintings in color?! If
their world was black and white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?
Dad: Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were
insane.
Calvin: But... but how could they have painted in color
anyway? Wouldn't their paints have been shades of gray back then?
Dad: Of course, but they turned colors like
everything else did in the '30s.
Calvin: So why didn't old black and white photos turn
color too?
Dad: Because they were color pictures of black and
white, remember?
Calvin: The world is a complicated place, Hobbes.

But that aside, don't we still only see 3 colors. We have only three types of color receptors and any color gets resolved, if at all, into varying responses from three of them. To our color interpreter in the brain there are only those 3 axes. To us and other trichromats any color is a mixture of those three.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromat#Humans_and_other_ani...

Maybe the interesting question is when did we start naming the different mixtures. There's another hypothetical question that has fascinated me: say I perceive the color red as yellow, and it is some one to one map. But since I learn the names of colors from people, I or anybody else will not realize that I perceive them differently, I just happen to label them alike.
Number theory: fractal structure in partition numbers
Prescriptivists acting as if their fetish is important is more amusing when it's not distracting from demonstrably more valuable subject matter.

I wasn't using some of kind of mongoloid newspeak.

Chill out
First one seems to be a better option.

Atleast meeting your day to day expenses won't be a factor in decision making while you work on your main project.
Indeed, I'm not surprised. Facebook's value is not its technology, but being the standard of communication for almost 600 million users.